Conference Rise & Fall: The Data

People have been emailing me this week asking how I came up with the groupings for the Conference Rise & Fall articles. While the groupings I used were based on a mix of intuition and stats, here are the actual conference RPI's over the last decade. Notice the clean split between certain league divisions.. for example, the BCS leagues and non-BCS leagues. The difference in avg RPI between the best and worst BCS leagues (ACC & Pac-10) is 2.7, which is almost as big as the gap between the Pac-10 and the closest non-BCS league. While fans and administration in leagues like the A10 and MWC moan about how they shouldn't be categorized as lesser than the power conferences.. the reality is that there's a huge gap between BCS and non-BCS. Similarly, there's a big gap between what I would call the "high-majors" and everyone else. While the WAC was brutal last year, it has tended to average a top 10 RPI along with the other "high-majors" over this period. Outside of WCC's amazing '05 campaign, no other "mid-major" has ever even finished in the Top 10 RPI, let alone average such a number.