I’ve written a lot about this the last couple weeks, so if you’re a regular reader, this isn’t entirely new. Ken Pomeroy wrote a Substack post on March 4th saying the SEC is probably overrated. It’s a worthwhile read. The part I found most significant was not about the SEC in particular. It was about all conferences. Pomeroy wrote about how because algorithms like his don’t get much inter-conference data after New Year’s, they can overrate and underrate conferences as a whole by the end of the year. A conference where a lot of teams get better as the season goes on? That conference will be underrated. A conference where a lot of teams get worse? That one will be overrated.
In an effort to track this, I’ve been following how teams from different conferences are performing against the kenpom spread over postseason play. We’ll revisit this later, when the sample isn’t so outrageously tiny. For now, though, the conferences with more than one NCAA Tournament and NIT game played, and how they’re stacking up:
| Conference | Spread W’s | Spread L’s | per game pt. diff. vs. spread |
| WCC | 2 | 0 | 14.50 |
| CUSA | 2 | 1 | 7.67 |
| ACC | 2.5 | 1.5 | 3.25 |
| MVC | 1.5 | 0.5 | 2.00 |
| SoCon | 1 | 2 | -1.00 |
| American | 1 | 3 | -1.75 |
| A-10 | 3 | 3 | -6.50 |
| Big West | 1 | 2 | -12.00 |
| MWC | 0 | 2 | -13.50 |
Again, this is all a really small sample. Most of the WCC/Big West gap comes from Santa Clara pummeling UC Riverside. The SoCon is heavily affected by Samford, a team whose players went on spring break not expecting to play in the NIT.
Still, it’s interesting to see the Mountain West at the bottom, given narratives. That’s mostly San Diego State—which could be a UNC thing—but San Jose State didn’t help the cause against Loyola. It’s also interesting to see the ACC above zero. It would track with some perceptions from last year, and Pomeroy did write in that original piece about power conference talent levels being closer to one another than we might believe.
Not a lot of other thoughts on last night. Billy Lange should have challenged that out-of-bounds play. Texas has handled its men’s basketball program bizarrely, even given the hand Chris Beard dealt them. It’s fun to see teams make shots. Are they making more? That’s something to watch today. Maybe they got the ball figured out. Mark Titus had some good insight this week on that front.
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