Big Ten's March Madness success makes Michigan's season all the more impressive

Chicago — Seeing the Big Ten dominate the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament and send a league-record six teams to the Sweet 16 might come as a surprise to some. It wasn’t for Michigan guard Elliot Cadeau, who filled out his own March Madness bracket just for laughs and had three conference teams in the Final Four: Michigan, Nebraska and Wisconsin. “It's something I expected.

I played in the ACC (at North Carolina), which is a really good conference, but coming out here, it was a little bit different. There’s a lot more firepower, a lot of good teams,” Cadeau said. “Every game I play is always against a really good player, and every team is hard to beat.

Even though we're a really good team, we faced a lot of trouble against other teams. ” While only one of the three Big Ten squads Cadeau picked to reach the final weekend is still standing heading into Friday’s slate of Sweet 16 games, it doesn’t diminish what the league has accomplished. Nine Big Ten teams earned an NCAA Tournament berth, exactly half of the league.

Ohio State and Wisconsin both lost in the first round by a combined three points. UCLA beat UCF in its opener before falling to second-seeded UConn. All the others — Michigan, Purdue, Illinois, Michigan State, Nebraska and Iowa — won their first two games, giving the Big Ten a 13-3 record in an impressive showing of conference strength.