Every year, well before the men's college basketball season actually begins, ESPN, Sports Illustrated and every other major sports news organization makes predictions.

This year, they said that Michigan State would win the Big Ten, Purdue would be near the bottom, and Penn State would be in the basement.

For those scoring at home, that's wrong, wrong, and right on target.

With just three weeks left in the Big Ten regular season, two teams that were predicted to do poorly, Purdue and Michigan, find themselves tied for first place with 8-3 records.

And three teams that were ranked in the top 25 in the nation earlier this season, Illinois, Michigan State and Indiana, have struggled.

Indiana, who just last year made it all the way to the NCAA championship game before falling to Maryland, is way back in eighth place with a 5-6 record.

Indiana coach Mike Davis thinks that it's never good for a team to be highly ranked going into a season, feeling that other teams always raise their games for a school like Indiana. "It seems like everyone we play ends up being the star of the week," Davis said.

Iowa men's basketball coach Steve Alford knows about the kind of pressure players and coaches feel when they compete for Indiana. After all, he played for coach Bob Knight in Bloomington, and led them to the National Championship in 1987.

"You think of all the tradition-rich schools in the country, when you think of college basketball, you immediately think of Indiana," Alford said.

"Any little thing, good or bad, is going to be magnified there just because of the attention that's given to basketball in that state."

For Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo and the Spartans, it's been a struggle to deal with the high expectations that the team has year in and year out.

"Expectations are something we're getting a little bit more used to living with," Izzo said. "In the past five or six years, we've been pretty highly ranked, and I think that's a good problem to have, although every team deals with it a little differently."

Mostly though, a lot of the troubles the teams are having have to do with home-court advantage, or the lack thereof.

"The home-court advantage is even greater in the Big Ten than in any league in the country," Minnesota men's basketball coach Dan Monson said.

"There are no easy places to go play in the Big Ten."

Often, while on the road, a team will battle and stay close in the first half, and then get blown away after intermission. Indiana's Davis knows this too well.

"Sometimes, at halftime, we get that look in our eyes when you just know it's over," he said.

"It's been at that point for a while, and some way we have to get it figured out."

Still, one constant remains in the Big Ten: Penn State is at the bottom.

Penn State men's basketball coach Jerry Dunn sometimes finds it difficult to deal with all the losing.

"It's been a challenge, no question about it, but you have to remain grounded," Dunn said. "It's easy to give up, it's easy to quit. I remind myself that the most important thing right now is the kids."