The 2024 Men's College Basketball Conference Tierlist
The Mountain West and the Horizon League are both "mid-majors". So what does that term even mean?
Time for another yearly feature!
In 2021, spurred by the debate over the American Athletic Conference being the worst high major or the best mid-major (ah, memories), I used efficiency metrics to determine whether their performance was more in line with the Pac-12s and SECs of the world or the WCCs and A-10s.
While I was at it, I expanded on the concept and whipped up a temporally weighted tierlist of all 32 Division I conferences, limited to performance since the American split from the Big East in 2013 because it seemed counterintuitive to include data from before one of the conferences even existed.
In that initial tierlist, I gave the American a tier all their own, as their performance showed that they were clearly better than even the best mid-major leagues, but still obviously worse than the worst high majors most of the time. That was still true when I updated the tierlist for 2022, and it remained the case when I wrote about the 2023 update for The Low Major.
One year later, as we reach the end of this era of conference alignment, it’s time for one final update. Let’s see how this season’s results shook up the 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. Like this upcoming realignment, that movement was so earth-shattering that including any results from before that time would be counterintuitive.1 Then, I averaged these figures across each conference to spit out an initial ranking.2 That looked like this:
This looks correct—all of the power conferences are at the top and all of the low majors 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 2024. UConn won titles in both of those years, but aside from that, pretty much everything else in the college basketball world has changed.3
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, 2023 is weighted 90%, 2022 is weighted 80%, and so on and so forth. This is arbitrary but it works.
Last year, 2014 (the first season since realignment) was weighted 10%. Resultantly, this year it’s weighted 0%—the first and only time that data from an eligible season will be excluded from this tierlist.
After I made the weighted average calculations, I found breaks in the ratings and separated the conferences into tiers, of which there are nine this year (down from 10 last year).
That gives us…
The Tierlist
It’s finally happened. The American has been demoted from a tier of its own to Just Another Mid-Major™. That’s partly because they were an unimpressive collection of teams this year but just as much because the Mountain West essentially took their spot as the secret seventh high major this year and nearly passed them in the composite ranking.
As usual, this weighting helps conferences that have recently outperformed typical results (the SoCon and WAC each rise four spots) and hurts those that have underperformed (the MAC and CAA each fall three spots). That’s exactly what I was going for.
Let’s go tier by tier. This will include a lot of repurposed text from last year’s list, so if you get déjà vu, you know where it’s coming from.
Tier 1: High majors
These six conferences are (or were) the best of the best. You know them. You love them. You hate them. Last year I wrote that they’re everywhere and probably always will be. Lol.
Big 12: The Big 12 has still been #1 on KenPom for eight of the past ten years and remains the clear overall #1 in this ranking. Last year I posited that their AdjEM average would go slightly down with the league’s four new additions, and it did, but it was still in line with previous Big 12 performances and it was still comfortably #1 this year.
Big Ten: Ignoring March performance helps the Big Ten’s perception a lot, as—despite the best efforts of one of the greatest players in college basketball history—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. They only got three bids to the NCAA Tournament this season but they probably should have gotten five. Bid stealers. What can you do?
SEC: The SEC continues to pull away from the ACC for fourth, but the Big East has outperformed them for the past two years, so they’ll need a big boost if they want to crash the podium. Do Texas and Oklahoma qualify?
ACC: After a frankly bad 2023 season, the ACC has returned to their usual perch toward the low end of this tier, where they’ve sat for five years now. I want to say the league looks like it’s on its way up, but who even knows if it’ll exist in a few years?
Pac-12: When I wrote last year’s piece, I couldn’t have begun to predict that the Pac-12 would implode after just one more season. Just know that, despite the frustratingly bad TV deals and marginally worse on-court performance, we are unquestionably losing a high major conference.
Tier 2: Multi-bid mid-major
These four 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.
American: When you replace four Big 12 teams with six C-USA teams, you’re going to get significantly worse.
