Measuring Conference Strength: Bill Simmons is Wrong About the Pac-10

I am not a Bill Simmons hater. The guy has some excellent observations about the NBA. He knows a lot about professional basketball in the United States and can be sometimes clever with his writing, and uses his own platform shrewdly. I admire that. 

When push comes to shove, I would actually describe myself as a Bill Simmons hater hater. And yes, you read that last sentence correctly.

This time of year, however, Simmons begins spouting nonsense about college basketball because he watches four NCAA tournament games and it makes my blood boil. 

Please, Mr. Simmons, when it comes to writing about college basketball: Click on the little “X” in the right-hand corner of the window you’re working on and put the laptop away. The blathering must stop.

Simmons’ latest blog entry includes the following gem:

The biggest tournament shocker for me: The "powerful" Pac-10 failing to live up to the hype, keeping just three teams alive in the first round and then having two of those teams nearly get toppled in the second round. (By the way, count me among those who thought the Pac-10 was better than every other conference. The lesson, as always ... well, you knew already.)

It is the quotation marks around powerful with which I take exception.

The Pacific-10 was powerful, Bill, you just didn’t spend enough time thinking about what the heck you were writing. The Pac-10 placed three teams in the Sweet 16: Tied for the best in the land. 

What do you mean “powerful”?

Now, I must warn you: What follows is a statistical breakdown of the conferences. If numbers with decimal places make your knees tremble, I implore to turn around now.  This could get ugly.

First, I would like to place my biases on the table. I reside and pull for ACC teams. This may sway my analysis somewhat, but I hope it does not.

I base this analysis on kenpom.com’s Pythagorean Winning Percentage (PWP), a weighted average of offensive and defensive efficiency.

The easiest and most straightforward way to do this is to average the PWP for the entire conference and to see where that pits us.

Average PWP By Conference
Rank	Conference	Avg PWP
1	B12	0.885
2	P10	0.874
3	ACC	0.873
4	SEC	0.843
5	BE	0.836
6	B10	0.828
7	MVC	0.722
8	A10	0.704
9	MWC	0.672
10	CUSA	0.629

This table is especially illuminating, given the dearth of folks out there picketing for the Big 12 to be named basketball’s best conference. It also appears to give credence to Mr. Simmons’ comment about the Pac-10. It says a lot about the strength of Kansas and Texas that they were able to survive such an outstanding conference.

However, let’s think about this further, the Pac-10 contains Oregon State. OSU is quite possibly the worst team in any major conference. 

They have a PWP of 0.353, good for 199th in the country. One strong or weak team does not a conference make. You wouldn’t say Conference USA was a strong conference just because Memphis was in it, would you?

If we drop the best and worst teams from each conference and then continue with the analysis, we have:

Average PWP By Conference Best/Worst Team Dropped
Rank	Conference	Avg PWP
1	P10	0.926
2	B12	0.890
3	ACC	0.875
4	SEC	0.850
5	BE	0.850
6	B10	0.846
7	MVC	0.743
8	A10	0.711
9	MWC	0.694
10	CUSA	0.642

Holy cow!  Look at the difference between the Pac-10 and the Big 12.  What a gap!

The strength of Washington St., Stanford, USC, and Arizona (plus some other quality lower-tier teams) really buoys Pac-10 to the top of the list, making them clearly the top conference this past year.

Listen, Bill, just because your Final Four team, USC, didn’t make it because they were matched up against a woefully under-seeded Big 12 (there it is again!) team in Kansas St. doesn’t mean you have the right to go dumping on the entire conference.

(All stats courtesy of kenpom.com)