Make no mistake about it, March is the best month of the year and it’s because of college basketball. With conference tournaments, then the NCAA Tournament and NIT (and we can’t leave out the College Basketball Invitational or Collegeinsider.com Postseason Tournament), it doesn’t get any better. But there’s also something really annoying that happens at this time of the year, and this time around it’s a little magnified.
Once the NCAA Tournament field is revealed, everyone starts coming out with their favorite metrics to judge conferences against one another. It’s gotten to the point of absurdity, not to mention these metrics don’t really tell the whole story and people will also change up if someone challenges them on it. In fact, this activity really just serves as a reminder that you can “prove” anything with statistics.
This year, there’s been a great deal of hyperbole about the Big East. Since before practice started, everyone was proclaiming it as the best conference ever, a group of world-beaters the likes of which we’ll never see again. From the beginning, many wondered if it could place nine or ten teams in the NCAA Tournament, an absurd idea considering that every game has a losing team and teams have to win games to reach the NCAA Tournament. This has continued throughout the season, with everyone proclaiming it as the best conference as if it isn’t up for debate, and on Selection Sunday it happened more. That’s magnified the ridiculousness of all of these metrics.
Let’s take a look at some of them, starting with the most absurd one I’ve come across. One person I know said that the Big East getting three of the top four seeds proves that it was the best conference – even saying it was “hands down” the best conference. But does that metric really tell us that? It is quite possible that a top-heavy conference with a few great teams that had great non-conference wins could see this happen. So let’s not go around thinking this proves much.
The most popular metric, the number of teams from a conference in the NCAA Tournament, doesn’t help those engaging in Big East hyperbole, either. The Big East got seven teams in the NCAA Tournament, which evens it with the ACC and the Big Ten. Most will acknowledge that the ACC – which finished No. 1 in conference RPI – is in the neighborhood of the Big East, although they probably won’t say it’s better. I’m guessing just about no one except the most ardent Big Ten fans will say that the Big Ten is as good as the Big East this year. But if we go by this metric, it is.
That’s just one more reason I find this to be a flawed metric, and one I’ve never really been a fan of in the first place because it can also show just how top-heavy a conference is. A couple of years ago, just how flawed it is was driven home during a conversation with Missouri Valley Conference commissioner Doug Elgin.
In 2007, a year after four Valley teams reached the NCAA Tournament, with Bradley and Wichita State each reaching the Sweet 16, the Valley had just two teams reach the NCAA Tournament and two more in the NIT after sweating it out on the bubble. Yet anyone who saw action in the conference that year could tell you it was a better conference than a year earlier, especially since the teams that were in the bottom four were all better than they were a year ago. Last-place Indiana State had a win over Butler during the season.
In talking about it, Elgin said he wasn’t sure the Valley in 2006-07 had four teams as strong as the four they had in 2005-06, even though as a whole the conference was better. It’s tough to compare a conference in two different seasons, but the gist of what Elgin said has a lot of merit, and he later said that measuring a conference by how many teams get in the NCAA Tournament isn’t necessarily the best metric.
Some will also add in the other postseason tournaments to measure conferences. This is a little better metric, considering it might show one conference to be top-heavy and another to be deeper. The Big East has 12 teams in the NCAA or NIT; the ACC has nine. Each is sending three-quarters of its teams to those two tournaments, so it’s a draw. If you add in St. John’s, with a sub-.500 record, going to the College Basketball Invitational, the Big East gets a slim edge.
Lastly, some will go by competitiveness and claim the Big East is the best, even repeating the words of coaches who so often say, “there’s not a night off in this league”. That’s another area where the Big East certainly doesn’t win hands down; at best it’s a draw. The ACC didn’t have a team go winless in conference play like the Big East did; in fact, Georgia Tech’s two ACC wins match the two Big East wins Rutgers got as the next-to-last team. Sure, DePaul won a game in the Big East Tournament after going 0-18 – but Georgia Tech won a game in the ACC Tournament as well. The ACC regular season champion had three ACC losses; the Big East regular season champion had two Big East losses.
All of this insanity is annoying, but that’s not the worst of it. In another week, then a week later, all of these same people will then change up and measure the conferences by how many teams advance to the Sweet 16 or Final Four. Never mind, of course, that it doesn’t prove anything. Remember, you can “prove” anything with statistics, after all.
And never mind, in all of this, that the NCAA Tournament selection committee doesn’t bring conference affiliation into play.
So let’s stop with the flawed metrics and do something better: enjoy the great basketball still to be played. There’s already been plenty of it thus far.