Mountain West: The Mountain West continues to be the league to watch, and they (mostly) got the respect they deserved this year, earning six NCAA Tournament bids (even if some of them were underseeded). Having graduated from Minnesota, I’ve been a Big Ten guy through and through, but the Mountain West is doing its best to change that.
WCC: A team other than Gonzaga won both the regular season and conference tournament titles in this league for the first time since 2012. In both cases, it was Saint Mary’s, so be advised: there are two power programs in this league. And now, with Oregon State and Washington State joining on an affiliate basis for at least two years, there might be more.4
Atlantic 10: The A-10 had the potential to end up a one-bid league for the second year in a row if Dayton won the conference tournament, but the league was so competitive that that didn’t seem likely from the jump. As it stood, Duquesne stole that second bid and won their Round of 64 matchup as an 11-seed. The A-10’s alright.
Tier 3: The Valley
Missouri Valley: This year, we’ve got a different one-league tier! After being in a tier with C-USA last year, the Missouri Valley pulled away from them decisively this year and even outperformed the WCC and A-10 on aggregate. This was the third straight year that they only sent one team to the NCAA Tournament, but—as with the Big East—that number clearly should have been higher.
Tier 4: Middle mid-majors
These three conferences have a weighted average AdjEM between 0 and -1. They’re one-bid leagues, but they’re usually good for multiple top-100 teams and could theoretically be multi-bid leagues if everything breaks right.
C-USA: When you replace six American teams with four teams from lower tiers, you’re going to get significantly worse.
SoCon: The awful 2014 season leaving the weighting system entirely works heavily in the SoCon’s favor. They’re still riding the hot streak they’ve been on for the past half-decade (and their NCAA Tournament representative probably should have beaten Kansas this year).
Ivy: Two-bid Ivy was not that far removed from reality this season, as Princeton likely could have contended for an at-large with a couple more breaks. It’s also worth reiterating that the Ivy’s -4.66 Conference AdjEM in 2021 is based on nothing but preseason data because the league did not play basketball that year. This obviously weighs them down, but not as much as you’d expect; removing that data point would shift the Ivy just barely above the SoCon.
Tier 5: Lower mid-majors
These five conferences have a weighted average AdjEM between -1 and -2. They’re the types of league almost everyone thinks of when they hear the term “mid-major”.
Sun Belt: James Madison swept a non-conference slate that included a season-opener at Michigan State and lost just three conference games all year—two of them to the same top-100 Appalachian State team—and yet they were still clearly not in at-large contention, almost certainly missing the Tournament at 30-4 if they dropped their conference tournament title game. That’s what separates this tier from the one above it.
MAC: The MAC has been plummeting like nobody’s business in recent years. They went from Upper Mid-Major to Middle Mid-Major to Lower Mid-Major in two years flat. With no membership changes. What on Earth is going on in Ohio?
WAC: The WAC’s membership has been in flux for most of the past decade and will likely continue to be in flux in the immediate future, with rumors that the WCC is poaching Grand Canyon and Seattle and that Stephen F. Austin wants to return to the Southland. But they’re a smart league. They’ll be equipped to handle whatever gets thrown their way.
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.
CAA: This is just how the CAA is gonna be now, I guess. The bottom of the league, most of which they recently added by choice, continues to weigh them down like an anchor as a few fringe top-100 hopefuls battle amongst themselves at the top.
Tier 6: Fringe mid-majors
These five conferences have a weighted average AdjEM between -2 and -3. 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: You could argue that St. Thomas, still ineligible for the NCAA Tournament for two more seasons via the transition rule, was the best team in the Summit League this year. Of course, South Dakota State reigned supreme, as they seemingly always do.
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.
Horizon: The Big Sky jumped the Horizon this year despite the Horizon (-4.38 AdjEM) outperforming the Big Sky (-5.75). The reason: the 2014 weighting. The Horizon’s 2014 season was abnormally good (+0.83) and the Big Sky’s was abnormally bad (-8.23).
