Is the SEC Overrated?

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Interesting article from KenPom

Among power conferences, the better the league, the more likely their rating will drop during the tournament. I’ve added the linear trend, but it’s not certain that the trend is linear. The very best conferences have underperformed even more than the linear trend would indicate.

TLDR; Regression to the mean from their hot start, improvement by other teams post January 1st, BIG12 2024 and ACC 1997 own the other top 3 non-conference records and they fared worse than expected.

 

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OOC records

Collectively, the two conferences with the best non-conference scoring margin in history sent 14 teams to the tourney and got one team to the Elite Eight.

One takeaway is that it’s not unusual for historically great conferences to fail in the tournament. So maybe it’s time to sell the SEC. Before Greg Sankey throws a fit, it’s important to note I’m not disputing the SEC’s conference supremacy this season. Just that it’s likely the SEC’s tournament performance will not be entirely consistent with being the best conference of all-time.