Oct 24, 2016
Conference strength is a subjective term that can be measured with objective information. It’s an opinion supported by fact.
From my perspective the strongest conferences have the following traits:
- Their teams beat teams from other conferences. Simple enough, and we track each conference’s winning percentage against the rest of Division III each year in our Conference Guidebook.
- Their best teams beat the best teams from other conferences. The NCAA tournament results provide tidy set of comparative results that we track in the NCAA Guidebook.
- They are competitive, top to bottom. We’re measuring the strength of entire conferences, not just the top teams in each one. The best conferences are hard to win so the eventual champion should suffer some losses along the way. So that means a tougher conference should produce winners with a lower in-conference winning percentage.
Note here that we’re focused on regular season conference winners. Many conferences use a conference tournament to decide their champion and all but the UAA use the conference tournament to decide who gets the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. But, for this purpose, I’m more interested in how a team performs over a full season than which team is playing best in late February.
Numerical measures like these are nice because we can quickly calculate and sort them. But they are admittedly imperfect.
Using the regular season champion’s in-conference winning percentage as a measure of conference parity is an over simplification. It ignores the fact that a conference could have one elite team that romps through the schedule and several other good teams that beat up on each other. NCAA tournament results aren’t perfect because matchups are geographically based in at least the first couple rounds. So conferences like the NESCAC have more opportunities to roll up wins early in the tournament than teams from the CCIW, MIAC or WIAC who end up playing each other in early rounds.
In my opinion, numerical measures – even the more advanced ones -- also don’t tell the full story. Even if you only rely on numbers, you have discretion to decide which ones matter the most and how much more they matter than others. So I quizzed the rest of the gang at D3hoops to get their opinion before making my picks. I’m pretty confident I’ll get more input on how well I did in the comments section and message boards.
Finally I made two adjustments to account for the year-to-year swings in a conference’s performance.g,
I looked at each of the measures described above for the last four seasons to account for a conference’s performance over that period. So I’m ranking the conferences according to their performance from the 2012-13 season through the 2015-16 season – the typical playing career of most Division III athletes who graduated last May.
I also considered how many teams from each conference made the NCAA tournament over the last four years since that’s a measure of a conference’s depth and internal competitiveness.
Numerical measures like these are nice because we can quickly calculate and sort them. But they are admittedly imperfect.
Using the regular season champion’s in-conference winning percentage as a measure of conference parity is an over simplification. It ignores the fact that a conference could have one elite team that romps through the schedule and several other good teams that beat up on each other. NCAA tournament results aren’t perfect because matchups are geographically based in at least the first couple rounds. So conferences like the NESCAC have more opportunities to roll up wins early in the tournament than teams from the CCIW, MIAC or WIAC who end up playing each other in early rounds.
In my opinion, numerical measures – even the more advanced ones -- also don’t tell the full story. Even if you only rely on numbers, you have discretion to decide which ones matter the most and how much more they matter than others. So I quizzed the rest of the gang at D3hoops to get their opinion before making my picks. I’m pretty confident I’ll get more input on how well I did in the comments section and message boards.
Finally I made two adjustments to account for the year-to-year swings in a conference’s performance.g,
I looked at each of the measures described above for the last four seasons to account for a conference’s performance over that period. So I’m ranking the conferences according to their performance from the 2012-13 season through the 2015-16 season – the typical playing career of most Division III athletes who graduated last May.
I also considered how many teams from each conference made the NCAA tournament over the last four years since that’s a measure of a conference’s depth and internal competitiveness.
If you’re still with me, congratulations – you made it to the end of the dry stuff. This isn’t a perfect methodology, but it’s a good place to start for our first attempt at picking the Top 20 conferences in Division III basketball.
Now you can go back to the rankings and tell me what I got wrong.
Now you can go back to the rankings and tell me what I got wrong.