MAAC: It’s unclear how exactly this league transformed so quickly from The Iona League to The Saint Peter’s League but here we are.
Tier 7: Upper low majors
Hey, that’s the name of the show! These five conferences have a weighted average AdjEM between -3 and -4. They’re 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.
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.
ASUN: This year, the ASUN’s recent upward trajectory was not just halted, but reversed as two of their highest-performing programs (Liberty and Jacksonville State) left for C-USA. Kennesaw State is also leaving for C-USA this summer. Replacing them is West Georgia, the league’s fourth Division II backfill since 2019 (joining North Alabama, Bellarmine, and Queens).
America East: They might as well rename this the Vermont Conference, though UMass Lowell has given them a run for their money as of late.
Ohio Valley: Welp. Belmont and Murray State left for the Missouri Valley last summer and the OVC cratered to its worst performance since 2013 realignment, comfortably worse than even last year’s rather striking down year. That’s probably gonna be the reality of this league for the foreseeable future.
Patriot: Colgate wins this league every year, Colgate is a trendy upset pick every year, and Colgate loses badly in the Round of 64 every year—their average margin of defeat a stark 17.25 points over this current run of four consecutive conference tournament titles (15.20 if you also skip over 2020 and include their 2019 defeat).
Tier 8: Lower low majors
These two conferences have a weighted average AdjEM between -4 and -6.5 They almost never have any good or even average teams. They’re First Four regulars.
Southland: Even with Will Wade taking over the McNeese program and immediately spinning yarn into gold, this league was just as bad as it’s been every year since Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston left for greener pastures. They’d need more than the possible return of Stephen F. Austin to even sniff a higher tier.
NEC: Merrimack won the NEC, both regular season and conference tournament, in 2023 despite not yet being eligible to claim an NCAA Tournament bid. This year, Le Moyne—in their first year at the Division I level—finished with a winning record in conference play. No further analysis necessary.
Tier 9: HBCU low majors
These two conferences have a weighted average AdjEM lower than -6. They’re the primary historically Black college and university (HBCU) conferences in Division I, operating at a significant resource deficit relative to the rest of the division due to various institutional factors. They usually perform noticeably worse than even the other low majors and are somewhat infamous for their struggles.
MEAC: Home of 2024 March Badness Chumpion Coppin State, the MEAC has recently suffered from dwindling membership and not much hope of backfilling the departed. It could be worse, though, at least they’re not…
SWAC: The SWAC has finished 31st or 32nd among conferences6 in Conference AdjEM every year in the past decade. They're essentially the polar opposite of the Big 12.
What about the Independents?
Of the past ten seasons, there have only been independent programs in three: NJIT was an independent in 2015 before joining the ASUN (they’re now in the America East), 2023 saw Chicago State get booted from the WAC while Hartford spent their final Division I year as an independent before dropping down to Division III, and this year had Chicago State still stranded as an independent before blessedly receiving an NEC invite that takes effect next season.
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.
And that’ll be curtains on this tierlist for at least the next few years. We’ll see how—or if—the dust settles on this next explosive round of realignment. I hope you’ve enjoyed these insights as much as I’ve enjoyed providing them. Thanks as always for reading.
This is also the reason I’m not continuing this feature next year. I may bring it back in a few years if things begin to settle, but I doubt that’ll happen any time soon.
KenPom followers probably also 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. But that’s not what I’m doing; I’m measuring how dominant each conference was in every individual year and averaging them out. I do not believe this to be a misapplication of the data.
Shoutout to UConn for repeating and allowing me to carry that sentence over from last year’s piece with no changes.
It’s kinda funny how everyone was screaming for Gonzaga to join the Pac-12 for like a decade straight and then the Pac-12 crumbled to dust and two of its members instead joined Gonzaga.
Both are between -5 and -6 but skipping an integer would look weird.
They’re listed as finishing 33rd in a few years thanks to the independent programs being counted as a “conference”, but I’m ignoring that for the sake of this exercise.