Top to bottom, the Big 12 is the best conference in men’s college basketball

After leading the last two NCAA Men’s Tournaments, the Big 12 continues to establish itself as the best conference in 2022-23 men’s college basketball. Here are just a few of the stats from ESPN Analytics showing how dominant the conference has been this season.

• The Big 12 have an average rating of 11 using the Men’s College Basketball Power Index (BPI), the highest of any conference.

• The weakest team, Texas Tech, has a BPI (number of points the team is above or below average) of 9, higher than the average of the second-placed Big Ten (8.5).

• The Big 12 is the only conference with three teams in the BPI’s top 10: Texas (5th), Kansas (8th) and Baylor (10th).

• The remaining 10 toughest schedules belong to 10 teams in the Big 12.

• All 10 teams in the conference are in the top 40 in the BPI. No other conference has 10 teams in the top 50.

• Joe Lunaldi’s Bracket Studies Seven of the ten teams are now on the tournament field, with two of the remaining three teams in his First Four Out (Oklahoma) and Next Four Out (Oklahoma State). If the Big 12 can get eight teams in, it will surpass the 1991 Big East for the highest percentage of teams in the conference going to the big dance. ESPN Analytics gives him a 33% chance of this happening.

• The Big 12 has four teams with over a 1% chance of winning the 2023 NCAA Tournament. No other meetings are more than two.

ESPN Analytics uses a combination of the BPI Rating and the game’s expected closeness to generate a metric called match-up quality for each game. This is a prediction of how fun the game will be on a scale of 0 to 100. Using this metric, his three most exciting games of the regular season take place tonight, and all three are Big 12 matchups featuring top 10s in the conference. BPI team.