Conferences seem sort of irrelevant to me. Like last year the SEC was total total garbage. That's all anyone ever said. Then all of a sudden the SEC accounted for half of the final four. And ESPN and other stations can hardly catch their breath between all of their Big 10 worship, yet the B1G hasn't won a title in 14 years and over the past 25 years they've only won two.
tldr: good team = good team, regardless of conference.
Pretty much.
This isn't football where you need a strong conference to get votes. Basketball is settled on the court, and perceived conference strength has had little to do with postseason success.
The early non conference season in basketball favors teams that have consistency and low turnover, while in the end talent wins out more often than not, and the conferences that have consistently put more talent in the NBA(in terms of players who actually stick in the league) are the Pac12, the ACC, and the SEC. The Big 10, Big East, and Big 12 trail substantially.
In the SEC with the exception of Kentucky, Florida and Vandy, no one has had any stability in coaching recently, which has hurt the league, especially in terms of early season competitiveness, but the SEC is really not that bad of a league, and has substantially outperformed leagues that are perceived as better basketball leagues like the Big 10 and Big East at producing NBA talent, even after you take Kentucky out. It just hasn't performed well in the regular season non conference for whatever reason.
Rating conference strength as a single unit is kind of impossible to do objectively, because it all depends on how you weight it towards the best teams or the worst teams. The ACC probably has the overall best top 5, but the bottom of that league is garbage, yes even worse than the bottom of the SEC. The big 12 has 8 really strong evenly matched teams, but can their best team compete with the top of the ACC (or Kentucky)? Once you get the the middle of the pack, is there really all that much difference between the 40th best team vs the 50th or 60th best?
