RE: What is a mid-major?
Caltex, you're making this way more complicated than it is. I did the numbers on Final Fours and Sweet Sixteens, as we gear up to debate and spread the word on the C-7+ as an "elite conference" in basketball, and I looked at the numbers of tournament bids.
And the numbers line up pretty well with most people's crude guesses of power conferences, top midmajor leagues and one-bid leagues.
Using the new lineups and going back 10 years, the ACC has 4 national championships and 9 Final Fours. The SEC has 3 national championships and 5 Final Fours. The New Big East has 2 national championships and 4 Final Fours. The Big 10 and C-7 Plus each have six Final Fours, and the PAC has 3. Outside those conferences, George Mason is the only Final Four team in the last 10 years.
Counting Sweet Sixteens, the new ACC has 33, the Big 12 has 23, Big 10 has 22, C7 Plus has 19, SEC has 18, NBE has 9. Everyone else put together has 11.
If you count Sweet Sixteens by leagues-at-the-time, the A-10 had 7 (Xavier x5, St Joes '04, Richmond '11), C-USA had 5 (Memphis x 4, UAB '04), the Mountain West, Missouri Valley and Horizon had 4 each (SDSU '11, BYU '11, UNLV '07, Utah '05, Bradley '06, Wichita State 06, Southern Illinois '07, Northern Iowa '10, Butler x 3, Milwaukee '05), the West Coast Conference had 3 (Gonzaga x2, St Marys '10) and the CAA had 2 (Mason '06, VCU '11).
That lines up pretty good with the crude guess of the Mountain West, A-10 and Missouri Valley as top mid-majors, C-USA and Horizon as one-bid leagues with a power program, the West Coast Conference and CAA as somewhere between one-bid leagues and top mid-majors. (Great, now I'm splitting things into un-necessary tiers.)
I also looked up tournament bids since the last big realignment in 2005. The Big East averaged 8.14 bids a year, the other BCS conferences from 4.14(PAC) to 5.85(Big 10). And again, we have the A-10 (20 bids, 2.85 per) , Missouri Valley (15, 2.14) and Mountain West (16, 2.29) at 2 bids per year, the A-10 just under 3.
The rest:
WCC 12, 1.71
CAA 11, 1.57 (lost VCU)
C-USA 11, 1.57 (lost Memphis)
WAC 10, 1.43 (lost everybody)
Horizon 9, 1.29 (lost Butler)
Sun Belt 8, 1.14
MAAC 8, 1.14
(This post was last modified: 12-26-2012 12:57 AM by johnbragg.)
|