MINNEAPOLIS — If there were ever a season for the Big Ten to reach the Final Four, this would be it, right? Because Big Ten coaches didn’t fight through the gauntlet of the last three months for every one of them to be sitting at home come April.
Calling this Big Ten women’s basketball season a gauntlet would still be underselling it. More accurately, it has been a grueling 12-week marathon with an obstacle course sprinkled throughout. Why simply run 26.2 miles, when you can also do hurdles and monkey bars for good measure? While no Big Ten team has ranked No. 1 nationally this season — a spot that South Carolina never relinquished — the top quarter of this league has clawed one another to remain among the best and most competitive conferences in the nation. It has been a series of game-planning routines against top-10 team after top-10 team, only to receive as a reward for getting through that — congrats! — a game against yet another top-10 team.
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Though the Big Ten championship game left a bit to be desired from Ohio State, Saturday’s slate of semifinals between Iowa and Maryland, Ohio State and Indiana — the conference’s top four teams — left every witness in the Target Center in awe, including AP voters who placed four Big Ten teams in the top 12 this week (no other conference had more than two). So, save the fact that fans were greeted with 30-degree weather and two feet of snow when they exited the arena, they may have sworn they were hanging out in Dallas in early April instead of Minneapolis in early March.
After that fireworks show, it was just a bit shocking to remember that this is a conference that hasn’t boasted a national title game appearance since 2005 and hasn’t placed a team in the Final Four since 2015. Only Purdue, in 1999, has won a national championship. So, this has to be the year, right?
The Big Ten is putting two teams in the Final Four. Calling it now.
— Chantel Jennings (@ChantelJennings) March 4, 2023
“This is the strongest this league has ever been,” said Iowa coach Lisa Bluder, the longest-tenured coach in this conference at 23 seasons. “You look at the top four teams in this conference, it’s amazing. Any one of them could make it to the Final Four, maybe more than one. I think it’s that good of a conference.”
Maryland coach Brenda Frese agrees, and as the last Big Ten coach to make it to the Final Four (with her Terrapins in 2015, Maryland’s first season in the conference), her opinion holds some water here. But as she and Maryland have fought through this season — beating Ohio State twice, splitting regular-season games with Iowa, losing its matchup against Indiana — she hasn’t felt like this was the 2015 season. It hasn’t felt like just a Final Four year for the conference. It reminds her of 2006. A national championship year.
That season three Final Four teams hailed from the ACC: Frese’s Maryland team, Duke and North Carolina.
That trio had spent the regular season beating up on one another — Maryland lost to Duke in both regular-season matchups and split the meetings with North Carolina, while the Tar Heels beat the Blue Devils in both their regular-season contests and then beat Maryland in the ACC title game. (Sound familiar, Big Ten?)
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For good measure, all three reunited in Boston for the Final Four that year when Maryland beat UNC to reach the title game and Duke got a glimpse outside of the ACC in the semifinals by beating LSU. But it was an all-ACC championship game, with Maryland taking home its first national title.
At times throughout that season, all three of those teams had arguments as the best team in the ACC, and all three had times at which they were exactly that. That resonates with the Big Ten this season.
After Maryland’s eight-point semifinal loss to Iowa, Diamond Miller confidently sat at the podium, disappointed in the result but sure of her team. “At the end of the day, they won the game,” she said, “but I still feel like we’re the better team.”
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Not all these teams have consistently looked polished from December to now, and not all looked their best every time they played this past weekend. But what the Big Ten tournament showed was that its four top teams, when at their best (and even close to their best), are capable of punching a ticket to Dallas. As pundits across the country have pondered which team might pose a challenge for presumptive favorite South Carolina in its quest to repeat as national champs, the Big Ten seemingly raised its hand pretty forcefully this weekend.
The thought of facing a team other than the Big Ten gauntlet? “I know we’re all excited to stop beating each other up and go compete against somebody else,” Frese said.
Finally, other teams will know what it’s like trying to game-plan against Caitlin Clark’s range, which became even more dangerous over the weekend as Gabbie Marshall’s hot shooting streak continued. Other coaches will get to play the exciting game of roulette defense against Maryland’s playmakers and scheme against their active defense. Opponents will attempt to hobble Indiana, the most balanced Big Ten team, a feat that took every other conference team an entire season to discover and hone. As Ohio State returned to Columbus to retool its full-court press, new opponents will have the opportunity to see what it looks like to have the swarming Buckeyes suffocate inbound passes.
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It’s not a shock to see the Big Ten rising right now. In recent years, the Big Ten’s investment in women’s hoops has increased. When outgoing conference commissioner Kevin Warren interviewed for the position in 2020, he made a point to note one of his first actions would be hiring a person for a VP-level role focused solely on women’s basketball — a position that doesn’t exist in any other conference. (The conference hired Megan Kahn for the job in 2021.)
“I was surprised that we didn’t have a person in the Big Ten conference whose singular focus was on the promotion, empowerment and organization of women’s basketball,” Warren told The Athletic at the conference tournament. “That seemed so obvious to me.”
In an effort to bolster exposure, Warren combined media days for the men and women this year, and even though he’s departing the commissioner role, he has pushed to move the men’s and women’s Big Ten tournaments to the same location at the same time and hopes his successor will follow through on the goal. With USC and UCLA joining the Big Ten, Warren sees a path forward for women’s basketball to continue to grow as the only bicoastal conference in the nation.
The league has also demonstrated its continued commitment to the sport with its two most recent hires at Illinois and Rutgers. Both universities took big swings last season and wrote checks that have enough zeros to plainly state that mediocrity won’t be accepted — Rutgers brought in Coquese Washington at $770,000 a year, and Illinois hired Shauna Green at $800,000. This weekend, after five years in the bottom-third of the conference, Minnesota let program legend Lindsay Whalen go — a decision that certainly didn’t come lightly but speaks to the seriousness with which the Big Ten sets competitive standards for women’s basketball.
In Minneapolis, the conference did exactly that. The championship game might not have shown it, but the top four teams understand that the course they ran this season could prepare them for deep tournament runs. Coaches know the conference has never seemed this good, and the top-tier talent has never been this competitive.
During January and February, that translated to knock-out fights between these teams. But the final obstacle comes in April. Can the conference finally topple that one? Or will this be another year in which they’re toppled before they can get there?
(Photo of Indiana’s Grace Berger and Ohio State’s Taylor Mikesell: David Berding / Getty Images)
