For all the positives in a remarkable year for the Big Ten, the ending certainly wasn’t one of them.
The league struggled at the finish line in the postseason, with bowl trophies slipping away from a conference that had spent the previous few months establishing itself as perhaps the best in the nation thanks to all those coveted spots near the top of the polls.
That turned out to be part of the problem as the Big Ten crowded into the New Year’s Six games, forcing just about everybody else to step up a weight class or two and creating a difficult slate of games from top to bottom.