UK Wildcat Country

Ranking conferences in the NCAA is about as accurate a practice as playing darts underwater. How someone can explain away all the fuss of the “Big” East while their national tourney record looks like the Devil’s Baby Doll beats the beast out of me. In actuality, it is the SEC that has the highest tournament winning percentage of the recent past, yet always seem to run the back of the pack when it comes to ranking the major conferences in college basketball.

We think we have it down to some lawful science based on RPI, pre-season expectations, and what divine appointment the elders apply to the messy slush. And if you are a subscriber to that junk, please read on. Explain to me how Louisville needs a late game bow-your-head to knock off a Kentucky team - who have lost to four of their last six SEC opponents - and then goes on to cruise through a heavy early season B.E. schedule. VMI beats Kentucky like a drum, Louisville slips by them, and therefore VMI would hand it to Louisville only slightly less than that of Kentucky?

Sounds like misapplied logic, right? Right. It’s the same thing that happens when you try to use conferences to decide how good a squad is, only on a much more grand and ridiculous scale. So let’s take a group of 12, have them play each other over and over and then compare them to another group of 12 that have never or rarely mixed play. Or how about we take two of the worst teams of one conference, have them play two of the better teams of another, and force a head-to-head record of 0-2 (or 2-0) and use that to say that conference is better than this one. How about this: let’s look at the top 8 teams in a conference of 16 and compare them to the top 8 of a conference of 10 and decide that the bottom two of those 8 are very different. We’ll then conclude that the conference of 16 is obviously better than the conference of 10.

This all sounds really stupid, difficult to follow, and trivial, right? Right. That’s what it is; that’s what is happening, and that’s what the talking heads talk their heads off about. A talking head may point to LSU as an example in order to discount the SEC as a whole. Looking at their OOC schedule, they dominated a load of pansies, suffered a double-digit loss to a mediocre Texas A&M, were destroyed by Utah, and lost to Xavier by 10 in a chance to legitimize anything they had done or would do. The Tigers have since gone on to destroy the SEC, going 10-1 as of today. That says a horrible team on the national scene is the best team in the SEC, therefore the SEC is horrible. Aren’t facts great?

The dark side of facts is that they can be used to “prove” just about anything when it comes to sports.

Now throw a glance Arkansas’ way. Arkansas took care of Oklahoma and Texas in the weeks leading up to conference play with a total OOC record of 12-1. Since then the Hogs have posted a league worst (tied with UGA) 1-11 conference record. So a real good team on the national scene comes into the SEC and gets destroyed in eighty different unheard of immoral ways. Therefore, the SEC must be pretty awesome!

These things don’t match up, right? RIGHT! It’s called parity folks (or the difference therein, do yourself a favor and look that misused word up), and it calls college basketball “home.” This fact of the matter renders rankings of all kinds just about useless. Conference play then renders these things all the more futile. Statistics will tell you that it takes a sample size of about 30 to successfully represent a population over 100. With a league of 343 or so teams, and the biggest conference only holding 16 of them, what does conference play inform us of? It tells us how to rank the teams within that conference. Very useful, but what does this then tell us about how to rank teams on the national scene? Absolutely nothing. There are too many teams and not enough games played to properly rank them.

Too many teams play division 2, or NAIA, or division B, or non-NCAA tournament subdivision teams (whatever it is) to allow anyone to determine who stands where. Standings are accurate; rankings are not. You can rank a conference; you can not rank the League of Extraordinarily Too Many Members. Seeding a conference tournament is relatively easy even if there weren’t rules for doing so. Seeding the NCAA tourney is impossible to even remotely be accurate at. In fact, there is no such thing as accurate here. There are too many teams that haven’t played each other, and if they have they are a completely different team than they were when they played half a year ago. Too many teams.

The Big East is not the best conference. The ACC may or may not be. The SEC isn’t the worst. I’m not saying anyone’s wrong; I’m saying they CAN NOT be right. I’m not saying the Big East is not the best conference, I’m saying they CAN NOT be. I’m not saying conference RPI has it wrong, I’m saying that THERE IS NO RIGHT. It’s not a broken system; it’s just that there is NO SYSTEM at all. The statistics everyone holds so near and dear say it’s ridiculously improbable. What is it then? Just the opinion of some talking head. 

And what do I think? Too many teams. But, of course, who am I? Just a typing hand.