What is the Best College Basketball Conference?

It’s a fun argument, especially between fans of different teams, to determine the best college basketball conference. I love this topic of conversation for two reasons. First, people are naturally biased so tend to overrate their own team’s conference. Second, people can define best in different ways leading to irreconcilable differences of opinion. In this way, it’s kind of like the Lebron v. Jordan debate.

In this article we’re going to help people settle the best basketball conference debate. We’ll look at the problem in LOTS of different ways. We’ll break down the best college basketball conference by decade, through all history, using different metrics, and more.

Our main tool that we use to determine the best college basketball conference is final AP polls. It isn’t a perfect way to measure conferences, but looking at final rankings gives us a good idea how many good teams a conference produced in a given year.

We’ll include more on our methods later. For now, just know that (a) more teams in the top 25 is good and (b) higher ranked teams contribute more to their conference’s strength.

We’ll start with the goods, though. In the next section we’ll tell you which conference was the best college basketball conference since 1950.

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Best College Basketball Conference of All Time

We tallied up the data since 1950 when the first AP poll was taken. We rewarded conferences for having lots of teams in the top 25. We also rewarded being placed higher in the top 25.

Who is the best college basketball conference of all time? Is it the Big Ten with their long history of big state schools having good teams? Is it the Big East buoyed by some dominant years in the early 2000s? Or is it the ACC on the backs of long term sustained success by North Carolina, Duke, and more recently Virginia?

The winner of the best basketball conference of all time is….

The Atlantic Coast Conference takes the title of best college basketball conference of all time. Sustained success, multiple titles, and multiple good teams year in, year out is hard to beat.

Was it close? Who else came near the top?

Top 5 Best Basketball Conferences

While the Atlantic Coast Conference took the title of best basketball conference since 1950, some others were close. The top 5 basketball conferences since the time of the AP poll are contained in the table below.

The “Points” column is explained in the methodology section, but is a reflection of aggregate success over the last 75 years. The points column is included to see how close these conferences were to each other.

Rank	Conference	Points
1	ACC	59.9k
2	Big 10	52.8k
3	SEC	42.9k
4	PAC-12	34.7k
5	Big East	32.6k

Second overall is the Big 10, probably not surprising. The Big 10 is the big Midwest schools where basketball is a way of life. These schools are very good very often, and that is why they secure second.

The SEC is the third best basketball conference, largely buoyed by Kentucky’s prolonged elite performance. Recently the SEC has had more consistent quality across the conference, but truly it has been the Wildcats dominating.

The PAC-12 is interesting and had some dominant years a long time back. Their ancient success combined with time-to-time quality teams in recent years earns them the 4th spot. Thanks UCLA.

Finally comes the Big East. The Big East is interesting because for about 30 years, they might have been the best college basketball conference. They suffered in these ratings because the Big East has only existed since 1979 while other conferences had longer to rack up points. We’ll address this later when we break things down by decade.

After these five comes the Big 12, A10, Conference USA, Ivy, Mountain West, and American Athletic Conference [In order]. The Big 12 [22k points] is pretty close to the Big East, but after that the quality drops off dramatically [the A10 has only 5.7k points]. There is a reason the power conferences are the power conferences.

The plot below shows how the rankings of the power conferences have evolved over time.

Interestingly, this plot shows that the SEC, ACC, and Big 10 were all tied until the early 80s. At this point, the Big 10 and ACC separated from the SEC. Then around the mid 90s, the ACC pulled away from the Big 10 and locked itself in as the best basketball conference.

In the next section we’re going to break things down by decade to look at how these conferences shape up. But first,

Best College Basketball Conferences by Decade

While the ACC is the best basketball conference overall since 1950, what happens when we look only at certain decades. Do different conferences shine?

The 1950s

In the 1950s, the best college basketball conference was the SEC. This success was largely earned by Kentucky who won two championships in the 50s. The SEC 7.6k points. The runner up was the Big 10 who earned 6.3k points. Third place was the ACC with just over 3k points.

