Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Best Conference? The Envelope Please!

How did you spend your summer? Stewart Mandel of SI.com decided to settle the "Who's conference is the best?" debate, sitting down with two interns and crunching numbers.

Each of the six Bowl Championship Series conferences was ranked against the others using five categories: BCS bowl record, percentage of teams in the final Associated Press poll, nonconference performance (as measured by the RPI formula used for basketball), record in other bowl games and NFL draft picks per teams. Data from the 10 years of the BCS was used for the study, and it was divided into two five-year chunks to help examine how the pecking order had changed after the Atlantic Coast Conference's raid on the Big East.

Six points were awarded for first place, five points for second and so on. The BCS and top 25 categories weighted doubly.

The winner for the past five years? The Southeastern Conference, which amassed 40 out of a possible 42 points. The Pacific 10 was second, with the almighty Big Ten finishing fourth, trailing the ACC. The Big 12 was fifth and Big East sixth.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nobody sucks at writing about college football more that Stewie Mandel. A hack's hack.

Anonymous said...

wow!! you are obviously a big televen fan first anon!!

your conference is horrible and hasnt been worth a hoot since tv was in black and white!!

Anonymous said...

Hey anon #2, if you read the article at all (or looked at the pretty pictures, depending on your intelligence level) you would see that from 1998-2003 the Big Ten was the best conference of the major 6. I dont know about you, but I had a color TV at that point.