Actually, I begged off not because I’m too busy, but because I am utterly ignorant about the Big 12. Nor could I have talked a little smack quite like that. Good job.

…and there is no denying resent history as he tried to do. We have more recent champions in the SEC than any other conference. SEC SEC!

well done.

I’d also like to congratulate ESPN Teh Magazine!!1 for illustrating a conversation about SEC and Big 12 undergrads with a picture of a woman clearly sporting an N.C. State sticker on her face. (Or have I just lost my mind?)

Crack work, arts department.

couple things

1.)I love how he wanted to get away from performances of recent years as a gauge of strength. They dont have much of a leg to stand on there. He would much rather use margin of victory and the ambiguous rankings of the first quarter/third of the season. Notice he has to use MOV and the polls. He cant just point to the rankings. According to the sagarin poll… the third party standard both sides use, the big 12 looks pretty bad after the top 5 teams in the conference. He mentions who is in the top 10 and the top 25 because after #25, the Big 12 falls off a cliff.

Consider this:

1. of teams ranked over 40: SEC – four teams Big 12 – seven teams.
2. of teams ranked over 60: SEC – two teams Big 12 – four teams

So, over half of the big 12 is ranked over 40 and a third is ranked over 60.

He says

“The top teams are among the best of any kind, while the middle of the pack is solid enough that an SEC fan can’t make the usual arguments about top-to-bottom depth.”

12 teams in each conference. Lets break it into 3rds according to rank. A top third, a middle third, and a bottom third.

As said above, we can certainly argue about the bottom third. It sucks. All ranked over 60.

As for the middle third, with the exception of one team, all of the Big 12’s middle third are ranked over/worse than the SEC’s middle third. So if put in order of best to worst the eight teams of the two conferences would look like this.

SEC
SEC
Big 12
SEC
SEC
Big 12
Big 12
Big 12

Their top third is really good. So is ours.

2.)He could only try to disprove the case for the sec rather than prove the case for the big 12. When he did try to prove why the big 12 is the best conference, his argument cannibalized itself, and you did a great job of pointing that out.

“Just so I’m clear, your argument that the Big 12 has depth is that the bottom half of the conference got absolutely crushed by the top half in five completely uncompetitive games, yet the SEC has no depth because an undefeated Kentucky team almost upset Bama, Vanderbilt has risen to 5-0 and Ole Miss upset a top ten Florida team? You understand that’s completely absurd, right?”

3. Since it seems a lot of this who has the better conference arguing becomes circular because the sec and big 12 dont play each other much, I looked into how the conferences have fared vs out of conference teams ranked in the top ten. The Big 12 was 5/15 or 33. The SEC was 9/19 or 47. Something to note from this is there are some outliers. OU and Neb were 0/3. Arkansas was 0/5 (great job guys). If you drop Nebraska and Arkansas the big 12 is 42% and the SEC is 64%.