Preseason Stats Roundup

Welcome to the start of the 2020-2021 Big Ten Basketball season! With the start of the season, I am beginning what will be a weekly column this year that takes a look at all the mainstream advanced statistic and metrics out there and putting them all in one place for you to see how each team in the Big Ten stacks up to the others.

This first preseason check-in will be a bit light on the content as many of the statistical services do not have a preseason ranking report, but moving forward expect to see RPI and BPI. Down the road when the NET rankings start coming out, those will also be included. For now we only have the preseason projected finish and the preseason KenPom rankings for you, however. As a heads up to readers, the charts used in these will not generally be mobile friendly.

Big Ten Conference Standings

The preseason media poll ranks the Big Ten as thus:

1. Illinois
2. Iowa
3. Wisconsin
4. Michigan State
5. Rutgers
6. Michigan
7. Ohio State
8. Indiana
9. Purdue
10. Maryland
11. Minnesota
12. Penn State
13. Nebraska
14. Northwestern

As the actual conference season begins, these will adjust each week. Until then, it will be more of a power ranking by me once games start until the season begins and gives us firm results to use instead.

KenPom Rankings

The preseason KenPom rankings are high on the Big Ten, with half of the Big Ten inside the top25, 10 of the schools inside the top-30, and 13 inside the top-70. Offensively, only four rank outside the top-50, and defensively nine are inside the top-50.

That will be a wrap for this week, but once games start and give us more data for advanced metrics to start breaking down I will have more to this column. I hope you all enjoy the new endeavor this season with an easy to go to conference wide reference of all the different major metric services in one place.