Ranking the Conferences with the Directors' Cup
The National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics
annually ranks athletics programs using NCAA championship
competitions as its measuring stick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NACDA_Director's_Cup
Up to ten men's and ten women's sports are counted. Michigan, as a random example, received points in eleven men's and eleven women's sports, so men's track and women's golf were discarded, being the lowest scores. All sports are scored the same; a NC in field hockey receives the same 100 points as a NC in football.
http://www.nacda.com/auto_pdf/p_hotos/s_chools/nacda/sports/directorscu…
I sorted the colleges by conference and averaged the teams' points so the eight team Ivy League could be compared to the sixteen team Big East Everything-But-Football Conference. I also averaged the teams' ranks. [Points are cardinal numbers and, in athletics, are used in gymnastic and figure skating scoring. Rankings are ordinal numbers and used to score track, cross country, and swimming.] The two yield slightly different results.
Pac 10.......AvRank....28.7....AvPts......848.9..100%
Big 10.......AvRank....28.9....AvPts......718.6...85%
SEC........................36.2.................658.9...78%
ACC........................37.2................637.2...75%
Big 12.......AvRank......43.0....AvPts....565.3...67%
Big East Football........78.1....AvPts....308.8...36%**
Ivy League...AvRank....83.5....AvPts....274.....32%
Big East Basketball.....101.1...............273.1...31%**
Mountain West.........108..................265.3...31%
Western AC..AvRank..150.4....AvPts....158.3...19%
Conference USA .......132.9................154.....18%
Mid-American..........179.4.................89.3...10%
Sun Belt.....AvRank...234.6....AvPts.....27.5....3%
**Help understanding the Big East is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_East_Conference
Of note is how the non-scholarship Ivies neatly separate the big football dogs from the rest of the pack.
My one stab at analysis is that the money runs out between the Big 12 and the Big East. Several of the Big East and below schools do not have twenty sports and do not fully fund the sports they do have.
Definitely interesting, although I guess the standings would seem pretty irrelevant to conferences full of schools without twenty sports.
Now the rest of the Big 10 has to try to catch up to Michigan's #5 ranking (looking at you #55 Indiana).
I don't want the rest of the conference to catch up. That would have to involve us going down. The conference can't have 11 winning programs in each sport.
have 20 sports either. KU has 16, OkSt has 16 also. ISU only has 14. not sure about the funding level each sport operates at.
the pac ten suffers from WSU and ASU and the oregon schools, but the Cal schools are usually very competitive in most sports. IOW, they (the pac10) have a higher STD DEV than the B10, i imagine.
It's interesting to note that schools at the top of the Directors Cup rankings are disproportionately very good academically.
The following is a list of all the schools who have finished in the top 5 over the past 5 years: Stanford (5x), UCLA (4x), Michigan (4x), Texas (3x), UNC(3x), Florida (2x), USC (2x), Arizona State (1x) and Duke (1x).
While I'm not generally a fan of the US News and World Report's college rankings, I'm not above employing them to make a point. It's absolutely remarkable that every school on that list lands in the USNWR top 50, with one exception (Arizona State, which in the course of my research I was horrified to learn accepts 94.9% of applicants!)
Keep in mind, as the commercials say, that most of these athletes, especially once you get to the 4th to 20th most popular sports, "will be going pro in something other than athletics."
In other words, it's not that the big schools know how to perform athletically, it's that the big athletes choose to take advantage of the scholarship offers to the schools that will give them the best degrees.
huge acceptance rate is a result of a philosophical decision there to try to reinvent the way University education works. Remember (way) back in the day, when the University of Michigan advertised the "uncommon education for the common man?" ASU has taken that to heart - their goal is to have an undergrad class of 100,000 but to still be ranked very highly academically. I wish them luck.
(More can be found here)
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