Where Did The Big Ten Rank As A Women's Basketball Conference?
A deep look at the Big Six (or Big Five plus the UConn conference)
REMINDER: This is the last Hoopla post until next Thursday, June 16. On the following Monday (6/20), we start the team previews.
Hoopla wouldn’t exist without my belief that the Big Ten is a very good conference for women’s basketball, but how good was it last year compared to some of the other elite conferences in the sport?
To find that out, I went through some key numbers that I thought could separate the six major conferences for women’s basketball:
ACC
Big East
Big Ten
Big 12
Pac-12
SEC
I looked at a variety of things, including the amount of teams ranked in the final AP poll, how each conference did in the NCAA Tournament, how the teams rank in Her Hoop Stats’ rating (similar to KenPom), as well as the average placement of each team’s offensive and defensive rating.
Here is what all of that information looks like:
Immediately, two things are clear: The Big East was the worst of these conferences, and the SEC was the best.
I included the Big East here because it has UConn, who made a run to the championship game and lifts the conference into relevancy on its own every year. The Big East also had the most success in the NCAA Tournament, with UConn’s five wins, Villanova’s first round upset win and Creighton’s magical run to the Elite Eight making a major impact.
But on any advanced analytic, the Big East is just not here. The conference’s average Her Hoop Stats rating is not even close, nor are the offensive or defensive rankings. The HHS rating, like KenPom, can be negative if a team is, on average, worse than its peers. The Big East is averaging a team that is barely above that minimum threshold, and has an average defense that would be bottom half in the country.
On the other end, the SEC was unbelievably good in every metric. The conference nearly averaged a top 50 offense, something that is hard to fathom considering that these 14 teams had to battle against each other with an average of a near-top 60 defense.
Sure, the ACC had a better March Madness generally, but the SEC also had the ultimate winner in South Carolina. Put it all together, and it is evident which conference was the deepest in 2021-22.
But this is a Big Ten newsletter, so where do they fit? I think anywhere between third and fifth is fair. The ACC’s tournament success, to me, puts them in second, well behind the SEC but marginally ahead of the Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12. From there, it really depends on which of these metrics holds more weight.
The Big Ten tied the ACC for the most ranked teams in the final poll, and even that doesn’t tell the whole story: those five Big Ten teams all are ranked in the top 14 (eighth, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th).
That final ranking I think is a beautiful representation of where the Big Ten is in women’s basketball right now. The conference so clearly is filled with talented teams and players, and that was also evident by four Big Ten teams making the Sweet 16, none of which were Iowa, the conference’s highest seed.
But what the NCAA Tournament also showed was that the Big Ten didn’t quite have a team ready to compete with the elite of elites like South Carolina, Stanford and UConn, as only Michigan made it to the Elite Eight, and no team made it to the Final Four.
So, the Big Ten had more teams in the top section of the country than any other conference, but also, at the same time, didn’t have a team that was in the top top section.
Will that happen this year? It’s possible, but I think it’s more possible that the conference does a similar thing again, with plenty of very good teams without one true title contender. That makes the regular season and Big Ten tournament way more fun though, so that’s cool with me.
The Big Ten also, more than any non-Big East conference team here, was weighed down by some truly terrible teams at the bottom of the conference. Illinois and Wisconsin were bad everywhere, and the defenses of Minnesota and Penn State led to the very not good average defensive rating.
But that was also clear from watching this conference. There are some good defensive teams (Indiana, Michigan, Northwestern, Rutgers), but almost every team has an exciting offense that can erupt at any time, something that was clear by an average offensive ranking that trails only the SEC.
The Big Ten was, undoubtedly, a top five conference for women’s basketball. I think there’s an argument that it was a top three conference, but the Pac-12 and Big 12 have plenty strong cases. Either way, these numbers proved what my eyes already saw: it was a deeply fun, offense-heavy conference that was constantly unpredictable.
In two weeks, let’s try and predict the unpredictable, starting with who will finish at the bottom. See you there.
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