I’m exasperated with the constant bashing of Big Ten basketball.

Make no mistake, the Big East was the best basketball conference this season. But everywhere I turned during March — from ESPN to CBS to sports talk radio to my boss David Marran — the Big Ten was getting thrown under the bus.

I say enough.

The Big Ten’s best team (Michigan State) manhandled the Big East’s best team (Louisville) in an Elite 8 contest last Sunday. The top-ranked Cardinals were thought to be too deep and too talented. The Spartans, it had been surmised, would be no better than a middle-of-the-pack team in the Big East.

How thorough was the 64-52 whipping by Michigan State? Louisville, who lives by its press, couldn’t force turnovers and couldn’t beat MSU on the fast break. So demoralizing was the second half that once the Spartans got up by 15 with six minutes left, Louisville quit.

The Cardinals found out what the rest of the Big Ten already knew. Being down 10 against a team like Michigan State or Purdue or Wisconsin is like being down 20 against a team that doesn’t take its defensive disciplines seriously.

As for the style of play, there is a gargantuan double-standard in basketball analysis.

When Wisconsin, or a Big Ten team, plays a game in the 60s it’s deemed “hard to watch” or “setting basketball back.” When other conferences put out a low-scoring game, not a peep about style enters the conversation.

Low-scoring games have been commonplace in this year’s tournament.

For the record, here’s a list of power conference (or Top 25) programs that had a game score in the low 60s during the tournament: UCLA, Wisconsin, Xavier, Pittsburgh, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, Arizona State, West Virginia, Kansas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Purdue. Teams that failed to get to 60 in a game at least once: Duke, Clemson, Syracuse, Xavier, Louisville, Florida State, Boston College and last but not least Marquette.

*Coco sighting: Flipping through channels this weekend, I stumbled upon a replay of the Milwaukee Iron’s season-opening loss to the Iowa Barnstormers in af2 action. A pan to the Iron’s sideline, prompted a double-take. It looked like former Bradford star Jamaine “Coco” Blalock.

Sure enough it was.

Blalock, approaching nearly a decade in professional indoor football, had 63 all-purpose yards for Milwaukee in Friday’s contest. He had four catches from Iron quarterback Tyler Donovan, a former Badger.

The Iron are on the road for the next two weekends before returning to the Bradley Center to face the Peoria Pirates on April 17.

*Book it (11-6): March proved very good to the prediction portion of the show. The Big East did get exactly two teams to the Final Four to push my mark to a season-high five games up of .500.

Some Vegas books have North Carolina as an 11-10 favorite to win the national title. I’m booking on a team other than UNC winning the national championship.

Mike Larsen is a sportswriter for the Kenosha News. E-mail him at mlarsen@kenoshanews.com