The 2023 Men's College Basketball Conference Tierlist

Not all mid-majors are created equal

May 03, 2023

A few years ago, when the American Athletic Conference looked a lot better and the Pac-12 looked a lot worse, it was pretty commonplace on the college basketball internet to see people debating whether the American was a high major1 or a mid-major.

On the one hand, it was originally formed by splitting from another high major. In breaking from the Big East,2 the American a) took some of their big-name programs, and b) got a TV deal far more similar to theirs than, say, the Atlantic 10’s. On the other hand, well…they had East Carolina, South Florida, and Tulane. Every high major conference has a laughingstock program or two but none of them are that bad.

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This debate ended up resolving itself over time. UConn—marquee name, rich history, and all—went back to the Big East in 2020. Then the Pac-12 and SEC, previously the worst high major conferences on a fairly consistent basis, both improved drastically, putting themselves far out of the American’s reach. Come next season, when Houston and Cincinnati3 will have left for the Big 12, any insinuation that the American isn’t a mid-major will be, in a word, laughable.

But that debate caused me to look at the question of “high major vs. mid-major” from a metric perspective. We could talk about how conferences are marketed and how historically good their big-name programs are, but when it comes down to it, these are pretty abstract concepts. We could also look at more results-oriented measures such as NCAA Tournament bids, but institutional factors make these favor traditional powers from the jump, so this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What if we only considered the results on the court?

In 2021, I did just that: I created my first Men’s College Basketball Conference Tierlist by looking solely at efficiency metrics.

My conclusion then was that the American was in a middle ground that made it neither a high major nor a mid-major; it was clearly worse than the former and clearly better than the latter. But that was just a small part of the final product, in which I separated the 32 Division I conferences into nine tiers, from “high major” at the top to “HBCU low major” at the bottom.

I updated this after last season but never got around to writing about it. This year, it’s overdue.4 Here is the 2023 Men’s College Basketball Conference Tierlist.

Methodology

My metric of choice is Ken Pomeroy’s Conference Adjusted Efficiency Margin (AdjEM). If you’re familiar with KenPom, you know that AdjEM, Pomeroy’s primary rating system, is a measure of how many points per 100 possessions a given team would outscore the average Division I team by, adjusted for tempo. Conference AdjEM is the AdjEM of a hypothetical team that would be projected to finish with a .500 record in league play in some given conference; in other words, it’s the strength of an average team in that conference.

First, I took the Conference AdjEM for each of the 32 Division I conferences for every season since the 2013 realignment that included the Big East–American split.5 Then, I averaged these figures across each conference to spit out an initial ranking.6 That looked like this:

This looks intuitive. The conferences everyone knows to be great are at the top, and those we know to be the worst are at the bottom. But it’s not enough. I’m trying to rank conferences today and I’m weighting 2014 performance the same as 2023. UConn won titles in both of those years, but aside from that, pretty much everything else in the college basketball world has changed.

My fix here was a simple weighting system that reduces the influence of a given season with each passing year. It weights the most recent season at 100% and reduces the weighting by 10 percentage points for each year we go back: this year, 2022 is weighted 90%, 2021 is weighted 80%, and so on and so forth, all the way back to 2014, which is now weighted 10%. This is arbitrary but it works.

After I made the weighted average calculations, I found breaks in the ratings and separated the conferences into tiers, of which there are 10 this year.

That gives us…

The final 2023 College Basketball Conference Tierlist

The first thing you should notice is that I still have the American in its own tier. I did this because, while I do think they’ll continue to fade as realignment continues, this tierlist is retrospective, not predictive. The American still sits far enough above the rest of the multi-bid mid-majors that mixing them together seemed wrong to me, but this probably won’t be the case next year.

If you compare this to the raw, unweighted ranking above, you’ll notice the weighting helps conferences that have recently outperformed typical results (C-USA, SoCon, WAC) and hurts those that have underperformed them (ACC, MAC, Colonial). This is exactly what I wanted.

Let’s zoom in a little bit.

Tier 1: High majors

These six conferences are the best of the best. You know them. You love them. You hate them. They’re everywhere and probably always will be.

Big 12: The Big 12 has been #1 on KenPom for eight of the past ten years and is the clear overall #1 in this ranking. It’s routinely considered the best conference in modern college basketball and sometimes discussed among the toughest conferences of all time. With Houston, Cincinnati, and BYU joining the fray,7 the average might go slightly down, but the league will still be a battle night in and night out.
Big Ten: Ignoring March performance helps the Big Ten’s perception a lot, as they still haven’t won a national championship since 2000, when Michigan State cut down the nets. (No, 2002 Maryland does not count.) Be that as it may, the Big Ten still routinely crushes non-conference play and, as a result, enjoys high efficiency metrics year after year.
Big East: Well you’d sure hope the conference that wanted to focus on basketball would be good at it. Aside from one randomly mediocre year (2019), they have been.
SEC: You’re not misreading this: the SEC has surpassed the ACC. As well it should; it’s outperformed the ACC for the past three years straight and the last two haven’t been particularly close. A coaching resurgence in this league has lifted it to new heights that it probably isn’t jumping down from anytime soon.
ACC: As the SEC’s coaches have risen, the ACC’s have fallen…or, more accurately, retired. The league’s in a transition period and it’s not what it used to be, but make no mistake: it’s still powerful.
Pac-12: The Conference of Champions has improved pretty drastically since bottoming out in 2019, to the point that if you tried to joke about them being a mid-major today, you’d just seem ignorant. We’ll see if that holds up after the Los Angeles schools leave next summer.

