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There's a big argument going on these days about which major conference is the best. Out of the BCS conferences, it's come down to only two leagues having a legitimate argument. The others played themselves out of contention:
- The ACC faltered early on, with pre-season favorite Clemson falling to Alabama, and Virginia Tech losing to East Carolina
- The Pac-10 was the next bust in week three, losing a slew of games to the Mountain West, punctuated by UCLA's 59-0 loss to BYU
- The Big Ten was dismissed from the discussion early as well, with traditional powers Michigan (lost to Utah, Notre Dame) and Ohio State (35-3 losers to USC) flopping
- The Big East had strong teams in 2006 (West Virginia, Louisville, Rutgers) and 2007 (West Virginia, South Florida, Cincinnati) but no league team is undefeated this year, the Mountaineers having lost twice.
Some of the main arguments for the SEC or Big 12 can be found in this point/counterpoint discussion (which happens to cite my adjusted scoring offense and defense ratings). Some of the arguments for the SEC are:
- The SEC has won more championships recently
- The SEC has fewer bad teams than the Big 12
- The SEC plays good defense, the Big 12 doesn't
For the Big 12, some arguments are:
- The Big 12 is much better at the very top
- The SEC in fact does have some poor teams
- The SEC schedules easy non-conference games
All of this begs the question, how should two conferences be compared? The ESPN article mentions Jeff Sagarin's ratings, and he (Sagarin) uses a couple of methods to compare conferences: average strength and average strength weighted toward the middle teams. Both are attempts to give top-to-bottom comparisons among conferences which might not have the same number of teams.
The method I use is to create hypothetical matchups between all the teams. Each team in Conference A "plays" each in Conference B and the aggregate records are added up. This way a conference like the Big East can be compared to a 12-team league. I use score-margin-based ratings for the comparisons since in win/loss rating systems games between members of the same conference can change the results, which is not what we want. For the 2007 season using this method the SEC was the #1 conference in college football.
With two conferences who have the same number of teams, it's even easier: just rank the teams in order, add up the ranking positions, and see who has the lower value. Here's a list, built from my Strength power rating (which uses margin of victory) for all 727 teams. Their rank among the 24 teams in the combined SEC/Big 12 is the first value; their rank among all 727 teams follows, and their hypothetical "record" against all 12 teams from the opposing conference is last. Big 12 teams are in red, SEC teams in blue.
# rnk Team rec Strength "record"
1. 2 Oklahoma 5-0 81.17 12-0
2. 4 Texas 5-0 79.11 12-0
3. 5 Missouri 5-0 78.95 12-0
4. 6 Florida 4-1 71.58 9-3
5. 8 Texas Tech 5-0 67.50 11-1
6. 10 Alabama 6-0 66.90 8-4
7. 13 Oklahoma St 5-0 65.76 10-2
8. 14 Georgia 4-1 65.11 7-5
9. 25 Kentucky 4-1 61.49 7-5
10. 27 Kansas 4-1 60.96 8-4
11. 31 Vanderbilt 5-0 59.01 6-6
12. 37 LSU 4-0 57.11 6-6
13. 39 Nebraska 3-2 56.90 6-6
14. 42 Mississippi 3-3 55.55 5-7
15. 43 South Carolina 4-2 55.23 5-7
16. 49 Auburn 4-2 53.82 5-7
17. 51 Kansas St 3-2 52.12 3-9
18. 52 Iowa St 2-3 51.72 3-9
19. 61 Tennessee 2-3 50.33 3-9
20. 64 Baylor 2-3 48.48 2-10
21. 70 Colorado 3-2 47.62 2-10
22. 93 Mississippi St 1-4 42.52 1-11
23. 95 Texas A&M 2-3 41.22 1-11
24. 135 Arkansas 2-3 34.29 0-12
Totals:
140 430 Big 12 731.51 82-62
160 546 SEC 672.94 62-82
Using these numbers the Big 12 comes out slightly ahead top-to-bottom. Of course the results are completely dependent on the rankings you use; using Sagarin's ranking the result might be closer, or different. Using Sagarin's Predictor would probably yield fairly similar results (but note that Predictor still uses some weight from last season).
Adding up the simple rankings (1-24) gives the Big 12 140 points, 20 better than the SEC's 160. Though each conference has six teams in the top half, the Big 12 currently has the three best teams. It's early in the season so this may change as more games are played.
Adding up the rankings within the entire college football world puts more weight on the poor teams. Arkansas causes a lot of pain for the SEC here, as they are 40 slots below even Texas A&M. The Big 12 wins this one 430 to 546 (average ranking 36th to SEC's 46th). Take Arkansas out of the picture and the two leagues are roughly tied. But the point of this exercise is that every team from the conference is included, no excuses for bad members.
The third comparison gives a lot of weight to the upper and lower teams by adding the Strength power rating for each team. The Big 12 wins here 731.5 to 672.9. According to this measure, the average Big 12 team should beat the average SEC team by 4.88 points.
And the last comparison is the head-to-head hypothetical figures. With the Big 12 having the top three teams, it's easy to see where this is leading. The Big 12 wins round robin competition, 82 to 62,
So far, thanks to their five undefeated teams ranking so high in margin-of-victory style power ratings, the Big 12 looks like the conference to beat. The season isn't even half way over yet, and there are more inter-conference matchups here and there. Plus, even intra-conference matchups will move the teams around in the overall rankings, which will change the hypothetical win-loss values. So really we don't know which conference is the best. For now the Big 12 looks hard to beat, even if Sagarin actually has them ranked third right now!
The Mountain West is another interesting conference, and I may look at all the BCS conferences with them in the mix as well, once we get a little further into the season.
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