On occasion during Big Ten basketball telecasts, they flash the league standings to offer perspective on what’s at stake.
But it’s a big league – 18 teams – and TV screens are only so large. So they regularly lop from the graphic the last six or eight teams, which thus become sort of roadside litter to the great traffic taking place up above.
This year, it’s been hard to find an old Pac-12 legacy franchise on the screen amid all the fervor caused by Michigan, Illinois, Purdue and Wisconsin. And others.
How are we liking the Big Ten, you newbies? Two seasons in, what are Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA thinking about this unlikely new alliance merging surfboards and soybeans?
Spike their Gatorade with some truth serum, and would they give a thumbs-up to their future in this league? Or are they just an accessory to the football enterprise that drove this whole realignment thing?
I’m not sure you’d get glowing unanimity about that outlook, even if you discount UCLA coach Mick Cronin’s regular outbursts against travel, motherhood, puppies and Bruins who don’t hedge hard enough on ball screens.
When the four Western franchises took up residence in the Big Ten, one respected observer of hoops opined that it was a promising move for them, reasoning that no Big Ten school has won a national championship since Michigan State in 2000.
Which was . . . beside the point.
For the prospects of future competitiveness of the four suddenly looking eastward, the issue was not one of a lack of a traditional heavy like a Duke or Kentucky in the Big Ten to keep you from winning a national title. It was about the daunting depth in the Big Ten, the likelihood that there were going to be a lot of occasions when your team got on the 2,000-mile flight home fresh from getting KO’ed twice in the heartland.
The Huskies, Ducks, Trojans and Bruins were entering a league loaded with capable programs, and they would be playing in a lot of arenas that regularly draw 15,000 enthused, partisan fans happy to be in from the cold.
Think about this: In the last four years of the old Pac-12, 2021 to 2024, the league landed 16 berths in the NCAA tournament. During that stretch, yes, the Big Ten housed 14 teams, but it produced 32 spots in the tournament.
This, after the Big Ten four times placed seven in the NCAA field in the five seasons from 2015 to 2019.
Lumps were going to be taken, then. It was a given. If anything, that challenge has been amplified in 2026, as this week, the Big Ten has five of KenPom’s top 13 teams and nine of the top 40.
Against this power, the Western four have issued a scattered response, marked by a discouraging string of injuries.
Washington (13-13), a program that hasn’t advanced beyond the NCAA round of 16 in 73 years, has been battered all season by injuries, which must make all the more frustrating the fact that it hasn’t been that far away from NCAA-tournament contention. The Huskies are No. 52 in the NET rankings.
Still, they show some old, familiar weaknesses. They don’t shoot well - .322 from three-point range (279th nationally). Their best three-point mark in the last decade -- .354 in 2024 – ranked only 101st.
Oregon (9-16) is bound for Dana Altman’s first losing season in 16 years at Oregon because star guard Jackson Shelstad is out for the year with a hand injury and center Nate Bittle has been in and out with a bad foot.
Altman is known not to be a fan of today’s revolutionary mores in college sports. But he has said he’s staying the course at Oregon.
In LA, USC (18-7) lost Maryland transfer guard Rodney Rice early to a shoulder injury, just as he was averaging 20 points and six assists, including a triple-double. Five-star freshman recruit Alijah Arenas, out until late January after a car crash and a knee injury, has 78 points in the Trojans’ last three games.
Then there’s UCLA (17-8), where Mick Cronin unwittingly provides regular comic relief with harangues against players – he recently alleged they were “soft” and “delusional” about how good they are – and against the demands of Big Ten travel. (In this moment, he must be forgetting that it was his school that helped do this.)
Still, travel for the Western four is not nothing. Each program makes four trips per winter to the legacy schools, and a fifth to the Big Ten tournament. On the other hand, the legacy schools travel west only once. And each of the newbies makes a pair of separate two-hour trips to the Northwest or LA -- for a single game.
It isn’t crazy to think there's an effect on players. Last year in mid-March, USC coach Eric Musselman essentially told the Athletic a conference championship would be a future longshot for any of the newest four, saying, “UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington are going to have to be three to four games better than everybody else, flat out. You can argue about it or whatever, but that’s a fact.”
Last year, among the four newcomers, Oregon and UCLA made the NCAA tournament, but neither advanced to the second weekend.
So it must be asked: Are the four basketball programs going to drift toward mere collateral damage for the great football-driven realignment money grab?
Too early to say. But it’s a possibility worth watching.