While costing it the 2022 title!
I saw a rival Big Ten fan say that Purdue had a cake walk conference schedule, so I decided to look into it.
Over the course of the Big Ten season, Purdue's opponents, removing games against Purdue, had a win percentage of .486%. Runners-up Northwestern and IU were at .497% and .522%
It looks like Purdue had the toughest conference schedule in 2022, at .532%, playing 4 of the top 5 teams twice and each of the bottom 4 teams once.
This is probably a horrible statistical study, as Purdue playing Wisconsin twice instead of Minnesota would have bumped that number up to .518%. But I guess it would have been nice to swap the year with the easy schedule to where you miss out on the title by one game rather than the one where you win the conference in the biggest landslide of the last 10 years. Either way, my conclusion would probably be that 2023 was a bad year for the unbalanced scheduling argument where there was 1 good team, 10 mid teams, and 3 bad teams.
I saw a rival Big Ten fan say that Purdue had a cake walk conference schedule, so I decided to look into it.
Over the course of the Big Ten season, Purdue's opponents, removing games against Purdue, had a win percentage of .486%. Runners-up Northwestern and IU were at .497% and .522%
It looks like Purdue had the toughest conference schedule in 2022, at .532%, playing 4 of the top 5 teams twice and each of the bottom 4 teams once.
This is probably a horrible statistical study, as Purdue playing Wisconsin twice instead of Minnesota would have bumped that number up to .518%. But I guess it would have been nice to swap the year with the easy schedule to where you miss out on the title by one game rather than the one where you win the conference in the biggest landslide of the last 10 years. Either way, my conclusion would probably be that 2023 was a bad year for the unbalanced scheduling argument where there was 1 good team, 10 mid teams, and 3 bad teams.