MWC

CHN's 31 conference ranking, including 10 year historical averages based on average RPI finish. For more information on historical RPI averages, check out the Conference Data Page. Links lead to league preview pages.

ST. LOUIS -- The Missouri Valley Conference and the Mountain West Conference announced today an agreement in principle to the formation of an annual Mountain West/Missouri Valley Challenge for men’s basketball. All 19 members of both leagues will participate in the Challenge, which will feature head-to-head competition between nine Mountain West and nine Missouri Valley teams annually.

In recent weeks, the Rise & Fall series has chronicled the progress (or regress) of college basketball's major conference teams. But if I equated each team to a civilization, I was mistaken. It is really the NCAA conference that equates to a burgeoning civilization or nation, each with its sometimes stable and sometimes rotating member states. Like civilizations, the prestige and power of conferences wax and wane..

People have been emailing me this week asking how I came up with the groupings for the Conference Rise & Fall articles. While the groupings I used were based on a mix of intuition and stats, here are the actual conference RPI's over the last decade. Notice the clean split between certain league divisions.. for example, the BCS leagues and non-BCS leagues. The difference in avg RPI between the best and worst BCS leagues (ACC & Pac-10) is 2.7, which is almost as big as the gap between the Pac-10 and the closest non-BCS league.