Which college basketball conference is the strongest?
Answering that question is dependent on how you define a conference's success. Best competition from top to bottom? Most powerhouse teams? NCAA tournament entries? Final Fours? National titles?
For our purposes, we believe the definition involves objective analytics, avoiding any inherent biases or perceptions about the leagues. Using the Basketball Power Index and ESPN's other analytic tools, we used a hybrid approach to equally weigh three metrics and evaluate the strength of each conference, and we subsequently ranked the leagues from No. 1 to 32.
Average conference BPI: The average BPI rating for each team in the conference.