Clearly we're better this year, right?
It's still a head-scratcher on its face:
a 22-10, 13-5, fourth-place Big Ten team is a No. 5 NIT seed in 2018.
an 18-16, 6-14, 13th-place Big Ten team is a No. 4 NIT seed in 2019
All because a bunch of Big Ten teams lost games in November 2017 and a bunch of Big Ten teams won a lot of games in November 2018. Thus the conference season started each year with the perception that (2018) the Big Ten is down or (2019) the Big Ten is up. Yet the 2018 post-season proved that perception wrong — Michigan the national runners-up, PSU the NIT champ.