Southland

Lamar

Northwestern State

Sam Houston State

Stephen F Austin

Texas-Arlington

 

Conference Rank: 21st

CHN's 31 conference ranking, including 10 year historical averages based on average RPI finish. For more information on historical RPI averages, check out the Conference Data Page. Links lead to league preview pages.

 

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.

In recent weeks, the Rise & Fall series has chronicled the progress (or regress) of college basketball's major conference teams. But if I equated each team to a civilization, I was mistaken. It is really the NCAA conference that equates to a burgeoning civilization or nation, each with its sometimes stable and sometimes rotating member states. Like civilizations, the prestige and power of conferences wax and wane..

 

Lamar (15-17, 8-8)

Northwestern State (17-10, 10-6)

Sam Houston State (21-10, 13-3)

Texas A&M-CC (26-7, 14-2)

Other (McNeese St, SFA, etc)

Favorite: Sam Houston St. Player of the Year: JeJuan Plair. Conference Rank: 29th.

It has taken a couple of years for the fallout affects of Virginia Tech and Miami’s move from the ACC to reach the small time. But now that it finally has trickled down, conferences are starting to snatch up Independent teams like a starving kid at a donut shop.

UC-Davis is all set to officially move to the Big West, the Mid-Con has snatched up IPFW, North Dakota State and South Dakota State for the 2007-2008 season and Florida Gulf Coast is already getting looks before they are ever cleared to become a Division I institution. But the biggest winner of all? The Southland Conference. Full of mediocre teams, coaches and players, this conference reeled in a big fish when it landed Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, perhaps the best DI Independent ever.