The Real Prestige Rankings: Introduction and Outline

However, the No. 1 seeded teams have earned the right to have an easier first-round match-up with their regular season success.  The regular season success and match-up difficulty for teams are both taken into account already with the setup of the tournament so it would be repetitive for the Prestige Rankings to score for this as well.

It’s also important to note for smaller conferences teams that even though a first-round win or even just qualifying for the tournament receives a relatively small amount of points, that it still is significant when compared to their peer group of teams (other small conference teams), who would all get zero points for not making the tournament.

As of 2008, there are 341 Men’s Division 1 Basketball teams that compete for the right to play in the NCAA tournament.  272 of these teams have made the NCAA tournament at least once since 1985.  For this reason, I will be breaking up the rankings into eleven different posts (not including this one).

Because there are so many teams that are clearly nowhere near the prestige of the top programs, I will show the rankings within all of the 32 conferences (including the independents as their own conference).  This allows comparisons for the prestige of all of the conferences, similar to ESPN’s rankings.  Each conference is also rated based on the average point total of all its current members.

For overall prestige, I will also show the top 50 teams with details of their tournament successes throughout the past 24 years.

Here is the outline of posts to come (Part 1 will be the next post):

Part 1:  Monday, August 18 – Conferences 28-32, Overall Teams 46-50

Part 2:  Tuesday, August 19 – Conferences 25-27, Overall Teams 41-45

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