The opinions came rolling in Oct. 28 in Chicago.

One by one, Big Ten Conference women's basketball coaches and players talked at the conference's media day about how wide open the league would be this season.

"I'll tell you, if anybody predicts accurately (in the) preseason how this conference finishes up, I need to get them and have them predict what kind of stocks I should buy, because they obviously know something that I don't know," first-year Penn State coach Coquese Washington said. "But this conference is going to be in flux and it's going to be really competitive and I think there's a lot of parity."

Two months later, that sentiment seems to have held up pretty well.

Preseason consensus favorite Ohio State (9-2), which has won the league outright the past two seasons and shared the title in the 2004-05 season, is the only team with fewer than three losses heading into the Big Ten season, which begins in earnest this weekend.

Five teams have three losses — including the University of Wisconsin, which opens its conference season tonight at Purdue — and two more have four. Big Ten teams are just 2-17 against teams ranked in the current Associated Press Top 25.

Only three Big Ten teams made the NCAA tournament last season, the fewest since 1992. Four of the six players selected to the coaches and media's first-team all-conference teams graduated, and another (Purdue's Lindsay Wisdom-Hylton) is out for the season with a knee injury. And last season's top three teams — Ohio State, Purdue and Michigan State, the three NCAA tournament teams — graduated their top scorers.

So you can see why the buzz is that the Big Ten is down.

"I know it's not going as well as it usually (has) in the past," said Badgers senior guard Janese Banks, UW's second-leading scorer at 15 points per game. "Usually, right now somebody's maybe still undefeated. But, you know, a lot of things can happen, so I try not to get too caught up in the bracketologies and the predictions and the stories that people write, because they're just stories, and nothing's going to be said until March."

Optimists say the Big Ten will be more balanced and not as weak near the bottom.

Case in point: Michigan, which went 10-20 last season, is off to a 7-3 start under first-year coach Kevin Borseth and has the second-best RPI of any Big Ten team, according to Jerry Palm's CollegeRPI.com. The Big Ten as a whole ranks fourth among the nation's 31 conferences in RPI, and is higher than the Southeastern Conference — a league that features three top-10 teams.

And only two teams, Purdue (4-6) and Northwestern (4-8), are below .500 entering league play.

So while the Badgers (7-3) aren't off to as good of a start as they would have hoped, they enter tonight's game against the Boilermakers knowing they're as likely as anyone else to contend for their first conference title in school history.

"It leaves us with an opportunity, too, to realize that no one in the Big Ten is really a dominant force," UW sophomore forward Mariah Dunham said, "and we need to be that team that can just go out there and be dominant."