Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Yes, More Midweek Disasters

Cleveland State 7 Ohio State 5
Eastern Illinois 10 Illinois 6
UW-Milwaukee 5 Northwestern 4, 10 innings
#8 Notre Dame 2 Purdue 1

Only the Boilermakers can offer up a legitimate reason for dropping one of their two midweek games. The Irish have long since passed red hot and moved into white hot or whatever other color indicates that they haven't lost a game in about a month. Hanging that tough with a team zooming up the rankings speaks well of Purdue.

However, the remaining losses were just painful. It absolutely crushes the conference's RPI numbers and leaves me with little doubt that the only team advancing to the NCAA Tournament from the Big Ten will be the automatic berth given to the conference tourney winner.

On a positive note, there have been three midweek conference successes. None as noteworthy as the defeats, unfortunately, but these squads did what they should in the time between conference affairs. (Note: There are two or three more games left, I don't recall exactly how many but I'm certain that MSU and Minnesota both have contests to play.)

Purdue 13 Valparaiso 4
Indiana 5 Miami (OH) 0
Penn State 14 Bucknell 6

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