I’ve been getting a lot of e-mail about my statements that the Pac-10 is overrated. I’d like to present some food for thought on the matter. Let’s look at the Pac-10’s wins over top 30 teams from outside the conference. I will selfishly use my ratings as the gospel here. <\/p>\n
UCLA over Kentucky (N)
\nUCLA over Georgia Tech (N)
\nUCLA over Texas A&M (h)
\nOregon over Georgetown (A)
\nArizona over Memphis (H)<\/p>\n
Now the ACC…<\/p>\n
UNC over Ohio State (H)
\nUNC over Kentucky (H)
\nUNC over Arizona (A)
\nBC over Michigan State (H)
\nDuke over Air Force (N)
\nDuke over Indiana (H)
\nDuke over Georgetown (H)
\nVirginia over Arizona (H)
\nClemson over Georgia (H)
\nFlorida State over Florida (H)
\nMaryland over Michigan State (N)
\nGeorgia Tech over Memphis (N)
\nGeorgia Tech over Georgia (H)<\/p>\n
That’s 13 to 5. Granted, there may have been a few more opportunities for the ACC to get wins, especially at home, and maybe using my ratings skews things a bit. Feel free to try this exercise with the RPI. And feel free to try it using the record against the top 25, or top 32, or top 43, or whatever figure you want. I doubt it will make the Pac-10 look a whole lot better. Until further notice, I’m chalking this up to a case of some guy saying the Pac-10 is the best, some other guy agreeing, and then a few more people blindly jumping on board. And it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When Stanford beats UCLA, the reaction is “Wow, Stanford is better than we thought!” while UCLA’s reputation doesn’t suffer at all.<\/p>\n
It’s not that the Pac 10 sucks, it’s that they’re not any better than a typical power conference. They have a viable Final Four candidate, and three or four others that are Sweet 16 possibilities, just like most of the other elite conferences. <\/p>\n
Before you Pac-10ers shower me with the East Coast bias routine, I was such a Pac-10 cheerleader during the early rounds of the tourney last season. They were underrated and I said so. It just amazes me that there is such unanimity on an issue that clearly doesn’t deserve it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been getting a lot of e-mail about my statements that the Pac-10 is overrated. I’d like to present some food for thought on the matter. Let’s look at the Pac-10’s wins over top 30 teams from outside the conference. I will selfishly use my ratings as the gospel here. UCLA over Kentucky (N) UCLA […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}