The Big Ten is everywhere among the country’s top-ranked teams. Will a national title follow?

Among conferences, the Big Ten is the beast of the college basketball world this season – seven teams ranked in the AP top 25, eight teams in the NET’s top 31, 11 teams in KenPom.com’s top 44, all as of Friday.

That leads to the question: After a 21-year drought, will a Big Ten team finally be able to add a national championship to its trophy case?

Michigan and Ohio State are No. 1 seeds in Joe Lunardi’s latest NCAA Tournament Bracketology report on ESPN.com, while Illinois is a No. 2. Those three teams plus Iowa are in the top eight of the NET.

The third-ranked Wolverines are in first place in the league at 8-1 but have been on a 23-day pause instituted by their athletic department because of positive tests for a COVID-19 variant that transmits at a higher rate. They are scheduled to return to competition Sunday at Wisconsin.

In the meantime, the top teams have taken turns beating up on each other. Illinois is 9-3 in the Big Ten, followed by Ohio State (10-4), Wisconsin (9-5), Iowa (8-5), Purdue (8-6), and Indiana (6-6). Rutgers is 7-7 but still rates a No. 6 seed in the ESPN mock bracket.

Penn State (7-9, 4-8), which is the highest-ranked team (No. 31) with a sub-.500 record in the NET, has a chance in the next eight days to work its way up the bubble. After a home game Sunday versus Nebraska, the Nittany Lions host Ohio State on Thursday and travel to Iowa for a Feb. 21 contest.

The Big Ten also has some of the nation’s best talent, topped by Iowa’s Luka Garza, who averages 25.3 points and is a favorite to win national player of the year honors.

The last team to win a Big Ten championship was Tom Izzo’s Michigan State Spartans in 2000. Since then, conference teams have gotten to the national title game seven times but haven’t been able to finish the job, the latest being Michigan, which lost to Villanova in 2018.

Michigan last played on Jan. 22, a 70-53 win at Purdue. The next day, athletic director Warde Manuel announced that activities in all sports would be paused up to 14 days. The basketball program reportedly had no positive tests before or during the shutdown.

Michigan returned to the court for workouts on Feb. 4 and held its first full-scale practice last Sunday.

“No one ever experienced anything like this before,” head coach Juwan Howard said earlier this week on his radio show. “You just try to manage it the best way you can, but making sure you don’t put our players in a situation where you get injured or set your team back. So we’ve done a really good job.”

While they were idle, the Wolverines actually moved up to No. 3 in the AP poll and remained No. 3 in the NET. They lead the Big Ten in field goal percentage (50.7%), free throw percentage (76.8%) and field-goal defense (37.4%), and are second in points allowed and rebound margin.

It seems as if history is made this season whenever a new AP Top 25 poll is released.

Take this week. Kansas ended its record run in the poll at 231 consecutive weeks. This marked the first time since Dec. 18, 1961, that four of the sports’ bluebloods – Duke, North Carolina, and UCLA as well as the Jayhawks, owners of a combined 33 national championships – had not been ranked.

In addition, none of the winningest Division I programs was in the top 25.

Of the 15 programs that have won multiple national titles, the only ones to make the top 25 this week were Villanova (No. 5) and Oklahoma State (No. 23). Four received votes. The other nine were shut out.

Kansas’ top-25 streak began on Feb. 2, 2009. The Jayhawks’ game Monday night against Oklahoma State was their first as an unranked team in 434 games. However, after wins over the Cowboys and Thursday over Iowa State, a victory Saturday in a road rematch against the Cyclones could return them to the rankings.

No. 12 Oklahoma at No. 14 West Virginia, 1 p.m., ESPN Plus: Because their next two games against No. 2 Baylor next week were postponed, the Mountaineers (14-5, 7-3 Big 12) can put all their focus into this contest. The Sooners (12-5, 7-4) are led by Austin Reaves, who averages a team-high 15.8 points and tops the Big 12 in free-throw shooting at 87.4%.

No. 22 Loyola Chicago at Drake, noon, ESPN2: The top two teams in the Missouri Valley Conference square off Saturday and Sunday in Des Moines, Iowa. The Greyhounds (17-3, 12-1), a Final Four team in 2018, have returned to the top 25 for the first time since 1985 while the Bulldogs (19-1, 10-1) started the season with 18 straight wins before losing last Sunday to Valparaiso.

North Carolina at No. 9 Virginia, 6 p.m., ESPN: It’s a tough three-day stretch for the Cavaliers (14-3, 10-1), the ACC’s first-place team, with games against the Tar Heels (12-6, 7-4) and Monday night at No. 17 Florida State. Carolina is playing for the first time since last Saturday after a postponement sparked by a video showing unmasked Tar Heel players celebrating their win over Duke.

Junior guard Izaiah Brockington, who starred at Archbishop Ryan High School, has been a durable player for Penn State. The 6-foot-4 Brockington is second on the Nittany Lions in scoring (13.9 points per game), rebounding (4.7), and free-throw percentage (79.6%). He also averages 30.9 minutes, tops on the team. Brockington’s season high of 24 points came in a December win over then-No. 15 Virginia Tech.