Tier 2: The American

American: Yep. I’ve already discussed this one in-depth at least twice here. No need to repeat myself.

Tier 3: Multi-bid mid-majors

These three conferences are clearly mid-majors, but they’re definitely the most powerful ones. I didn’t originally intend to consider NCAA Tournament bids at all, but it just so happens to work out that the conferences in this tier send more than one team to the NCAA Tournament more often than not, something nobody in the tiers below them can claim.

Mountain West: The Mountain West has been the most exciting conference to follow over the past few seasons. All of its best teams are of relatively equal strength, and that strength puts them pretty much right on the NCAA Tournament bubble, so there’s a game with meaningful postseason implications almost every night. If you haven’t been watching it, you should rectify that next year.
WCC: Contrary to popular belief, this conference is not just Gonzaga. That said, BYU’s departure with no corresponding addition will have the conference leaning on Gonzaga a little more. Unless Gonzaga finally leaves like they’ve been rumored to do for the past decade, in which case, who knows what happens to this league?
Atlantic 10: This past season was the first since 2005 in which the Atlantic 10 only sent one team to the NCAA Tournament. They’re usually good for about three.
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Tier 4: Upper mid-majors

These two conferences are pretty similar to the previous tier in spirit, but not quite in performance. Most college basketball fans are somewhat familiar with these leagues, but they probably couldn’t tell you who plays in them.

Missouri Valley: Loyola Chicago had been the best program in the Missouri Valley for the past half-decade before leaving to be the worst team in the Atlantic 10 this past season. The conference had hoped Belmont and Murray State would fill their shoes, and they also added UIC to retain the Chicago market, but this had the effect of weighing the bottom of the conference down even further. As a result, 2023 was the Missouri Valley’s worst year in a long time, and if that trend continues, the conference will continue to drop down this ranking.
C-USA: C-USA this year rose just as quickly as the Missouri Valley fell, but they’re losing six schools—including their three best performers in 2023—to the American this summer, so it’s unfortunately not likely to last.

Tier 5: Middle mid-majors

These four conferences are the kind of leagues almost everyone thinks of when the term “mid-major” comes to mind.

MAC: The MAC was once in the upper mid-major tier, but two consecutive awful years have knocked them out of it. Their membership hasn’t changed since 2006, so this is just a case of their best teams not performing quite as well as usual, while their worst teams have bottomed out.
SoCon: A decade ago, the SoCon’s performance in 2023 would be considered a high point for the league. As it stands today, this conference was uncharacteristically weak in 2023. It’s grown a lot!
Ivy: Here’s the biggest snag in my methodology: the Ivy League didn’t play basketball in 2021, so their -4.66 Conference AdjEM for that year is based on nothing but preseason data. This weighs them down a little bit, but not that much; if we erase that data point, the Ivy moves above the SoCon, but still sits firmly within this tier.
Sun Belt: After dropping two schools and adding four last summer, the Sun Belt had its first +AdjEM season since 2013 realignment.

Tier 6: Lower mid-majors

This tier is spiritually the same as the previous one, but these three conferences were bunched so closely together that they commanded their own tier.

WAC: The WAC’s membership has been in flux for most of the past decade and will continue to be in flux in the immediate future. Most of their recent adds have been good basketball schools and most of their recent drops have been bad ones, so their standing has risen significantly in the past couple years. They lose New Mexico State8 and Sam Houston to C-USA this summer, so it’ll probably dip back down a little.
Colonial: Last summer, the Colonial lost a good basketball program (James Madison) and added four bad ones (Hampton, Monmouth, North Carolina A&T, Stony Brook), so they cratered to their worst efficiency metrics ever. Behind Charleston and Hofstra fighting for the title, more than half the league couldn’t crack the top 300 on KenPom. This was a three-bid league in 2011. Time flies.
Big West: The Big West is the most consistent conference in this tier. Aside from a couple down years, they’re usually right in the middle of the pack, with one or two teams good enough to frighten a 3- or 4-seed come March.
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Tier 7: Fringe mid-majors

This is where the line starts to blur between mid-major and low major, but I’m giving these four conferences the benefit of the doubt and calling them the former.

Summit: When St. Thomas’ Division III program can jump straight into your conference and finish tied for fourth in their second year, you’re probably not the strongest of leagues. The Summit League had been dominated by the “Dakota State” schools for years until Oral Roberts suddenly boomed and got their icky bigotry all over everything. Now head coach Paul Mills is gone (Wichita State) and so is star guard Max Abmas (Texas). Here’s hoping for a return to Dakota Marker supremacy.
Horizon: The Summit League and the Horizon League are the same conference. I don’t make the rules.
Big Sky: It’s pretty rare for the Big Sky to have any top-100 teams, but it’s also pretty rare for it to have many unfathomably bad ones. Even at its worst, a lot of leagues are worse.
MAAC: The MAAC usually has a couple decent teams and one of them is almost always Iona. As with the Big Sky, it’s saved from a lower tier by its rank and file teams, which are almost never irredeemably bad.

