Is the SEC this year the Best Men's Basketball Conference in the Modern Era?

The SEC has been demonstrating that it's not just a football conference anymore, and this year marks the culmination of that rise with a record 14 (of its 16) teams getting into the NCAA tournament (87.5%). The previous record was the Big East with 11 of its 16 teams getting in (69%). Was this justified? Or was the SEC overhyped this season? We'll find out more over the next few weeks, but by one metric, this year's SEC is historically good in men's basketball.

Last fall we did a post on UConn being potentially the greatest men's college basketball team in the modern era (which we defined as 1984-85 onwards, since that's when the NCAA tournament expanded to 64 teams). We leveraged the "Simple Rating System" a lot in that analysis, which takes 1) a team's average margin of victory (MOV), and 2) a team's strength of schedule (SOS), and 3) adds them together for its "SRS" score. A team's strength of schedule, as a reminder, is the average margin-of-victory (MOV) for the team in question's opponents. A positive SOS score means a team's opponents on average beat their opponents by that many points per game, while a negative SOS indicates the opposite. Ideally you want higher numbers in MOV and SOS to make the most powerful statement. The great part about the SRS system is all you need is final scores to compile this analysis. You don't need full box scores, estimates of possessions, or anything else. Consequently, it actually becomes a lot easier to compare teams across different eras. It's simple, just like it's name, but powerful.

You can use this ratings system for conferences as well, and courtesy of Sports-Reference.com, below we've done just that. The chart below shows the best conference's SRS score for each season going back to 1984-85. It also shows each of the two components of the SRS score (the lines are margin of victory and strength of schedule) as well as the SRS score itself (the bars). The chart clearly demonstrates that at least according to the SRS, this year's SEC is by far the best men's college basketball conference in the modern era.

The SEC's SRS score this year is considerably higher than the previous all-time high, which was the 2016-17 Big 12.

Both components help demonstrate the SEC's legitimacy. In case you can't notice from the above chart, this year's SEC's SoS of 12.14 is the highest of all time, slightly eclipsing the 2020-21 Big Ten of 11.89. Besides that, the best conference on average has an SoS score of 9.4 historically. To here the SEC is historically good. And as a reminder, a good chunk of the schedule is conference play, where the SEC is of course only playing each other (just as every other conference is playing only teams within its conference as well). That reminds us that the SEC did most of its damage in the SRS score before conference play began.

Besides the red bar in the above chart, the green line, which denotes margin-of-victory (MOV) is also the highest of all time, slightly eclipsing the 1985-86 ACC. So in both components of the SRS score, the SEC this year is the best of all time. They played the hardest schedule of all time, and they beat the teams on that hardest schedule by more points than any other conference has done in the past.

We'll see if the SEC lives up to this hype during the NCAA tournament in coming weeks, but it would be surprising if they completely fell flat here. As always, it will be fun to watch.

Enjoy the Madness!