Best Conference, from top to bottom

huKSer

huKSer

New member
Last year's results. Calculate each of the 5 power conferences win percent for the year, then removed the top 2 teams by record, and recalculated the new win percent. The most balanced conference will have the smallest win % drop.

SEC: total win % was 62% - adjusted win % was 57% = - 5%

B1G: total win % was 58% - adjusted win % was 54%= - 4%

Big 12: total win % was 55% - adjusted win % was 47% = - 8%

PAC 14: total win % was 59% - adjusted win % was 54% = - 5%

ACC: total win % was 57% - adjusted win % was 51% = - 6%

SEC had the best overall win %, and adjusted win % was about the same as other conferences adjusted win %. However, B1G had the lowest drop of 4%, which shows that B1G is the most balanced.

Maybe I will drop FCS teams and see what happens.

 
Bear in mind that total wins/losses for conference games are always going to be 50%. So if you just look at non-con games and remove FCS, the sample sizes are going to be much smaller.

 
BrayWyatt said:
The bowl records seem to represent the conferences pretty well.

2013 BOWL RECORDS

CONFERENCE W L PCT.

Sun Belt 2 0 1.000

Southeastern 7 3 .700

Pac-12 6 3 .667

Independents 2 1 .667

Big 12 3 3 .500

C-USA 3 3 .500

Mountain West 3 3 .500

Atlantic Coast 5 6 .454

American 2 3 .400

Big Ten 2 5 .286

Mid-American 0 5 .000

http://m.espn.go.com/general/blogs/blogpost?blogname=pac12&id=67862&src=desktop
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I don't put too much into bowl records. The strength of each conference's bowl opponents varies quite a bit and there are a lot of things that can happen between the end of the regular season and a bowl game - not the least of which is a coaching change.

 
Every conference has it's cellar dwellers, but who has the worst teams, and which conference has the strongest teams amongst the worst, are at least the fewest of the most miserable (if that sentence makes sense)? I kind of reasoned that a conference with a bunch of teams that were lowly ranked could not be considered the strongest top to bottom, so I wanted to see where the bottom feeders were ranked.

I used Sagarin's power rankings, just because. http://www.usatoday.com/sports/ncaaf/sagarin/

The worst team among the big five conferences, by far, was Purdue (#157). Here are the list of teams ranked #50 or lower by Sagarin at the end of the season among the big five (I don't know how he ranks them this way, but I don't really care either, Nebraska was #38 btw):

157. Purdue (Big Ten)

119. Kansas (Big XII)

118. Cal (PAC 12)

113. NC State (ACC)

106. Virginia (ACC)

104. Kentucky (SEC)

86. Wake Forest (ACC)

77. Arkansas (SEC)

76. Illinois (Big Ten)

75. Colorado (PAC 12)

74. West Virginia (Big XII)

73. Maryland (ACC)

72. Iowa State (Big XII)

65. Northwestern (Big Ten)

64. Boston College (ACC)

62. Syracuse (ACC)

60. Tennessee (SEC)

58. Minnesota (Big Ten)

57. Indiana (Big Ten)

53. Florida (SEC)

52. Penn St (Big Ten)

The number of teams on this list:

PAC 12: 2

Big XII: 3

SEC: 4

Big Ten: 6, including the very worst

ACC: 6

So the PAC 12 has the least number of the truly horrible teams, if you put any stock into Sagarin. In addition, to compare the worst teams to the better teams, here are the number of teams in each conference with at least 10 wins last season:

PAC 12: 5

SEC: 5

Big XII: 3

ACC: 3

Big Ten: 2

My conclusion from all this is that the PAC 12 was the best conference from top to bottom last year, with the highest number of really good teams and the lowest number of really bad ones. The Big Ten was easily the worst of the major conferences last year.

 
BrayWyatt said:
Why the top 2? Why not remove the top and bottom team and calculate the remainder.
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Conferences are looked at, fairly or not, by their top team performances. I picked two because many have 2 divisions. And many people say "Its tough to win the SEC because of ALL of their teams are tough.

Utly wrote

Bear in mind that total wins/losses for conference games are always going to be 50%. So if you just look at non-con games and remove FCS, the sample sizes are going to be much smaller.
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I was looking if the top teams have less than 2 loses, or like baseball, a team over 0.600 is a powerhouse. That is the top teams losing multiple games and surviving a slug fest.

 
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