On the Big 12’s Poor Tournament Performance and Best Conference Proclamations
Posted by Chris Stone on April 10th, 2015The Big 12’s season ended in disappointing fashion in the 2015 NCAA Tournament. No team from the conference made the Elite Eight, and only two, Oklahoma and West Virginia, earned a spot in the Sweet Sixteen. The league lost a pair of its highest-seeded teams, Baylor and Iowa State, to massive upsets in the Round of 64 while regular season champion Kansas fell to intrastate foe Wichita State shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, this type of performance has become a somewhat common occurrence for the league. The Big 12 hasn’t produced a single Elite Eight team since 2012, and Kansas was the last Big 12 team to make the Final Four. Even more disturbing, the Jayhawks are also the only program in the league to make the Final Four since 2004 when Oklahoma State pushed through to the final weekend.
Daxter Miles Jr. became the face of the Big 12’s failure after his guarantee to beat Kentucky. (Getty)
The string of failures has become a key talking point among the media. Sam Mellinger of The Kansas City Star called this season “a colossal failure,” while noting that, “if [the Big 12] happens to be first or second or even third in the RPI rankings next year it will be greeted with more mockery than respect.” Meanwhile, David Ubben of Fox Sports Southwest argued, “the Big 12 can say goodbye to its reputation as college basketball’s best league this season.” This is the problem college basketball runs into when using March Madness to determine its champion. The ACC opened the NCAA Tournament with an 11-1 record during the first weekend, but it was just a few possessions away from losing two of its top teams, North Carolina and Notre Dame, in the Round of 64. There is a lot of randomness to the tourney — which is what makes the spectacle so exciting — but it also makes it difficult to draw broad season-long conclusions about who the best teams (and leagues) in the country actually are.
We don’t like to admit that luck is a part of basketball (and life). It’s much easier when we can put trust in the results, simply accepting that if one team defeats another then the victor is the better team. In truth, individual games (even head-to-head) are pretty bad proxies for determining the best team. There are too many other variables at play. Is UCLA better than SMU because an official botched a goaltending call? Did a last second hook shot that bounced around the rim for a couple seconds prove North Carolina State was better than LSU? Was Duke really better than Utah or did Delon Wright’s improbable foul trouble contribute to the Blue Devils’ victory? Officials make mistakes; good shots rim out and bad shots drop; and foul trouble (sometimes warranted; other times not) can decide individual games. That’s what makes them both an exciting and terrible metric. There’s too much variance involved.
By nearly all available statistical metrics, the Big 12 was the top conference in the country this season. The league ranked first in Ken Pomeroy’s ratings based on offensive and defensive efficiency. In Jeff Sagarin metrics — one that emphasizes the teams in the middle of the conference; one that weights all teams equally; and one that identifies the Sagarin rating necessary to achieve a 50 percent win rate in the conference — the Big 12 ranked first in all three categories. Sure, the league has had a bad run in the NCAA Tournament over the past few seasons, but it should be clear that it alone is a poor metric for measuring the relative strength of a league. Yes, teams receive additional monetary compensation for going deep in the Tournament, and yes, March Madness is how we determine our game’s champion. But, single elimination tournaments are so exciting by virtue of the incredible amount of luck it takes to do well in one. If we’re willing to step back and look at the bigger picture, it’s easier to recognize the impressive season-long performance of the Big 12 without calling it “a colossal failure.”
Chris Stone is a contributor to the Big 12 microsite. You can find him on Twitter @cstonehoops.
You make great points here. The Big 12 was unlucky in the NCAA 1st Round and conversely the ACC was very fortunate to win all its nail biters. There really is no definitive way to claim Best Conference when this happens. Postseason isn’t everything but it does matter. I would also argue that all rating systems for conferences are set in stone Dec 29th and that’s not totally relevant either. Teams certainly change after that point but conference ratings can’t capture that. We all assumed when KSt beat the Big 12 elites it meant KSt was good. Maybe it really meant the top of the league wasn’t. Who knows?