This has been a crazy year. There have been postponements of games. Teams didn’t finish their schedules – some had their seasons end short. It has been rough.

Conferences knew this going in – and they all had rules on what would determine their regular season champion. For the Big 10, the Athletic Directors and Council of Presidents and Chancellors voted at the start of the season and decided that it would be winning percentage.

Now that Illinois finished their full schedule at 16-4 (.800) and Michigan dropped two of their last three to finish at 14-3 (.824), they feel they should be named co-champions because they beat Michigan in their only meeting and won more games than the Wolverines.

Illinois AD Josh Whitman penned a letter to the conference stating that there should be co-champions, including the following statement…..

“We should not have had to advocate for ourselves—this is the right outcome for the Big Ten and one that it should have proactively sought,” Whitman wrote. “But nonetheless, we were left to fight our own battle, and despite our advocacy, I learned late yesterday that our efforts were unsuccessful. Michigan will remain outright champions.”

The Illinois AD is right with the first sentence – “We should not have had to advocate for ourselves.” That is because they never should have been advocating for themselves.

Don’t get me wrong – I grew up in the state of Illinois, and so if I had a preference between the Illini and the Wolverines, I am always going to root for Illinois. Well, except if they meet on Sunday in the Big 10 championship. Because I can’t stand whiners.

Illinois had a fantastic season that is likely going to lead to a #1 seed in an NCAA Tournament that is going to have all the games happening about a 2 hour drive from their campus. But the rules were established before the season started – and .824 is better than .800. The Michigan Wolverines were the Big 10 regular season champions.

Sure, they played 3 less games. For the record, they were at Northwestern (9-15, a team they beat by 19 in their other matchup), vs Indiana (12-15, a team they beat by 16 in their other matchup) and at Penn State (11-13). So, while it could have certainly happened since the Big 10 is just a brutal conference especially on the road, for Illinois to legitimately get the championship, the #4 team in the country would have lost at least one of those three games against teams with losing records. It is not a likely scenario.

But the scenario is irrelevant. Because the rules were the rules. Michigan doesn’t have to prove they would have won those three games – they did not get played in order to protect the players safety due to spikes in Covid, and thus, they finished the season with a better record than Illinois. If the tables were turned, I am sure they would not appreciate someone else claiming part of their championship.

Illinois can not like it. But at the end of the day, they did not win the regular season championship – Michigan did. And moaning about it this publicly makes them look pathetic. Go win the Big Ten Conference Tournament, and simply raise that banner instead. You have no right to the banner that you did not win.