If someone said at the beginning of the season that the Big Ten -- the underachiever of conferences in recent years -- would have seven teams ranked in the Associated Press top 25 going into February, I would have suggested he have his head examined.

Well, we're in the second week of February and currently the Big Ten does have seven teams -- Minnesota (No. 22), Purdue (No. 21), Iowa (No. 19), Indiana (No. 17), Wisconsin (No. 15), Ohio State (No. 13) and defending regular season champion Michigan State (No. 5) -- ranked nationally.

It hasn't really mattered this season if the No. 1 team in the conference was playing the No. 10 team -- chances are it has turned out to be a close and competitive game.

We basketball writers seem to be headed toward pre-season accuracy in picking the Spartans as regular season champions, but every other position in the Big Ten seems to be a crapshoot.

Michigan State is tearing up its conference schedule with a 9-1 record, 20-4 overall. One of the reasons for the Spartans' success is that they returned all five starters from last year's conference championship team, including standout point guard Mateen Cleaves.

But here's what is so surprising about the list of the other six ranked Big Ten teams:

• Last year Ohio State was the doormat of the conference with a 1-15 record. So far this season the Buckeyes have shocked the conference with a 7-3 record, including a 73-56 win over Indiana, an 80-69 victory over Indiana and an 89-60 blowout victory over Minnesota in the new Value City Arena at the Jerome Schottenstein Center.

• Wisconsin finished in ninth place with a 3-13 record while Minnesota finished eighth with a 6-10 record. After losing their first two conference games to Michigan and Ohio State, the Badgers rattled off seven victories in a row to boost them into the top 15 teams in the nation.

• The Northwestern Wildcats, who received 29 votes in this week's AP poll, also finished last season with a 3-13 record, but sixth-year center Evan Eschmeyer has carried the Wildcats to a 6-4 Big Ten record, 14-6 overall.

• Another team full of surprises is the Iowa Hawkeyes, who got an early non-conference upset of the Kansas Jayhawks, snapping the nation's longest winning streak. The Hawkeyes started the season with four straight conference victories, but stumbled lately with a 2-5 record in their last seven conference games.

Meanwhile, aside from Michigan State, the teams favored at the beginning of the season to finish at the top of the conference are currently in the bottom portion of the standings.

Indiana is 5-5 in the conference and Purdue is 4-5. Both teams were favored to finish somewhere in the top three spots, but now are both struggling to finish around .500.

I guess the point I am trying to get at is that any one of the top seven teams can win the Big Ten crown in the conference tournament at The United Center in Chicago.

So far this entire season, it seems almost every game in the Big Ten has been decided in the final minutes of the game, take for example the past four home games for the Penn State Nittany Lions. They lost all four games in the final minutes by a combined score of 15 points.

The Fighting Illini have been anchored in last place of the conference throughout the season, but they proved my point Saturday when they upset Wisconsin, 53-51, overcoming a 17-point deficit in the final 13 minutes.

Coming down the home stretch toward the end of the Big Ten season, nothing is set in stone. Any team can beat any team.

Fortunately for hard-luck teams like Penn State, anything can happen.