NCAA mens tournament conference roundup

So I thought I'd take a look at how each conference was performing in the tournament in some sort of objective way. All in all, this is silly since its way too small a sample size...but fun to do nonetheless. I've listed the wins and losses in each conference starting from the round of 64, as well as a plus minus, which is a silly metric for measuring how well a conference is performing relative to expectations. Basically, if the higher team were to win every game in the tournament, then each conference would be at 0. Any time there is an upset, the team conference gets credited (or debited for a loss) the difference in seeds. This makes the metric highly biased towards big upsets (2-15 for instance...) which ultimately makes sense...since if a conference loses an 8-9 game, its only slightly underperforming, but when a conference loses a bunch of top seeds early (cough cough big east last year) they are majorly underperforming...



SEC 3-1, 0
W: uk vandy uf
L: alabama

ACC 3-2 -6
W: UNC FSU NCSU
L: duke uva

Big east 6-3 +4
W: marquette, UL, SU, Gtwn, Cincy, USF
L: ND UWV Uconn

big 10 5-1 -6
W: wisc OSU IU purdue MSU
L: michigan

big 12 4-2 -13
W: KU ISU baylor KSU
L: texas missou

pac10: 1-0 +5
W: CU

the big 12 is performing the worst, with missouri having a big upset, and no mitigating win. THe big east had a big 12-5 win yesterday, partially negated by ND's loss, NCSU's win partially cancels duke's loss.

THis method accepts that seeds are a good measure of expectations, which ultimately hurts the big 10, which didn't have so many chances for an upset (1) as the big east did (3). But, funly enough, as the tournament goes on, the conferences will have more chances for upsets, so by the end of the tournament, we should have a pretty decent idea of which conferences performed best relative to expectations.