The Big Ten appears to be winning the pre-season campaign for the mostly-meaningless title of “best conference” this season. They are expected to have a strong upper tier and even in terms of overall conference strength, the Big Ten may reign supreme. The conference figures to have a weak back end, but the perennial champ in this department – the ACC – isn’t going to have as much junk in its trunk as it did last season.
An additional component to this argument is that the Big Ten retains more talent from last season than any other conference in the country, or at least it should be part of the argument, because that is what the cold, hard data tells us.
Note: The figures below are given in terms of returning offense and defense (vice returning minutes). More details after the data.
RetO RetD Avg
Big Ten 67.8% 70.1% 69.0%
Patriot 68.6 66.7 67.6
GWC 68.1 65.8 67.0
MWC 69.0 63.9 66.4
SoCon 67.0 63.8 65.4
MVC 60.8 67.2 64.0
AmEast 63.1 64.9 64.0
Ivy 62.6 65.1 63.9
A10 60.4 65.7 63.0
ASun 60.1 65.8 62.9
BigSth 62.3 62.9 62.6
MAAC 59.8 65.1 62.5
MEAC 58.6 65.1 61.8
WCC 58.4 64.8 61.6
C-USA 59.3 63.6 61.4
OVC 60.8 60.5 60.7
CAA 60.4 60.8 60.6
Horizon 61.9 55.7 58.8
Sthland 56.0 58.9 57.4
Summit 56.9 57.7 57.3
ACC 54.4 59.3 56.9
NEC 54.5 59.0 56.8
Pac 10 52.9 59.4 56.2
SunBelt 55.2 56.7 55.9
BigWest 55.6 55.7 55.7
BigEast 51.3 59.2 55.3
SEC 51.3 57.0 54.1
Big 12 50.6 55.4 53.0
BigSky 51.9 50.5 51.2
SWAC 46.4 55.9 51.1
MAC 44.6 50.5 47.6
WAC 36.1 43.8 39.9
Average 57.7 60.5 59.1
For those that must know, returning offense determines a player’s value by computing his points produced and scaling it by an additional factor that accounts for his efficiency and his involvement in the offense.
(PlayerORtg/TeamORtg)2*(%Poss/20)2*(PlayerORtg*%Poss*%Min)
In layman’s terms, players that use more of a team’s possessions and are more efficient than their teammates are going to be more difficult to replace. Thus their minutes are valued more in this calculation. If you still don’t get it, it means that Gordon Hayward’s minutes are more difficult to replace than Avery Jukes on the offensive end.
To compute returning defense, each player’s value is determined by computing the simple component of Dean Oliver’s stops formula,
Stops = steals + blocks x FMwt x (1-1.07 x opp OR%) + DR + (1-FMwt)
FMwt factors in the relative value of a missed shot compared to a defensive rebound based on the team’s ability to do both. And if you have any more questions about that, you should buy Dean’s book.
The benefit of each calculation is that it correlates better to year-to-year improvement than returning minutes does.
Special thanks to John Barber for compiling returning player information. There’s actually more to discuss when it comes to the reasons a player leaves his school, which John helpfully noted for me. Obviously, the majority of the cases involve a player exhausting his eligibility. But at first glance, the remaining discretionary cases don’t seem to be correlated to conference visibility.
The only obvious trend is that players in the Ivy and Patriot Leagues don’t leave before they have a diploma. This isn’t a surprise considering those are the only two D-I leagues where a player is at his school for academic reasons more that athletic ones. Transferring from Columbia, to say, Colorado State for an upgrade in competition (or even playing time) is not worth the tradeoff of not having a degree that says “Columbia” on it. In the other 30 conference, players want to play and they go elsewhere when they can’t. In addition, their tendency to misbehave appears independent of conference affiliation. I’ll document that in the future.
And if you want team values for returning offense and defense, you’ll need to buy my book (or at least the one I contributed a small amount to).