An Improved Conference Ranking System
Measuring top-end quality in each conference
The SEC had a historically strong 2025, leading to what many consider the best single season in conference history. They had 14 of their 16 teams make the NCAA tournament, setting a record for the most from a single conference. They also finished the season with four of the top six teams in the nation at EvanMiya.com, including the national champions in Florida.
This season, the SEC has taken a significant step back. The conference has just one team in the top 12 nationally at EvanMiya.com, has only nine teams deserving to be in the field right now according to Resume Quality, and may not land a single team on the one or two-seed line on Selection Sunday.
So why is the SEC still rated as the best conference in basketball at KenPom.com, and (previously) EvanMiya.com?
The answer makes sense numerically but still feels unsatisfying. If you take the average predictive team efficiency margin across every team in each conference, the SEC still shakes out as the strongest conference in the country. This is mainly because the middle and bottom tiers of the conference are still comfortably better than every other league. The SEC has over 80% of its teams inside the top 60 nationally at EvanMiya.com, and they have only a single team outside the top 100 (South Carolina at 106th). Conversely, the Big 12 has just 9/16 teams inside the top 60 nationally, and has five teams outside the top 75, compared to just one in the SEC. A third of the teams in the Big Ten rank outside the top 60, and it includes three very weak high-major squads this year: Maryland (111), Penn State (123), and Rutgers (137).
So, yes, the SEC still technically has the hardest group of teams to beat from top to bottom… But that isn’t REALLY what we care about, is it?
Creating A New Conference Ranking System
When we look back in mid-April and memorialize the 2026 season, each conference will be primarily remembered for a few things:
Did your conference win a national title?
How many Final Four teams did your conference have?
How many teams did your conference get into the tournament?
Though the SEC has the strongest group of teams from top to bottom, both the Big Ten and the Big 12 are way more likely to move the needle on a national level in March. The Big Ten has 5 of the top 11 teams at EvanMiya.com right now, and 8 teams in the top 35. The Big 12 has 6 of the top 16 teams in the country.
To better measure the top-end quality of each conference, I have created a new conference strength metric, which you can find updated daily on EvanMiya.com's “Misc” page. I’m calling it “Upper Strength” to represent the team quality in the upper regions of each conference. I’ll share the exact details of how this is calculated in the footnotes1, but essentially, teams at the top of the conference are weighted much more heavily than those at the bottom.
The table below shows the updated conference strength standings with this new metric:
The ordering of the top conferences much more accurately reflects the high-end quality in each league. The Big Ten and Big 12 are neck-and-neck for the top two spots, with the SEC slotting in a bit behind in third. The ACC and Big East form the next tier, followed by the WCC, Mountain West, and Atlantic 10.
If you equally weight all teams in each conference, the WCC actually rates as the 8th-best conference nationally. However, using the Upper Strength conference metric, it surpasses the Mountain West and Atlantic 10, largely because it has three at-large-quality teams: Gonzaga (12th), Saint Mary’s (40th), and Santa Clara (43rd). When we talk about how good the WCC is this year, no one really cares that Portland and Pepperdine are outside the top 250 teams nationally.
Diving Deeper
I will go further into the implications of this new conference ranking system next Tuesday on the upcoming episode of my new show, The EvanMiya College Basketball Show! It’s a weekly podcast with episodes every Tuesday morning. The show covers national storylines and recent trends in CBB, featuring multiple guests each week — plus a touch of analytics.
Here is the latest show from this week, featuring Kevin Sweeney from Sports Illustrated:
The exact formula for assigning a weight to each team in the conference is as follows: Give each team a numerical ranking R from 1 (best) to N (worst) in the conference. Determine each team’s weight by the following: weight = [1 - ((R - 1) / (N - 1))] ^ 2.
This exponential weighting system assigns significantly more weight to teams ranked higher in the conference, with diminishing weight for teams in the middle and lower tiers. The table below shows how this works for the SEC conference. A team ranked in the dead middle of a conference will have about 25% of the weight of the best team in the conference.
Love that Illini colored graph showing off the Big Tens #1 status.