Top to bottom, the Huge 12 is the very best conference

After topping the previous 2 NCAA men’s tournaments, the Big 12 continues to establish itself as the best conference in guys’s college basketball in 2022-23. Here are simply a few stats from ESPN Analytics that demonstrate how dominant the conference has been this season:

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• The Huge 12 has the highest average rating using the Male’s College Basketball Power Index (BPI) of any conference at 11.

• The weakest group, Texas Tech, has a BPI (the number of points above or second-rate a group is) of 9, greater than the average of the second-ranked Huge 10 (8.5 ).

• The Huge 12 is the only conference with three groups in the BPI’s top 10: Texas (5 ), Kansas (8) and Baylor (10 ).

• The 10 hardest remaining schedules belong to the 10 teams from the Huge 12.

• All 10 teams in the conference are in the BPI’s top 40. No other conference even has 10 teams in the leading 50.

• Joe Lunardi’s bracketology currently has 7 of the 10 teams making the tournament field, with two of the staying three amongst his First Four Out (Oklahoma) and Next Four Out (Oklahoma State). If the Huge 12 can get eight groups in, it will top the 1991 Big East for the greatest percentage of teams in a conference to make the Huge Dance. ESPN Analytics offers this a 33% opportunity of happening.The Big 12 has four teams with more than a 1 %opportunity to win the 2023 NCAA competition. No other conference has more than two.Using a mix of BPI ratings and how close the game is forecasted to

  be, ESPN Analytics generates a metric called Matchup Quality for each game. This determines how amusing a game is predicted to be on a scale of 0 to 100. Using this metric, three of the most interesting games of the regular season will occur this evening, and all three are Huge 12 matches featuring the conference’s top-10 BPI teams.Baylor at Texas Tech(9 p.m. ET, ESPNU) earns a 94.6, with the BPI preferring the Bears by 1.1. Kansas at Kansas State(7 p.m. ET, ESPN )gets a 95.2, with Kansas winning by 1.3 on average.Texas at Iowa State(8 p.m. ET, Big 12/ESPN+ )grabs a 96.3, with the BPI predicting the Cyclones to win by 1.8. Of the 10,000-plus regular-season matchups in

  men’s college basketball, only about 50 each season earn a rating above 94. So far this season, we’ve had 20. Thirteen of those have included clutch time(within five points with under 5 minutes)and two more were within 6 points. All 20 have actually included AP Top 25 groups.(Depending upon Monday’s AP rankings, Baylor versus Texas Tech could be the very first match to break this trend.)More than half of these highly expected matches featured, or will include, a group from the Big 12. With many high-quality teams, the conference has actually been must-watch television all season and has a genuine possibility to

  extend its NCAA tournament champion streak to 3.