This time around, Big 12 basketball is real -- and it's spectacular
In many ways, it’s an obvious point: The Big 12 is the top basketball conference in the land.
But all you have to do is look back to last March, when only two of the seven Big 12 teams that got an NCAA tournament bid made it to the second weekend to realize nothing in college basketball is obvious before Selection Sunday sets the real proving ground in motion.
Yet I will still argue that this year, the Big 12 is once again the best conference in college hoops and that last year’s flop in March means absolutely nothing this time around.
First, I’m going to throw a boatload of numbers at you. For the first time since 2002-03, the Big 12 has three teams in the top five of the AP Poll (No. 2 Kansas, No. 3 Oklahoma and No. 5 Iowa State), plus two more (No. 16 Baylor and No. 20 West Virginia) in the top 20. Think the human polls are flawed? Fine: The Big 12 looks even better in the analytics world, with those five teams ranking in the top 18 on KenPom.com and with the conference topping KenPom’s conference rankings. The Big 12 ranks second in the forever-flawed conference RPI metric, but that’s only a sliver behind the Pac-12, which ranks fifth in KenPom’s rankings.
Good wins? The Big 12 has a lot of them: Oklahoma obliterated Villanova on a neutral court. Kansas handled UCLA and Vanderbilt at the Maui Invitational (and nearly beat Michigan State, the top-ranked team in the country, in November). Baylor also beat a Vanderbilt team that will be at the top of the SEC this season. Iowa State beat a hot-shooting Iowa team at home in one of the most thrilling games of the year to date, and Texas – which right now projects to be on the NCAA tournament bubble and the sixth tourney team from the Big 12 – upset North Carolina at home in another thriller.
Or do you simply want a personal testimonial from someone who’d know better than anyone?
“To me it’ll be as good or better as it’s ever been,” Kansas coach Bill Self said.
That’s saying something for a conference that’s been at the top of the RPI rankings three of the past six years, including the past two.
And yet I could give you thousands of words and a truckload of statistics to prove my point, but the chattering class could tear it all down with one simple point:
And how’d that turn out?
Well … not great. March 2015 was not kind to the Big 12. It became one of the big story lines of the NCAA’s first weekend: The Big 12 was overrated all year long. The first day of the tournament, two three-seeds from the Big 12 -- Iowa State and Baylor -- lost to 14-seeds. It was the first time since 1995 that two three-seeds lost in the Round of 64. Oklahoma State and Texas also lost in the round of 64, then Kansas failed to make the Sweet 16. The only Big 12 teams that did make the Sweet 16 were West Virginia and Oklahoma -- and we all remember how that turned out against Kentucky and Michigan State.
And yet I still argue the Big 12 was the deepest conference in the land last year despite that poor showing in March. I hate judging a team or an entire conference based on a handful of games in March. Hey, Iowa State didn’t take UAB seriously, Baylor lost on the magic touch of R.J. Hunter, and all the sudden we had definitive proof the Big 12 never was nearly as good as the ACC (or the Big Ten), no matter what the numbers told us?
Come on. I don’t buy that from last year. This Midwesterner thinks there’s some truth into the conspiracy theory that part of the Big 12 backlash came from the East Coast bias overlooking flyover country.
And I certainly don’t buy it for this year.
Part of it is because the Big 12 has won at a better clip than any conference in college basketball a month into the season. The Big 12 has won more than 81 percent of its nonconference games, tops in the nation. It has two undefeated teams and four one-loss teams, better than anyone else. It is 13-9 against the top 50 RPI teams.
But the bigger point is this: During a season in which a lot of things -- a shorter shot clock, rule changes that help swing the pendulum toward the offense, an emphasis on limiting too-physical defensive play -- have points being scored at a substantially higher rate than a year ago, the Big 12 is better positioned than any league to take its run-and-gun style deep into March.
The Big 12 averages more points per game (80.3) than any conference in the country. Two Big 12 teams (Kansas and Oklahoma) rank in the top 10 nationally in scoring; West Virginia is 18th, Iowa State 22nd. The schools are fast and fun in a college hoops game that’s putting more emphasis than ever on a quicker pace. Iowa State ranks seventh in the nation in average length of possession, per KenPom. Kansas has the fastest tempo of any Bill Self team in history, ranking 22nd in the nation in KenPom’s adjusted tempo metric. Oklahoma may be the most balanced team around, with one of the nation’s most efficient defenses (second in defensive efficiency) and offenses (14th in offensive efficiency) and a pretty speedy pace. West Virginia is now PressVirginia, with Bob Huggins’ newfound pressure forcing opponents into more turnovers than any team in the country.
So you can, if you’d like, point back to last season as the reason the Big 12’s early success is actually a mirage.
But I would caution against that. In this new era of faster-paced college basketball, the Big 12 is as well-positioned as any conference to take its unassailable nonconference success and bring it to the Final Four come April -- maybe one team, or perhaps two or three.
Follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave or email him at ReidForgrave@gmail.com.
