2023-24 college basketball conference previews: Pac-12
The swan song
PREVIOUSLY: Intro: Parallax, Previews Part One, Previews Part Two, Previews Part Three, Previews Part Four, Previews Part Five, AAC, WCC, Mountain West.
Hello! This is Part Seven of our multi-week conference preview series. Today’s previews cover the ACC, Pacific-12, and Big East, which are ordered using KenPom’s conference rankings. These are all separate posts, because we are finally to the portion of these that are both pretty long and require their own address. This one is for the Pac-12. If you say Pac-12 three times in a mirror, the world’s most annoying Big 12 fan will appear, whimpering that YOU didn’t care when the Big 12 almost died 13 years ago.
Right here is where we crack the territory known as the Big Six. Every year, these conferences get no fewer than three teams into the NCAA Tournament. Generally, it’s more like getting four or more in. All of them have legitimate national championship contenders within their ranks. Every single conference listed has very real and very reasonable aspirations of at least sending a team to the Final Four this coming April. The problem is that not everyone can.
Also, these conferences have depth issues somewhere along the line. Based on a consensus of the top four metrics sites (Ken, Torvik, EvanMiya, Haslametrics), today’s three conferences contain eight of the nine Big Six teams ranked outside the national top 100. The star power still exists - five of the top eleven belong to these three - but the back ends of these conferences are pretty bad compared to the Big Three.
Lastly: as has been outlined a few times now, all conference previews are behind a paywall. If you have a financial issue that keeps you from paying the $30/year for the subscription ($20/year for people with .edu emails), let me know and I’m happy to give you a discount. Alternately, I think you can use a free trial for a week or whatever. Just get in touch.