This Year’s Best Men’s Basketball conference (as of January 26, 2012)

I’ve been reading the opinions of pundits and bloggers about which conference is the best. Well, I’m here to end the debate.

I’m going to discuss this in two posts. First, I will talk about the Big 6 conferences and justify as best I can on my ordering. Once I take a look at the rest of conferences, I will give my top 10 conferences overall, with justification as well.

The Big 6 (ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, PAC-12)

After some fancy spreadsheet work and gathering of facts, here are some interesting results

Average Team Win/Loss record by conference

ACC:                   12.3-7.0
Big 12:                 13.5-6.1
Big East:               13.7-6.9
Big Ten:                14.2-6.3
Pac-12:                11.2-8.4
SEC:                    13.3-6.6

Interesting tidbits:

-Pac-12 wins against AP 25: 0

-The Big Ten and Big East both are tough road conferences: Avg losses on the road: 3.5 and 3.6 respectively, and they also have the highest winning records.

-All conferences are allowing around 64 points per game (excluding the Big Ten).

-Purdue is the team in the Big Ten to not beat an AP 25 team.

-Kentucky is 3-0 against AP 25 teams

- The Big 12 plays basketball like football: lots of scoring, averaging 72.2 points a game. Highest among the Big 6.

- The Big Ten has the lowest points for at 67.7 and also the lost points allowed, 62.1.

So with those statistical nuggets, my initial thought of conference powers I have to say is wrong. I was going to say Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Pac-12 (in that order), just from the eye test and my gut feelings, but after looking threw the records, I can’t justify that ranking.

Obviously, the Pac-12 is last among these conferences.  Cal, its best team, is only 16-5. The conference has no wins over top 25 teams. The top half of the conference is mediocre while the bottom half is simply a disgrace. Utah, ASU, and USC combined have the same win total as Cal. The Pac-12 may be lucky to get more than just the conference champion in the NCAA tournament.

The next lowest spot is a battle between the ACC and SEC. I am leaning towards the ACC be to be second to last. SEC averages 13.3 wins per team to ACC’s 12.3. That’s a whole game more per team. The SEC has 13 wins against top 25 as the ACC has only 8. Also the SEC’s current conference leader is 20-1 (Kentucky) as the ACC’s is 14-6 (Florida State).

The top three are extremely hard to decide, but I am going Big Ten, Big East, Big 12, and putting the Big Ten is heartbreaking to me, just because I don’t like the conference. But they have the best overall wins per team. They have beaten 21 top 25 teams and all twelve teams have 10 wins or more. The Big East has the next best overall wins per team with 13.7 wins/team. They also have 23 victories over top 25 teams, but they also have four more teams than the Big Ten. Also, the conference is very well balanced from top to bottom. The Big 12 comes in third because they have the third best overall wins per team, and they have only 12 wins over top 25 teams. The big 12 is top heavy with talent, but the bottom half (Oklahoma, Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Oklahoma State) are well below par.

So the final rankings:

1      1.    Big Ten

          2.   Big East

     3.      Big 12

     4.       SEC

     5.       ACC

     6.       Pac-12