Answering Bill Self's question from his press conference.

I wanted to answer a question Bill Self posed in his press conference the other day. There was discussion about the strength of the Big 12 relative to the other 5 Power 6 conferences. Self threw out a number that over the last 7 or 8 years the Big 12 would probably average under 1.5 in rank where the next best conference would be 2.5 or 3.0. Well, Self may have been cheating and actually knew the answer. Because he was incredibly close. Of course they could just call me since I have all of that data in detail and with great accuracy. So here are the numbers. I took it back to 1997 when the Big 12 was formed. At that time, the Big 12 was the worst of the Power 6 conferences and stayed that way for the first three years. Then schools started to improve. For the following three years the Big 12 was 5th. In the 20 years beginning season 2003 the Big 12 has finished 6th once, 4th once, 3rd 3 times 2nd 7 times and 1st 8 times. Since 2003 the Big 12 has easily been the best conference in college basketball. They are clearly the best this season. The tables below show the rankings back to 1997 in three ways, the Average DPPI by team, the average rank by team and the average rank among the top 6 conferences.