In an attempt to make sense of SBN's ongoing conference re-draft exercise (which still has several rounds to go), I thought I'd try a rough evaluation of the conferences based on football and basketball power ratings from last season.
(If you aren't familiar with the project, it works just like a fantasy football draft except we're choosing college athletics programs rather than individuals. All of the BCS schools were thrown into a pot and six commissioners were tasked with building a conference however they saw fit. I'm a little disappointed no one has tried to build a basketball megaconference just for the hell of it--or draft Hawaii for vacationing purposes--but as we saw during the league expansion craziness of last summer, football drives everything in college sports now, including, sadly, this fake draft.)
To measure the strength of each college football team, I used F/+; for basketball, I used Ken Pomeroy's ratings. I then found the average F/+ rating and Pomeroy Rating for each league.
| F/+ Average | Pomeroy Average | |
| BCI | 51.7 | 36 |
| BHGP | 37.4 | 67.7 |
| TSK | 31.9 | 75.8 |
| BECB | 21 | 46 |
| HOS | 42.9 | 32.1 |
| RCR | 18.9 | 93.9 |
(Thru 53 picks.)
Comissioners and Conference names: BCI: Twelve Pack; BHGP: Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; TSK: The Empire (working title); BECB: Conference TMZ; HoS: House of a Thousand Sanctions; RCR: The Cult Of Les Miles.
The gents at Red Cup Rebellion have built a dominant football conference, with five programs that finished in the F/+ top 15 a year ago. The cost though is an amusingly terrible basketball league, whose only draw is whatever entertainment value lies in North Carolina pounding the snot out of an entire conference. Only two of the league's hoops programs (UNC, Michigan) finished in the top 70 of the Pomeroy Ratings last season.
Our BC bros have done better on the football side than the one-year average suggests. That's one of the problems with this rough glance, as aberrant seasons help or hurt more than they should. BCI drafted Texas and Georgia, both of which had unusually poor football seasons in 2010. (Texas finished at 65 in the F/+ ratings, obviously a big exception rather than the rule.) From a pure performance standpoint, they've gotten two of the draft's biggest steals in Wisconsin and Clemson. The Badgers finished in the top 15 in both sports, while Clemson was top 25 in both.
BCS Schools Still On The Board:
| UNDRAFTED | Pomeroy | F/+ |
| Baylor | 77 | 62 |
| Iowa State | 81 | 81 |
| Kansas State | 30 | 52 |
| Texas Tech | 114 | 61 |
| Ole Miss | 70 | 63 |
| Miss State | 116 | 26 |
| GT | 89 | 64 |
| Wake | 251 | 97 |
| NC State | 91 | 23 |
| Indiana | 75 | 88 |
| Minnesota | 57 | 77 |
| Purdue | 9 | 87 |
| Northwestern | 49 | 75 |
| Wazzu | 62 | 94 |
| Cincy | 23 | 54 |
| USF | 127 | 41 |
| Rutgers | 78 | 84 |
I don't have a clue what theoretically makes Oregon State, Utah, or Colorado more valuable than NC State, but so it goes I guess. It actually strikes me as quite plausible that no one has any idea that we play in a 58,000 seat football stadium that's sold out all the time. (And I will repeat: bass fishing empire for the taking here, people.)