Yep. The league itself made a jump in AEM from '18 to '19 that was roughly equal in size as the gap between this year's AAC and MAC -- the difference between a near-power conference and a decidedly mid-major one. Nearly every team returned a substantial part of its core save for Illinois and Rutgers, and those two teams arguably replaced leaving core players with freshmen who were better. I'd expect next year's B1G to be closer to '18 than '19 in quality, though not worse than '18. Depends on who leaves, of course.
I'd ordinarily be wary of any optimism in a situation where we took a smaller step forward than the rest of the league, but there wasn't a team that depended on freshmen more than Illinois. Rutgers and Maryland were in the same neighborhood in terms of minutes, but we were the only team depending on true freshmen as our top two options. Both of those other two teams had a junior and southmore as their top two guys. I had expected Frazier and Nichols to be those guys for us, but it didn't quite work out that way.