And your winner is ...

 I'm gonna make the state of Indiana boo and hiss this morning.

("Again?" you say)

I'm looking at this Big Ten Tournament draw sheet, and I'm seeing Indiana and Purdue are both double-bye teams, which means they don't play until the quarterfinals. And I'm looking at an Illinois team that's won 20 games and will give you fits when it decides to show up, and a 20-win Maryland team that's unbeatable at home but, um, not so much on the road, and a Penn State team that's 19-12 and playing its best basketball of the season.

Oh, yeah, and Iowa, which beat Indiana by 26 in Assembly Hall, and which also has 19 wins. And Michigan, which is only 17-14 but has Hunter Dickinson. And, what the hell, let's throw Nebraska in there, too, because the Cornhuskers have won five of their last six and beat Maryland in that stretch and also Rutgers, which is kind of free-falling and desperate right now,

Know what I see in all that?

I see a bunch of teams that can jump up and beat you if the motivation's right. And the motivation is the NCAA Tournament for at least some of them if everything falls their way.

Know what else I see?

No reason for either Purdue or IU to give a tinker's damn about this deal.

(Which, frankly, is what the Blob thinks generally about conference tournaments. John Wooden told me a long time ago they're nothing but an extra revenue stream for the conferences, and he's right. For teams that have already punched their ticket to the Big One, they're relatively meaningless -- especially if you're, say, Purdue, which has already won the Big Ten title no matter what it says on the trophy they hand to the winner in Chicago).

Speaking of Purdue ...

The Boilermakers are at least a No. 2 seed in Da Tournament no matter what they do this week, and Indiana's a 4 or 5. And Purdue's lost four of its last six and probably wouldn't advance its seeding even if it ran the table in Chicago. 

Indiana, meanwhile, has been on something of a win-one-lose-one roller coaster lately, which likely means the Hoosiers aren't miraculously going to jump up to a 2 or 3 seed if they run the table this week. That they're both away from Assembly Hall and would have to put together more than one good game in a row makes that unlikely.

In conclusion: Neither Purdue nor IU is going to cut down the nets Sunday in Chicago.

I suspect it'll be one of the desperate teams, or maybe Michigan State, which is kinda desperate, too, at 19-11. Plus it's March and March is to Michigan State what spinach is to Popeye.

But it won't be Purdue or IU. You can write that down.

And use it against me if I'm wrong.