Northwestern showed no ill effects from its 10-day layoff in a 30-point shellacking of Texas Southern. The impressive results, as usual for the Wildcats, were at the offensive end, where they posted the second-highest efficiency allowed by the Tigers all season. Texas Southern has faced a couple teams relevant to the Wildcats, so the efficiencies posted by each team against the Tigers may be enlightening:

BTN.com senior writer Tom Dienhart spent the season covering Big Ten football, and now it’s time for his team-by-team season recaps. Every day, Dienhart will post a recap for each Big Ten school, in alphabetical order. Up next: Michigan State. Watch our championship game video feature on the Spartans’ “Rocket” play now and read Dienhart’s season recap in this post. And look back at recaps for Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan here, then get ready for Minnesota coming up.

Illinois advanced to the school’s first NCAA volleyball championship match with a win over USC in five sets (25-27, 25-18, 25-22, 18-25, 15-10). Illinois will face UCLA for the title on Saturday at 8:30 p.m. ET live on ESPN2. Relive an entire live blog at FightingIllini.com, check out their photo gallery, and find the entire updated interactive tournament bracket at NCAA.com. NCAA.com also has video highlights. You can also follow the Illinois volleyball team’s Twitter account @IlliniVball. Earlier, UCLA advanced to its first national championship match since 1994 with a sweep of Florida State in the other semifinal (25-16, 25-17, 25-21).

BTN lead basketball analyst Jim Jackson needs no introduction. The former Ohio State star and two-time Big Ten Player of the Year has his number retired in the Value City Arena rafters, after all. He also had a long and successful NBA career. Oh, and he has a son, Traevon, who is a freshman basketball player at Wisconsin. Prior to Wisconsin’s game Wednesday night against Savannah State, Jim went one-on-one with his son at the Kohl Center. Watch the feature now.

Our show “The Journey 2012″ debuts on Jan. 8, 2012 and our Journey crew is already out there covering Big Ten men’s basketball action during the non-conference games. You can see a number of very cool promotional spots right over here.  The weekly show gets to go where every fans wants to go: Behind the scenes. If you get BTN2Go, you can watch all of last season right now.