Ranking the Mid-Major Conferences

What mid-major conference is performing the best? Which mid-major conferences should be on your radar for the NCAA tournament? Here are the best of the best.

The Mid-major conferences may not get the attention they deserve, but they are of the utmost importance to college basketball. Without the mid-majors, the excitement of an unexpecting Cinderella story in March is gone. Without the mid-majors, we lose Jon Rothstein’s famous “epitome of brutality” tweet year after year. Without mid-majors, college basketball just isn’t the same.

Before we can get to business ranking the mid-major conferences, we must define what a mid-major conference is. At CBB Review, Matt Waldman and myself took the time to define what we believe a mid-major is. A Mid-Major is an evolving term. One year a conference or a team may be considered to be a mid-major and the next season they could have established themselves enough to be considered a perennial national title contender, cough, cough…. Gonzaga.

With this in mind, we dove deep into the past to research teams and came up with the thought that a conference is a mid-major as conference if it sends ≤ 20% of their teams to the NCAA tournament in the past five seasons. We know finances play a major role, but we believe that this is a solid starting point. So for the sake of these rankings, using our definition, the AAC, ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pac-12, and SEC were not rated.

Now, with the mid-major conferences decided, what’s next? I took the time to use this season’s metrics as a starting point. I compiled KenPom, NET, BPI, and Torvik ratings. I averaged them together and focused on conferences that were deeper, conferences that had better teams at the top, and lastly using the eye-test to divide the mid-major conferences into five tiers.

The first tier, are the conferences that have the potential to earn multiple bids to this year’s NCAA tournament. The second tier has multiple teams in each conference who could win a game in March. And the last three tiers, of course, could surprise us in March, but most likely have only one team who could make their own Cinderella story.

Tier One

Despite Gonzaga being in tier one of the mid-majors, the Atlantic 10 took the top spot due to a large part because of the depth of the league at the top. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the top seven teams in the conference were able to win the A-10 tournament. The WCC, MW, and MVC all have two teams for sure with some playing with a third quality team.

Atlantic 10

West Coast Conference

Mountain West Conference

Missouri Valley Conference

Tier Two

Tier two contains some quality teams and conferences. These three mid-major conferences will be on the radar of every major program come March.

Conference USA

Mid-American Conference

Southern Conference

Tier Three

Tier three conferences may not provide the fireworks in March, although it is certainly possible. These mid-major conferences will provide excitement throughout the regular season, ultimately cannibalizing one another.

Big West

Sun Belt

Colonial Athletic Association

Tier Four

Summit League

Big Sky

Horizon League

Patriot League

Ohio Valley Conference

Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference

America East

Tier Five

Big South

Southland Conference

Atlantic Sun

Western Athletic Conference

Northeast Conference

Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference

Southwestern Athletic Conference

All data was collected Tuesday afternoon.

Feature image photo by Brian Murphy/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images