Tier 8: Upper low majors

These five conferences are breeding grounds for new Division I transitioners or bottom-100 programs, or both. They usually have one or two relatively powerful programs saving them from being the worst of the worst.

ASUN: In the past decade, the ASUN has added Queens, Bellarmine, and North Alabama from the Division II ranks. If you go back to 2012, they’ve also added Northern Kentucky (who has since left for the Horizon). Their saving grace over the past few years has been Liberty, disgusting as it is to call them that; Liberty’s leaving for C-USA this summer. Their new saving grace is Kennesaw State, a much more enjoyable hero; Kennesaw State’s leaving for C-USA next summer. Now what?
Big South: It’s kinda funny they call it the “Big” South when it has the two smallest home arenas in Division I: Charleston Southern’s Buccaneer Field House (capacity 881) and USC Upstate’s G.B. Hodge Center (capacity 878). That should tell you all you need to know about the quality of play in this league.
Ohio Valley: The Ohio Valley’s big names, Belmont and Murray State,9 both left for the other valley last summer. They were the conference’s two best programs by a mile, and if the OVC’s performance in 2023 is any indication, it’s in danger of dropping to an even lower tier without them.
Patriot: Lehigh’s upset of Duke was in 2012 and thus outside the timeframe of this tierlist. The Patriot League’s defining moments in the past decade have been a) 2016 Holy Cross making the NCAA Tournament with a 14-19 record, and b) 2021 Colgate being ranked top-10 in NET pre-Tournament because the lack of non-conference play that season completely broke efficiency metrics (Colgate then got walloped by Arkansas in the Round of 64).
America East: They might as well rename this the Vermont Conference.

Tier 9: Lower low majors

These two conferences pretty much never have any good or even average teams. They’re First Four regulars.

Southland: The Southland used to have Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston. Once they left for the WAC in 2021, this league might as well have booked a hotel in Dayton for the third week of March every year. This is pretty much where the Ohio Valley is headed without Belmont and Murray State.
NEC: Merrimack won the NEC, both regular season and conference tournament, in 2023 despite not yet being eligible to claim an NCAA Tournament bid. No further analysis necessary.

Tier 10: HBCU low majors

These two conferences, the primary historically Black college and university (HBCU) conferences in Division I, operate at a significant resource deficit relative to the rest of the division due to various institutional factors. They’re usually noticeably worse than even the other low majors and are somewhat infamous for their struggles.

MEAC: The MEAC’s membership has been dwindling by the year. In 2018, they lost Hampton to the Big South. In 2019, Savannah State dropped down to Division II. Most prominently, in 2021, North Carolina A&T followed Hampton to the Big South (both schools are now in the Colonial) while Bethune-Cookman and Florida A&M defected to the SWAC. A conference that was once 13 strong is down to eight. And, at least in the short term, their performance has been better off for it.
SWAC: The SWAC has finished 31st or 32nd among conferences10 in Conference AdjEM every year in the past decade. They're essentially the polar opposite of the Big 12.

But wait, what about the Independents?

Of the past ten seasons, there have only been independent programs in three: NJIT was an independent in 2014 and 2015 before joining the ASUN (they’re now in the America East), and just this past season, Chicago State was booted from the WAC while Hartford also spent their final Division I year as an independent before dropping to Division III.

That’s simply too small of a sample size to perform any meaningful calculations, not to mention these programs have no affiliation with one another, making it nonsensical to measure them together. The unfortunate reality is that those four team-seasons simply don’t exist in this dataset. Here’s hoping someone invites Chicago State soon so this doesn’t continue any longer than it has to.

I hear the Ohio Valley could use a little help.

The basketball equivalent of football’s Power 5, the high major conferences have traditionally comprised those five conferences plus the Big East. If you hear any college basketball fan talk about the “Power 5”, please yell at them on my behalf.

Legally, this actually happened the other way around. The old Big East retained the original conference charter and renamed themselves the American; the newly formed conference purchased the rights to the Big East name and history plus the right to host their conference tournament at Madison Square Garden. But you knew that.

And UCF, but lol

I was encouraged to do this in part by reading

Kyle Kensing

's great piece on Conference USA. I highly recommend checking his stuff out if you’re somehow familiar with me but not him.

KenPom goes back to 2002, but my original query was about the American, which has only existed since 2013, so that was my starting point. The college sports landscape shifted so seismically in 2013 that including results from before then in this exercise is probably ill-advised anyway.

If you’re even more familiar with KenPom, you know that AdjEM was not meant to be used to compare two teams/conferences from different seasons, as it is a measure of a given team’s/conference’s performance against the average Division I team/conference in that specific year. That’s not what I’m doing, though. I’m measuring how dominant each conference was in every individual year and averaging them out. This, to my knowledge, is not a misapplication of the data.