As we race towards the wild and wonderful month of March, conference tournaments and, ultimately, Selection Sunday, expect the annual debate about conference superiority to begin in earnest. In recent years, much as with the SEC in college football, there seems in college basketball to have developed an annual consensus that the Big East is king of the conferences. Certainly since 2008-09, when Pitt, Louisville, and UConn all received No. 1 seeds, the perception of superiority has been prevalent.
NCAA Basketball Conference Rankings: Big East, Big Ten Lead The Way
What about this year? As our own Sean Keeley noted after a particularly bloody January weekend in the Big East, the conference appears to be as deep as ever, where even a win over Rutgers cannot be taken for granted. And if depth and parity are the measures, the Big East certainly springs to mind. But by that measure so do the Big Ten and Big 12.
With the ACC, SEC, and Pac 10 all having down years, which of those three conferences should be considered the best?
One way to rank the conferences is to rank all college basketball teams and then average the teams in each conference. Alternatively, we could rank all the teams and then determine the mean ranking for each team. Using Jeff Sagarin’s computer ratings, by both measures the Big East and Big Ten are more or less tied at the top, with the Big 12 a little bit behind.
Using Ken Pomeroy’s rankings, we get the same top three, but the conference with the top average ranking is the Big 10, followed by the Big East, then the Big 12. Switch to mean ranking and the Big East rises to the top, trailed by the Big Ten and Big 12.
There are plenty of ways to slice and dice it, but what seems clear is that the Big East and Big Ten are the top two conferences this year, with the Big 12 a notch below. And because a post like this is nothing without a list... here’s my list of top college basketball conferences this year:
1. Big East
2. Big Ten
3. Big 12
4. ACC
5. Pac 10
6. Mountain West
7. SEC
8. Conference USA (outside shot at 3 NCAA bids)
Where’d I go wrong? Who you got at the top? Big East or Big Ten?
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