Diego-Bucks
Lost in Canada
Well, I appreciate you debating with me. I can't compare a 9-team conference that plays a 16 game conference schedule round robin to a 16 team conference that has an 18 game schedule with no round-robin. A lot more losses to be had for the middle teams in the 9-team conference. In the MWC, BYU and SDSU have inflicted 4 losses to almost every team in their small conference. In the Big East, Pitt and Notre Dame have played every team once (and just a few twice), which is ~2 losses inflicted to almost every team in their huge conference. That just becomes a simple numbers game.
Comparing straight up resumes to a conference of similar size is difficult as the Pac-10 has the numbers, but is actually worse than the Mountain West.
However, I can't look at straight top-25 when it is heavily swayed by voters who are generally in favor of the big conferences and East coast. I'd prefer to dive slightly deeper than that in my analysis.
RPI is at least not-biased by time-zone and instead by SOS and winning %, and Sagarin's formulas (which are kept slightly secret) are some of the best predictors of future outcomes in sports statistics.
BYU (with Davies) is 7-1 against Sagarin's top-50 (of course they are 7-3 against the top-51 as New Mexico is sitting at #51) and has one of the most impressive resumes of any team that isn't OSU or Kansas. This isn't the Big East which is bloated with a huge number of good teams that beat each other up and are excited to just go .500 in conference play; as such, any comparison between the MWC and the Big East and most of the other 12-team conferences isn't going to get very far. Its useful for my outlook to look at some stats that try to curb the level of bias and "level the playing field".
SDSU is 4-2 vs. top-50, 6-2 if you include New Mexico (who sits at the #51 spot). And against the top-68 (who should theoretically make up the NCAA tourney field) they are 10-2. Compare that with Texas who is 7-3 vs. the top-50 and 7-5 (by my count) against the top-68. I used 68 as my number instead of top-100 because you said that there are lots of teams in the top-100 that don't make the tournament of 68.
SDSU (and most mid-majors) is limited in how many AP poll top-25 teams they even have access to match-up against and they did a good job of playing a solid/strong non-conference against Wichita State, California, Gonzaga, St. Mary's. I'm not saying SDSU needs the #1 seed. I am saying that they are more than just solid.
You may be slightly in favor of the power, BCS conferences in general and view the MWC as weak, in which case, I can't really persuade you otherwise but most statistics would agree with me in that the MWC is a really strong conference this year.
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