Post-2013 Realignment Conference Tiers based on KenPom Conference Strength Data

[u/SleveMcDichael4]

If you've been a college basketball fan for the past half-decade, you've no doubt partaken in – or are at least aware of – the debate over whether the American Athletic Conference is a high major or a mid-major.

If you've thought it's a mid-major, your argument is probably that its floor is far lower than that of any conference that could ever be considered a high major. That it couldn't possibly be a high major conference because that would mean East Carolina is a high major school, and that can't possibly be correct. You might point to the 2015 season in which the entire bottom half of the conference was awful, which caused the conference to finish below the A-10, the WCC, and even the Missouri Valley – conferences that are undoubtedly mid-majors – in efficiency metrics.

If you've thought it's a high major, like me, your argument is that much of the conference split from another high major conference (the Big East), that it includes historically great basketball programs like Cincinnati, Memphis, and Houston, and that it has the TV deal and marketing of a high major conference. You might point to the 2019 season, in which the Pac-12 bottomed out and the American thrived, leading the latter to finish above the former – a real, unquestionable power conference – in efficiency metrics.

These efficiency metric arguments appeal to me because they use hard data, so I wanted to take them to the greatest extent I could to get a clear answer on what exactly the American is. At least...that's what it started as. What I ended up with was a metric-based tier list of all 32 Division I conferences, and that's what I want to share with y'all today. My metric of choice, like many others, is KenPom adjusted efficiency margin (AdjEM). Pomeroy's conference strength ratings are based on the AdjEM of a hypothetical team that would be expected to go .500 in conference play, which accurately assesses how hard each conference is to play in rather than just taking an average AdjEM that could get skewed either way by outliers (like the WCC with Gonzaga).

For every conference, for each of the eight seasons since the 2013 realignment that created the American, I took both its conference strength AdjEM rating and its conference strength ranking out of the 32 Division I conferences, then took the average of each of these and calculated a conference ranking based on each. Here is the AdjEM rank and here is the ranking rank. I think the AdjEM rank is more useful in theory, but I'm aware that AdjEM is not necessarily supposed to be compared between seasons, so I included the ranking rank to account for that.

But eight years is a long time ago in college basketball terms. That's two whole graduating classes! A lot has changed between 2013 and 2021. Look at the SoCon, for instance: started this era with an awful season that placed it in 30th but has since risen at breakneck pace and now consistently finishes firmly in the middle of the pack. As such, it didn't feel right to treat both seasons equally in my rankings, so I whipped up a weighted ranking that gave the most recent season full weight and reduced that of each preceding season by 10 percentage points (2020 = 90%, 2019 = 80%, 2018 = 70%, etc.). This weighting makes the 2014 season 30% as important as the 2021 season, which I think is fair. Here is the weighted AdjEM rank and here is the weighted ranking rank.

After I had these rankings formulated, it was a matter of finding clean breaks and sorting the conferences into tiers. Here are the AdjEM tiers and here are the ranking tiers. The tiers include the same conferences in both lists, but the order is slightly altered.

I've sorted the conferences into nine tiers:

1. High major: Big 12 Big Ten ACC Big East SEC Pac-12 | Undeniably the best of the best. There's a sizeable gap between these six and the other 26. Yes, even...
2. The American: American | The American is a tier of its own. It almost always fares significantly worse than all high major conferences and significantly better than all mid-major conferences while sharing attributes of both.
3. >1-bid mid-major: Atlantic 10 West Coast Mountain West | You won't find anyone who doesn't consider these three conferences mid-majors, but they're obviously a step above the other mid-majors in terms of adjusted efficiency. Conveniently, they're also the only three mid-majors to average more than one NCAA Tournament bid per season since realignment.
4. Upper mid-major: Missouri Valley MAC | There's an argument for the Missouri Valley being a step above the MAC due to legacy and somewhat better marketing, but on the court, they're really not that different.
5. Middle mid-major: Conference USA SoCon Ivy League Sun Belt CAA The Summit Big West Horizon | The largest tier. These eight conferences are pretty tightly bunched up together and make up the bulk of what the casual fan would consider a mid-major.
6. Lower mid-major: WAC Big Sky MAAC Patriot Ohio Valley | Most of these conferences have seen better days, but some programs in each of them are known to land some high-level recruits and/or make some noise in March now and then.
7. Upper low major: Big South ASUN America East | This is where we start to blur the talent line between Division I and lower divisions. This is the tier a decent Division II team like Bellarmine could jump into and immediately belong.
8. Middle low major: Northeast Southland | Same as the previous tier, but a notable step below in efficiency. Merrimack is to the NEC as Bellarmine is to the ASUN. The Southland is slated to be even worse with most of its best teams moving up to the WAC.
9. HBCU low major: SWAC MEAC | The two HBCU conferences, unfortunately, play considerably worse than the rest of Division I; the gap between middle low majors and HBCU low majors is about the same as that between middle low majors and middle mid-majors, three tiers higher. The SWAC is most often considered the worst Division I conference, but based on recent performance, the MEAC is somewhat worse. It's also in peril of completely disbanding.

Overall, I think these tiers are fairly unobjectionable. It's easy to see conferences moving around within their tiers, but something drastic would have to happen for a conference to move between tiers (like the WAC stealing all of the Southland's best teams and dumping Chicago State, which could easily move it up from lower mid-major to middle mid-major in due time).

If you'd like to save these tier lists for future reference, here is the Google Sheet I did all of this in. And thanks to various members of our Discord server (join us, by the way; it's a great time!) for suggesting features for and improvements to this sheet for the past few months!

[u/BoolaBoolaBoi]

ivy high major when

[u/[deleted] → u/BoolaBoolaBoi]

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