Pete Bigelow from the AA News has a good article on the disrespect the Big 10 got from national commentators this year, and unlike some other AA News writers, he actually had some good stats to back it up. The one I note:
"The Big Ten has had 51 teams in the NCAA Tournament since 2000. In those nine years, the conference is 72-43. It's .626 winning percentage is third-best among the top-six RPI conferences in that span.
It's behind only the Big East and ACC, a pretty respectable position, and one that lines up right on track this year with the number of invitations given to the three conferences."
So this shows that while we're not the BIG power conference in college basketball (although I'd love to see the std dev per team in that stat, i.e. take UConn and NC out of each and take MSU out of ours and see what the 'bulk' of the conference does compared to outliers), we're not the ugly stepsister of the "power" (read: BCS) conferences either. We're ahead of the Big 12, Pac 10, and the ESSSS EEEEE CEEEEE. And maybe the Big East should get 7 teams in since they're a friggin 20 team conference (exaggeration I know).
I'm sure you could go a lot more in depth taking into account seedings and such, but this is a stat even the average 'Bama fan can understand.
To paraphrase Sean Connery, "Suck it Trebek (Digger)"
