\n\tOn Sunday and Monday, the Big Ten\u2019s case for being the premier conference across all of college sports became much stronger. First, UCLA snapped a 27-year drought<\/a> by becoming the first Big Ten women\u2019s basketball team since Purdue in 1999 to win the NCAA Tournament. One day later, Michigan snapped a 26-year drought<\/a> by becoming the first Big Ten men\u2019s basketball team since Michigan State in 2000 to win the NCAA Tournament.\n<\/p>\n \n\tThe Big Ten is the first conference since the SEC in 2007 (Florida in football and men\u2019s basketball, Tennessee in women\u2019s basketball) to win the national championship in all three of those sports in the same year. It\u2019s the first conference ever to have three different schools win the national championships in those three marquee sports in the same year.\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tGoing B1G in @TimesSquareNYC<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/sCpDjAv86A<\/a>\n\t<\/p>\n \t\u2014 Big Ten Conference (@bigten) April 7, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n \n\tAnd the Big Ten\u2019s dominance doesn\u2019t stop there.\n<\/p>\n \n\tThe Big Ten has won all of the last 19 NCAA wrestling championships, including five straight titles by Penn State. The Big Ten has two of the four finalists in this year\u2019s Frozen Four for men\u2019s hockey, which will crown a national champion Saturday. Women\u2019s hockey technically isn\u2019t a Big Ten sport, but its member schools \u2013 specifically, Wisconsin and Ohio State \u2013 have won the last seven national championships in that sport. The Big Ten even has a chance of winning its first College World Series since 1966, when Ohio State won the college baseball national championship, as UCLA is currently ranked as the No. 1 team on the diamond.\n<\/p>\n \n\tAltogether, Big Ten teams are the most recent winners of 11 of the NCAA\u2019s 39\u00a0Division I championships, also including field hockey (Northwestern), women\u2019s golf (Northwestern), men\u2019s gymnastics (Michigan), men\u2019s soccer (Washington), men\u2019s outdoor track and field (USC) and men\u2019s water polo (UCLA). (That total doesn\u2019t include non-NCAA sanctioned championships, including Ohio State\u2019s sixth consecutive national title in pistol<\/a>.)\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \t\tCurrent Division I Champions By Conference, All NCAA Sports<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tConference<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tNumber<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tBIG TEN<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t11<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tSEC<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t10<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tACC<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t9<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tBIG 12<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t5<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tNo other conference has more than one champion. \n\tSince 2024, when Oklahoma and Texas joined the SEC and Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington joined the Big Ten, the debate about college sports\u2019 top league has centered around those two conferences. They\u2019ve certainly separated themselves from the pack in college football, combining for 13 of the 25 teams in this year\u2019s final AP Top 25, including seven of the top nine.\n<\/p>\n \n\tSEC fans will certainly argue that their conference reigns supreme on the gridiron, and until a few years ago, there wasn\u2019t much debate that they did. From 2006 to 2022, the SEC won the college football national championship 13 times in 18 years. The SEC still has a strong argument for being the deepest league in college football, putting seven teams in the top 15 of the AP poll last season compared to three (Indiana, Ohio State and Oregon) for the Big Ten.\n<\/p>\n \n\tBut when it comes to reaching the mountaintop of college football, the Big Ten has been king for the last three years, while an SEC team hasn\u2019t even made it to any of the last three national championship games. The SEC has yet to even win a game against the Big Ten in the first two years of the 12-team College Football Playoff. And the Big Ten looks well-positioned to contend for a fourth straight college football national title next season. Ohio State, Indiana and Oregon are all ranked within the top five of preseason college football national championship odds for the 2026-27 campaign, while Michigan, USC, Penn State, Washington and Iowa are also projected as preseason top-25 teams per On3\u2019s composite<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n \n\tBasketball, particularly on the men\u2019s side, was a sport where the Big Ten\u2019s postseason performance had lagged behind its power-conference counterparts \u2013 also including the ACC, Big 12 and Big East \u2013 in recent years. But that changed in a big way this year, as the Big Ten put six teams in the Sweet 16<\/a> and tied the all-time record with four teams in the Elite Eight<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n \n\tThe SEC is just one year removed from putting seven teams in the Sweet 16 and winning the national championship with Florida, so more than one year is needed to say the Big Ten has actually pulled ahead of the SEC in men\u2019s basketball. But it certainly had the best Big Dance of any conference this year. And more excellence is expected from Big Ten basketball next year; ESPN\u2019s initial top 25<\/a> for the 2026-27 season includes seven Big Ten teams (No. 1 Michigan, No. 6 Michigan State, No. 8 Illinois, No. 14 Purdue, No. 17 USC, No. 18 Nebraska, No. 25 Iowa), though the SEC also has seven.\n<\/p>\n \n\tThe SEC did put twice as many teams (six to three) in this year\u2019s women\u2019s basketball Sweet 16, but UCLA took down the conference\u2019s top two teams in the Final Four, Texas and South Carolina, to emerge as the national champion.\n<\/p>\n \t \n\t\tUCLA became the first Big Ten women\u2019s basketball team to win a national championship in 27 years with its win over South Carolina. (Photo:\u00a0Joe Rondone\/The Republic\/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)\n\t<\/p>\n \n\tConference expansion has certainly helped the Big Ten establish itself as the top conference in college sports, as each of the four West Coast schools has won a national championship in at least one sport (Oregon in women\u2019s indoor track and field) since joining the conference two years ago. NIL and revenue sharing have, too, as the Big Ten has brought in more revenue than the SEC and any other conference in every year since 2017 except for the 2021 fiscal year, when the Big Ten\u2019s 2020 football season was significantly shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic.\n<\/p>\n \n\tWhile Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State largely carried the torch for the Big Ten in football until a few years ago, the conference now has more national championship contenders than ever before with the rapid rise of Indiana and the addition of three of the best football schools from the old Pac-12. The Big Ten was deeper than anyone in men\u2019s basketball this season, leading all conferences with seven teams in the final AP poll.\n<\/p>\n \n\tThe Big Ten remains likely to lag behind its southern counterparts in sports like baseball and softball that schools with warmer winter weather have typically dominated, though the conference\u2019s new coast-to-coast footprint \u2013 particularly with the additions of UCLA and USC, which have the second- and third-most all-time national championships across all NCAA sports \u2013 has bolstered the Big Ten\u2019s chances of winning titles in every sport.\n<\/p>\n \n\tThe battle for conference supremacy between the Big Ten and SEC isn\u2019t one that\u2019s likely to end any time soon. But with the Big Ten currently holding a monopoly on national titles across the NCAA\u2019s most prominent sports, it\u2019s the conference everyone else in college sports is chasing right now.\n<\/p>\n
Schools categorized by primary conference affiliation.<\/p>\n![\"UCLA](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/USATSI_28666555.jpg\" "\\"UCLA")
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