Like many college basketball fans these days, Chris Chase thinks that Mike Krzyzewski is evil. Unlike most of the other frothing haters though, Chris has the common sense to see that Coach K is a hell of a good coach. Chris even had the integrity to publicly admit it. If you haven’t seen his blog before, give it a read. He’s damn funny.
NCAA stats
When I watch the NCAA tourney, I’m always keenly aware of how the various conferences are doing. Maybe it’s because my team, Virginia, hasn’t been a consistent contender for a long time, but I root hard for all the ACC teams. I generally pull for teams from the other conferences to lose, even if it upsets my pool picks.
When I’m trying to get a guage on which conference is having the best year, I use two measures. The first is very simple – total wins. It’s the number of teams your conference has sent home. Teams that lose in the first round have no bearing on this value. The other measure is slightly more complicated and does take into account the total number of teams in the tournament. I multiply the number of bids received by the overall win percentage of the conference. That way, you get credit for having many teams, even if several lose in the first round.
Looking back on the past 15 years, you’ll see that the ACC led in wins five times, including this year. The ACC led in Ratio six times. The SEC, Big 10 and Pac 10 all led in wins three times. The Big 10 led in Ratio four times.
In those 15 years, only once, in 2003, was the ACC clearly the weakest power conference.
The ACC never once had a record of less than .500 (and was .500 only once).
The Pac 10’s performance this year, only three bids and one win, is the worst of any major conference in the past 15 years. The next closest was the Big 10’s nightmare of 1995 when they got six teams in, but only won one game.
Here is a chart (big thanks to Charlie Board and his awesome site) of all the results by conference since 1990. The leader in wins and ratio for each year is bolded. You’ll probably want to set your browser to full screen to see this, as it’s pretty wide.