Conference Rankings - Basketball

Submitted by DCAlum on

I decided to put this together really quickly because I was bored at work. I used the most recent of two human polls (AP and Coaches) and two computer rankings (KenPom and Sagarin). Both types have their flaws (everyone probably knows about KenPom's love for Wisconsin at this point), so hopefully some sort of average makes sense.

 

  AP Coaches KenPom Sagarin Total
B10 98 96 97 86 377
BE 74 69 80 70 293
SEC 32 34 43 30 139
ACC 29 31 27 25 112
B12 19 20 20 22 81
P12 22 21 15 19 77
MWC 23 19 7 24 73
MVC 9 13 10 23 55
WCC 12 12 15 14 53
A10 7 1 11 12 31

 

It's a really simple ranking algorithm. The conference gets 25 points for a team in 1st place in whichever poll/model, 24 for 2nd, etc. So theoretically, a single team could earn its conference a total of 100 points. I only look at the top 25 teams, so this isn't incredibly accurate, but it's hopefully a nice little back-of-the-envelope calculation.

 

Takeaways:

The Big 10 is pretty strong right now. I think everybody knew that.

There is a big drop-off between the B10/BE and the rest of the conferences. Their total point value is greater than the rest of the conferences combined.

The top teams in the SEC are looking better overall than the top teams in the ACC, which is interesting to me. This is especially unusual since Duke is so good (providing the ACC with 97 of its 112 points) and Kentucky surprisingly bad (only 17 of 139) right now.

DCAlum

December 17th, 2012 at 3:39 PM ^

Suprisingly. Just threw down conferences, didn't put too much effort in. Could expand if you want.

 

Big Ten ranks, then point totals:

  AP Coaches KenPom Sagarin Total Points
Michigan 2 2 8 5 87
Indiana 6 6 2 6 84
Ohio State 7 7 7 9 74
Illinois 10 10 NR 17 67
Minnesota 13 16 10 7 58
Michigan State 20 19 18 NR 47

 

Michiganfootball13

December 17th, 2012 at 7:05 PM ^

I knew that hte B10 was pretty dang good at basketball this year but this chart shows how big of a difference there is in the country.  If B10 teams and get through conference play without beating each other up too much than it could be another 3 B10 teams in the Final Four.

WolvinLA2

December 17th, 2012 at 7:29 PM ^

An aspect you might want to include is to divide the average at the end by the number of teams in the conference, since your points are a total and not an average and a conference like the BE with 16 teams would have a better chance to have more teams in the top 25 than a conference with 12, etc. 

Let's say that the BE score and Big Ten score were identical.  It would be more impressive for the Big Ten because we got there with 4 fewer teams. 

Jasper

December 17th, 2012 at 8:17 PM ^

How, again, did the Big Ten manage to tie an inferior (in 2012, anyway) conference in its yearly challenge with them? Oh, yeah -- MSU and Wisconsin played poorly. At least, that's my memory.

WolvinLA2

December 17th, 2012 at 8:33 PM ^

Although I mostly agree with your reasoning (Sparty blew it), this ranking only ranks the conferences based on the top teams. The top teams in the Big Ten are better than those of any other conference. But the Big Ten-ACC challenge is among all teams, and top to bottom, we aren't that much better than them, which is why 6 of their teams were able to win.

DCAlum

December 18th, 2012 at 8:50 AM ^

That's exactly how I would put it. This is a ranking basically comparing the top teams in each conference. Unfortunately the polls don't have quite as much detail after about 30 teams or so as KenPom and Sagarin do, otherwise I would have tried to go farther down the ladder.