BREAKING NEWS:After this year, Big Ten basketball tournaments won’t include every team

Written by akahn1@mlive.com, Andrew Kahn
The Big Ten will be changing for the upcoming season, and the postseason basketball tournaments will follow suit.

The Big Ten revealed on Tuesday that 15 of the 18 league members would compete in the men’s and women’s basketball championships beginning in the upcoming season.

The conference opted to change the format for the 2024–25 season in light of the addition of four additional institutions this summer: Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington. All 14 of the Big Ten’s clubs are invited to the postseason tournament as of right now. There will be three teams excluded starting in the upcoming season.

The competition will still take place over five days, with seeds 5–9 earning a single bye and the top four seeds earning a double bye to the quarterfinals. This arrangement “provides access to all teams in contention for postseason invitations,” according to a press release from the Big Ten. Stated differently, it is highly unlikely that teams that do not make it to the Big Ten Tournament would have participated in any other postseason competition.

A policy that kept optimism alive for even the poorest team in the Big Ten until it lost its final game is the automatic invitation to the NCAA Tournament granted to the winner of any conference tournament. Moving forward, that will not be the case.

The league said that the conference schedules will stay at 20 games for the men and 18 for the women. As per the Big Ten, “this maximizes opportunities for NCAA postseason berths, is consistent with peer schedule formats, and allows for non-conference scheduling flexibility.” “The locations of the single-play home and away games will alternate every year, and the two-play opponents will be chosen based on rivalries, geography, and competitive balance.”

Minneapolis will host the Big Ten tournaments for the first time this year for both the men’s and women’s divisions. The men have played in Chicago or Indianapolis all but two years; the women were present the previous year.

The teams that will compete on Tuesday night, Michigan and Michigan State, have both experienced success in the past. The Wolverines prevailed in the two years in between, while the Spartans triumphed in 2016 and 2019.