Anyone looking at the Northwestern and Maryland women’s basketball rosters might have thought both teams were one year away from their landmark successes in the Big Ten this season.
The Terps’ top three players all are sophomores, and starting guard Laurin Mincy is the only senior on the roster.
The Wildcats start just one senior, with three sophomores and two juniors as their top four scorers and point guard.
And they are going to meet for the second time this week in Saturday’s Big Ten tournament semifinals at the Sears Centre.
Top-seeded Maryland, which had a double bye after the first perfect Big Ten regular season (18-0) since Purdue in 1999, cruised past Michigan State 70-60 in Friday’s quarterfinals.
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And fourth-seeded Northwestern, which also earned a double bye after its best Big Ten season record (12-6) since 1993, rallied from a 15-point deficit to beat Rutgers 62-57 Friday.
“What they (Maryland) have done this year is set the bar in women’s basketball in our league,” Northwestern coach Joe McKeown said after a 69-48 thumping by the Terps in Sunday’s regular-season finale.
That bar hasn’t been particularly high in recent years.
No team that played a Big Ten schedule has made the NCAA Final Four since Michigan State finished second in 2005. Five Big Ten teams made the tourney last year — the fewest since 2010 — and only Penn State reached the round of 16, where it lost.
The Big Ten media guide tries to put a tutu on that pig by already counting first-year teams Maryland and Rutgers among its past NCAA qualifiers.
Even with those new teams this season, the conference ranks only fourth in RPI, behind the Big 12, Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference, where Maryland previously played.
That the fourth-ranked Terps (28-2) would dominate the Big Ten is hardly surprising, no matter how callow their roster seems at first glance, no matter that their five graduation losses included Alyssa Thomas, the top scorer and rebounder in school history.
Maryland, the 2006 NCAA champion, simply has more talent and talented depth than Big Ten teams it has beaten 28 straight times dating to 2007.
“When you recruit players, it never has been about, “What year are you or how old are you but can you play?”’ Maryland coach Brenda Frese said.
Two of her current starters, sophomores Lexie Brown and Brionna Jones, also started all five games in last year’s NCAA tournament as Maryland, a fourth seed, reached the semifinals before losing to Notre Dame. Two other current starters, Mincy and sophomore Shatori Walker-Kimbrough, played extensively during that NCAA Final Four run.
“You can’t put a price tag on the experience this young team got last year,” Frese said.
McKeown has a similar feeling about a different kind of experience his young team had last year: learning from an 0-for-February.
The 2015 Wildcats (23-7) were staggering into February this year but saved their season by winning all eight games last month. The result was Northwestern’s first appearance in the AP top 25 since 1996 (they moved up a spot to No. 24 this week) and a strong case for its first NCAA berth since 1997.
“To play so well down the stretch as we’ve done, you have to have amnesia about what happened (against Maryland) and focus on how we got to (there),” McKeown said.
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