I make it easy to see which teams have veered from their preseason rating the most at any point in the season, but not so much for conferences. And yet, this is an interesting topic early in the season. So without further ado, here are the five conferences whose teams have improved the most since opening night.
Southland +1.84
Ivy +1.49
Am. East +1.23
MVC +0.97
MWC +0.73Conference ratings are a great tool in designing a preseason ratings model. While teams are not so easy to predict, conferences are very easy to predict. For example, the Big 12 has been the top league 8 of the past 10 seasons and - even with some new members - will make it 9 of 11 this season. Some of the teams within the Big 12 will surprise us, but we know pretty well what the 14 teams as a whole will do.
As I’m writing this, there are 97 teams that have improved their preseason rating by at least 1.85. But there are no conferences that have done so. It’s just extremely unlikely for every, or even most, teams in a league to make a major move in the same direction.
For the moment, the Southland has exceeded my preseason ratings the most. The league is ranked 27th, trying to end a six-year streak of finishing 28th or worse. Special shoutout to Southeastern Louisiana, who lost a game by 57 points and has somehow improved its somewhat respectable preseason rating. They’re safely the second-highest rated team in the league behind mighty McNeese State, who through two games have validated my computer’s faith in Shahada Wells.
But my real interest is the Ivy League who has had the second-best start among leagues relative to its preseason rating - which was pretty high to begin with. Princeton has beaten top 100 Rutgers and Duquense and is one of 53 remaining unbeatens as of Tuesday morning. And having not yet played a game in the L. Stockwell Jadwin Gymnasium, it’s the only unbeaten to have not played at home.
Penn beat Villanova, although they gave back some of those good vibes by losing at Maryland-Eastern Shore. Just when you thought the game, or how to get the most out of Harvard’s financial aid policy, passed Tommy Amaker by, the Crimson are off to a 4-1 start and have one of the most productive freshmen in the country in point guard Malike Mack.
Cornell is 5-1 after beating Cal St. Fullerton and Utah Valley to win something called the Jacksonville Classic Bay Bracket. Even lowly Columbia got a win at Temple last week. This doesn’t even mention conference favorite Yale, whose 4-2 start is unspectacular only because it’s expected to be a top 100 team.
The thing unique about the Ivy is that while the rest of college athletics gets swept up in transfer-mania, the Ivy is largely immune to this. To whatever extent they’re affected it’s negatively - since the league only allows players four years to use their eligibility, they lose a lot of graduate transfers and don’t gain any.
Columbia is the ultimate example of this. After finishing 351st last season, the Lions brought almost everyone back. Their rotation has hardly changed at all. They rank second in the county to FAU in minutes continuity. In any other league, a team like that would have overhauled its roster but in the Ivy you pretty much roll with what you have.
As it does every year, the Ivy is lapping the field in minutes continuity this season:
Ivy 57.5%
Big South 47.3
Patriot 46.4
Summit 46.2
Big West 44.3Continuity isn’t the only reason for the league’s success, of course. The Southland actually has the third-lowest continuity, which helps explain their improvement. If a bad league wants to get better quickly, it has to take chances on some new players.
But in the Ivy, there’s not much choice. And yet, the Ivy is one of the best conference success stories in men’s hoops in the past quarter century. From 1998 through 2010, the Ivy was ranked in the 20’s every season. Since then, it’s been ranked in the 20’s just once (2018). The Ivy rose to a high of 12th in 2019, fell to 16th in 2020, and then took the season off in 2021.
One might have assumed the league would take some time to recover from that, but it only took a year, if that. Upon return in 2022, the league dropped to 18th, and then last year finished 12th with Princeton making the Sweet 16. After the pandemic-break, the Ivy even added a new twist - its teams are suddenly up-tempo. The league finished fourth in possessions per 40 minutes in each of the past two seasons. This after never finishing higher than 15th in any season since 1997.
Last season was probably the Ivy’s best season ever. In my mind, the Ivy of olden times is romanticized as a time when athletes somehow valued education more than they do today. Many great players played there, or so I stupidly thought. A brief investigation shows that over the league’s history, even in the seasons where one if its teams made headlines, the league as whole basically sucked.
In 1965, Bill Bradley led Princeton to the Final Four and was the second overall pick in the NBA draft weeks later. However, the Ivy actually sucked that season! According to sports-reference.com, the Ivy ranked 13th out of 16th leagues, and that includes the fact that 12.5% of its membership made the Final Four.
In 1998, when Princeton spent multiple weeks in the AP top 10 and was a five-seed in the NCAA tournament, the Ivy still sucked! It was ranked 24th out of 30 leagues. And in 2010, when Cornell made the Sweet 16, guess what? The Ivy sucked! It ranked 26th out of 31.
But it sucks no longer. Last year may have been its best season, but this year could be even better. Maintaining the same conference membership forever1 and committing to players for four years is not a recipe that’s possible for any other league.2 But for the Ivy, its unique circumstances have led to the impossible in college basketball: a conference lacking in tradition that has experienced substantial and seemingly permanent improvement.
Impress your friends with this trivia: The Ivy has had the same membership in men’s basketball since 1954. After them, which D-I conference has maintained its current membership the longest?
Answer: The MAC, which has held together since the 2006 season. The conference with the third-longest continuity is the Pac-12, which dates back to the 2012 season. Next year, the Mountain West (assuming they don’t officially on-board the Pac-2) and Patriot League will move into third, with membership that only goes back to the 2014 season.
Well, the Patriot League is actually pretty similar in this respect, but it continues to flounder at the bottom of Division-I for whatever reason.