The 1960s

The best college basketball conference in the 1960s was the Big 10. In the 60s, the Big 10 had one championship from Ohio State and multiple runner up finishes by OSU, Michigan, and Purdue. Close behind the Big 10 was the ACC followed by the SEC.

Interestingly, the PAC-12 finished fourth even though UCLA won consistently throughout the 60s. There just weren’t enough other good teams to boost their ratings.

The 1970s

In the 1970s, the ACC took home the title of best basketball conference. The 1970s were particularly close, though. The ACC racked up 7800 points. The second palace conference was the PAC-12 coming in at 6400 points. The Big 10 followed closely behind at 6100 points. The 1970s were full of college basketball parity.

The 1980s

The 1980s again was ruled by the Atlantic Coast Conference with a strong showing of nearly 10k points. A couple championships and a couple runner-up finishes certainly helped. Second was the Big 10, just like normal. In third place though was a conference that started only the year before: the Big East. And, as we’ll see soon, the Big East was here to stay.

The 1990s

Blink and you’ll miss it. For the third decade in a row, the ACC was the best. For the second decade in a row the Big 10 was in the top 2 best basketball conferences. These conferences constantly seem to be battling at the top, and this is why they are the two best conferences overall. Third place in the 90s, though, was the SEC.

The 2000s

The early 2000s was won by – you guessed it – the ACC. The Atlantic Coast Conference won the best college basketball conference award for the fourth straight decade. And by scoring 10.7k points in our rating system it was also their most dominant decade yet. Second was the Big 12, a newcomer to the top conferences, with about 8700 points. The Big East rounded out the top 3 with just over 8000 points.

The 2010s

I feel like I can repeat the same blurb every time. The best college basketball conference in the 2010s was the ACC scoring over 11k points. This is the single best decade a conference has ever produced. The Big 10 follows behind in second (like always) and the Big 12 is third.

While it feels like nearly the same thing happens every year, lets look at how the 2020s are beginning to shape up

The 2020s

In just the last few years, longtime powerhouse coaches Krzyzewski and Williams left the ACC. This opened the door for some new blood. The best team in the first three years of the 2020s has been the Big 12! In second was the Big 10 followed by the SEC. In the last few years, the ACC has fallen to fourth place.

Most Dominant Individual Seasons by a Conference

The data above has shown how overwhelmingly dominant the ACC has been. No matter if you break it down by decade or aggregate the data, the ACC seemed to always come out on top.

In this section we want to look at the best individual season by conferences and look at what happened to make those seasons so great. We’ll go through the Top 3.

The overall best season by an individual conference is the 2009 Big East. In 2009, the Big East had the number one, number 4, and number 5 team in the final rankings. Louisville, Pitt, and UCONN all earned #1 seeds. Syracuse and Villanova earned a 3 seed. West Virginia and Marquette were 6 seeds. Just a ridiculous amount of talent.

A close second was a tie between the 2011 Big East and the 2019 ACC. In 2011, the Big East had a one seed, a two, two threes, a four, a five, and three sixes. That might have been one of the deepest tournaments by a conference ever, but not quite as top heavy as 2009 Big East.

The 2019 ACC had three one seeds just like the 2009 Big East: North Carolina, Virginia, and Duke. They also had two four seeds. Not quite as good as 2009 Big East, but they did have the eventual champion Virginia Cavaliers.

Methodology

In order to determine the best college basketball conference, we assigned points for teams finishing in the top 25. The higher in the rankings you finished, the more points you earned. The only question is how many more points a #1 ranked team is versus, for example, a number 10 ranked team.

The most obvious way to do this is to give 25 points for first place, 24 for second, etc. However we opted not to use this method because it didn’t feel quite right. A conference with the two best teams and #16 overall feels a lot better than a conference with the 5 teams ranked 10-15. You can come up with more examples of this.

Instead, we decided to give even more points to teams that finished high in the rankings. We did this by squaring the points from the last paragraph. For example, the best team got 25^2=625 points, the second best team got 24^2 = 576 points. This made things feel more reasonable. In assigning all-time rankings to teams, we added up their season by season totals.

Of course, you can define things however you prefer, this is just how we determine the best college basketball conferences of all time.