In many ways, it’s an obvious point: The Big 12 is the top basketball conference in the land.
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First, I’m going to throw a boatload of numbers at you. For the first time since 2002-03, the Big 12 has three teams in the top five of the AP Poll (No. 2 Kansas, No. 3 Oklahoma and No. 5 Iowa State), plus two more (No. 16 Baylor and No. 20 West Virginia) in the top 20. Think the human polls are flawed? Fine: The Big 12 looks even better in the analytics world, with those five teams ranking in the top 18 on KenPom.com and with the conference topping KenPom’s conference rankings. The Big 12 ranks second in the forever-flawed conference RPI metric, but that’s only a sliver behind the Pac-12, which ranks fifth in KenPom’s rankings.
Good wins? The Big 12 has a lot of them: Oklahoma obliterated Villanova on a neutral court. Kansas handled UCLA and Vanderbilt at the Maui Invitational (and nearly beat Michigan State, the top-ranked team in the country, in November). Baylor also beat a Vanderbilt team that will be at the top of the SEC this season. Iowa State beat a hot-shooting Iowa team at home in one of the most thrilling games of the year to date, and Texas – which right now projects to be on the NCAA tournament bubble and the sixth tourney team from the Big 12 – upset North Carolina at home in another thriller.
Or do you simply want a personal testimonial from someone who’d know better than anyone?
“To me it’ll be as good or better as it’s ever been,” Kansas coach Bill Self said.
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Part of it is because the Big 12 has won at a better clip than any conference in college basketball a month into the season. The Big 12 has won more than 81 percent of its nonconference games, tops in the nation. It has two undefeated teams and four one-loss teams, better than anyone else. It is 13-9 against the top 50 RPI teams.
The Big 12 is better positioned than any league to take its run-and-gun style deep into March.
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But I would caution against that. In this new era of faster-paced college basketball, the Big 12 is as well-positioned as any conference to take its unassailable nonconference success and bring it to the Final Four come April -- maybe one team, or perhaps two or three.
http://www.foxsports.com/college-ba...s-iowa-state-cyclones-oklahoma-sooners-121515
