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Quantifying the effect of realignment

ncaa1

As he is wont to do, Luke Winn of Sports Illustrated took a topic that we had all been discussing and gave us a way to measure it numerically.

In this case, it is realignment.

In a column posted on Tuesday afternoon, Winn took a unique look at the shifting of the conferences. Instead of predicting what each league is going to look like a couple of years down the road, he figured out what each league would have looked like the past decade if the changes had already been made.

And, well, his findings are about what you would expect.

The Big East takes a major hit. Conference USA takes an even bigger one. The SEC gets a bit better. The Atlantic 10 gets a bigger boost. The ACC gets the biggest boost, becoming the dominant conference over the last ten years, a fact that should continue with the resurgence of NC State and Florida State and the addition of Syracuse and Pitt.

As Winn lays out, there essentially become five tiers of conferences:

Picture 1

Simply put, without Memphis, there is no way that Conference USA ever ends up at the tenth best conference in the country again.

Anyway, it is great stuff as usual from Winn. Give it a read.