Counting down the most prestigious programs since 1984-85
By Harold Shelton, Nick Loucks and Chris Fallica
ESPN Research
Updated: July 21, 2008
What is prestige? What does a college basketball program have to do to prove its prestige? What program is the most prestigious? And who's to judge?
This summer, we decided to tackle the hundreds of Division I men's college basketball teams, weighing the thousands of regular-season and postseason wins and losses, the NBA draft picks, the All-Americans and the national titles to come up with a numerical point system to provide unbiased rankings of every college hoops program's success since the start of the 1984-85 season. Normally when you see these rankings, they are the "expert" opinion of one or more people whose knowledge (and sanity) usually is questioned by those who disagree.
But with ESPN's Prestige Rankings, there is no such argument. We let the numbers do the talking. We assigned point values for certain successes (win a national title, earn 25 points) and failures (get your program banned from the NCAA tournament, lose three points), put all the seasons through our big calculator and came up with the No. 1 program (and the No. 300 program) of the past 24 seasons.
Why cut it off at the 1984-85 season?
The 1985 postseason was the first NCAA tournament that was expanded to the 64-team format (precursor to the current 65-team format), in which a champion must play at least six games to win a national title. That span -- 24 seasons -- is a large enough sample size to get a true barometer of a program's recent history.
This is also an era of the game in which parity has ruled. UCLA will not top the rankings thanks to its domination in the '60s and '70s. NC State, San Francisco, Wyoming and CCNY aren't cracking the Top 50 because their national titles came before 1985. Minnesota won't get credit for having two top-two NBA draft picks in the '70s.
It was a different world for college basketball back then, and those accomplishments, as remarkable as they are, aren't a factor here.
Explanation of the scoring system
We wanted to account for a program's positive accomplishments. National titles and deep advances in the NCAA tournament are the big point-getters.
Having the best record in your conference's regular season is a fairly big deal, as well. We didn't just give out points here for conference titles. (Considering how many conferences are split into divisions and award shares of the title for, say, a 12-6 team from the West Division when a 14-4 team is in the East Division. In this scoring system, the 14-4 team would be the only one to earn five points.)
We also doled out four points for conference tournament titles. These were given fewer points than a regular-season title because a three- or four-day stretch of domination in your conference shouldn't be rewarded as much as a season-long one. For conferences that didn't hold conference tourneys (notably the Pac-10 and Big Ten for years and the Ivy currently), we simply awarded the points to the team that was given the conference's automatic bid to that year's NCAA tournament.
What about Cinderellas? We all remember 15th-seeded Richmond over Syracuse and 15th-seeded Hampton over Iowa State, and first-round upset wins by 12- through 16-seeds are rewarded accordingly.
We also had to factor in negatives. When your highly seeded team falls flat on its face in the first round against a no-name school, your program loses two points. When your team is caught breaking the rules and the NCAA bans it from the postseason, that is an embarrassment for the fan base. Same thing goes for losing seasons. Both cost your program three points in our rankings.
• National title … 25
• Title game loss … 20
• National semifinal loss … 15
• Elite Eight loss … 10
• Best record in conference's regular season … 5
• 30-plus wins in a season … 5
• Sweet 16 loss … 5
• Conference tournament title … 3
• AP first-team All-American … 3
• Losing in NCAA second round … 3
• Player in top 10 of NBA draft … 2
• NCAA first-round win as a 12-16-seed … 2
• NIT title … 2
• AP second-team All-American … 2
• 20-29 wins in a season … 1
• NCAA tournament berth … 1
• Postseason NIT berth … 1
• AP third-team All-American … 1
• NCAA first-round loss vs. 12-16-seed … -2
• Losing season … -3
• Ban from NCAA tournament … -3
>> Minimum 15 seasons in Division I
** Ties are broken by overall winning percentage since the 1984-85 season
^^ Teams are listed by their current conferences
Using the 15-season minimum, 41 current D-I schools won't qualify, giving us exactly 300 schools.
