I don't know of a soul on this site that thought this years team was going to be anything better than a rebuilding effort and was destined to struggle. Shocker that in January we have a poor record. Losing to some smaller teams is aggravating but shouldn't be unexpected and struggling in the B1G is not exactly new to Gopher B-Ball.
While I agree that anyone who was paying close attention should have expected a rebuilding year, I don't agree that the record to date should have been expected. If you look at the standings of the top six basketball conferences, the following teams have losing records at this point of the season:
St. John's
DePaul
Minnesota
Rutgers
Boston College
That's 5 of 75 or about 6.7% of the teams in those 6 conferences. I expect that more than 6.7% of power conference basketball teams are going through rebuilding years of some sort.
All of the quantitative ranking indexes employ strength of schedule in their computations. Sagarin, BPI, and Pomeroy employ similar methodologies and so they generally are not too far apart in their rankings. Minnesota is #161 in Sagarin, #158 in Pomeroy, and #154 in BPI. I'll use Sagarin because those openly published results are sorted by conference.
Of the five teams above, Rutgers, St. John's, and Boston College are ranked below the Gophers by Sagarin. If the Gophers are ranked #161 but above the three teams mentioned above, that means the Gophers are ranked lower than 71 power conference teams and 89 mid-major teams. That's really bad for a power conference team.
Wisconsin is clearly going through a rebuilding year; they lost their coach and return only 2 regular rotation players (albeit pretty good ones) from last year's final four team but they are 9-7 and ranked #57. No team in the Big Ten has had more adversity to their roster than Illinois, but they are 8-8 and ranked #103.
Here's a sampling of teams that, at the beginning of the season, I would have been very surprised to trail in ranking at this point:
#128 SUNY Albany
#136 Fordham
#158 North Carolina-Asheville
#160 Cal Poly-SLO
#132 North Carolina-Wilmington
#142 Columbia
#129 Eastern Michigan
#147 Morehead State
#156 Texas A&M-Corpus Christi
#155 IPFW
#106 Georgia State
#157 Cal State Bakersfield