Breakdown of sweet 16

[ProudUte]

For the purpose of this post – I will refer to the Big-East as a “Power Conference”.

Teams making the sweet 16 by conference:

Big10 – 1

ACC – 2

SEC – 2

B12 – 1

Big East – 1 (Revised to 2)

PAC12 – 4

Non-power-conferences – 4 (This represents like 30 conferences)

The PAC12 getting 1/4 of the 16 teams in is an amazing result.  This is a very good thing for our conference which was not taken seriously all season.  I am quite sure we never had a team ranked in the top-ten all season.  I do not believe we are the best basketball conference, but I also don’t believe that the PAC12 is the weakest of the power conferences.  This is a step in the right direction.

Go Utes!!!

 

[Hellhound152]

The Big East is a power conference by any measure (including history, recruiting, and recent national championships).  And the Big East has two teams in the Sweet 16 Villanova and Creighton.

[ProudUte]

My bad.  I forgot that Creighton moved to the Big East about 8 years ago.

I agree with you about the Big East being a power basketball conference.  However, many refer to the five football power conferences as being the power conferences.

[Stone]

I realize that march madness can reward teams that “just get hot.” But seeing a perceived “weak” conference do so well supports the need for a 8 or 16 team playoff in college football. There would still huge value in the regular season (because the field would not be very large), but it removes much of the beauty contest and subjective debate as to which conferences deserve the bids.

You never really know until you play the games. As it is, there is a perverse incentive in football to be a top-heavy conference. A conference may be really strong but balanced, thus, end up eating its own and getting punished. Whereas, a conference that is really top heavy (ahem, ACC) gets rewarded. 

[Charlie]

I think BB and football are very different. You can ask a BB team to play 4 games in 5 nights in a conference tournament, but you can’t ask a football team to play twice in less than 7 days. It is just so difficult to see more than a single football game for conference championship. A single great BB player can make almost any team dangerous, but even a great Jerry Rice will not make a small college football team dangerous to a bigger school. A school with small resources can create a top BB team. A school with small resources does not have a chance at creating a top football team. I think they will remain very different.

Still, I agree, we need to open up the football playoffs. Every conference football champion should go to a playoff. Since a month long playoff is not practical after a 12 game season, it makes sense to split football into divisions like HS. You could have 5 or 6 conferences in the top half and the others in the lower half. I think small schools would rather compete with similar schools in their own division for a championship than to have zero chance against the big boys. BB is much more open and can handle 64 teams in a playoff.

[Utesbyfive]

After the first round Jon Wilner had a great article about the financial windfall from getting five wins alone. Now that we have nine wins it gets even better. It could mean an extra two million per school per year for something like ten years. It’s huge. He needs to update his numbers. The PAC is guaranteed 10 tournament wins this time around.