This might be unpopular, but maybe others agree...
I think the Big Ten the last two years has been very, very overated. I'm not saying that it was not good, but it was not 9 teams in the NCAA worthy.
As such, I think that while we were better than Loyola, the gap wasn't much. I'm ok using the deer in the headlights perspective there.
However, we weren't as good as Houston this year and the disparity, while not great, was clearly evident. They were more athletic, they were bigger on the perimeter and they had multiple ways to score. We were undersized and limited offensively.
From my perspective, it had nothing to do with BU's coaching this time around. They were just better than us and he has to bring in the size and athleticism to compete with teams of that caliber. I think that applies to all Big Ten teams, which is why we're seeing these results in back to back years.
Eh, I don’t know about over rated.
I think we had a lot of good, not great teams this year, with few capable of making it to the second weekend. Rutgers had a good chance to beat ND, IU won their play in game. MSU won in the first round, etc. Iowa is the only one you could really say laid an egg this year. Based on the seedings, you wouldn’t expect more than 2-3 teams to make it to the S16. We got 2, which is in line with other P5 conferences. I realize ACC and Big 12 had 3, but that’s not drastically more than the BIG.
We probably had 8-9 teams in the 10-50 range, which is a really good conference. But realistically, you wouldn’t expect many teams in that range to make it in the second weekend. Not like we had a bunch of 1 and 2 seeds lose early like last year.