Conference rankings: Big 12 and Big Ten are still neck-and-neck

We have now seen 19 days of college basketball played in this most unusual of seasons. A number of games have been postponed or canceled outright because of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet we’ve still seen enough basketball to glimpse an emerging hierarchy among Division I’s conferences.

Put simply, the Big 12 and the Big Ten are easily the two strongest conferences in the nation this season.

If you’ve been reading along here for a while, you know that I evaluate conferences based on top-to-bottom strength, NCAA tournament seeds and NCAA tournament wins. We’ll have to do without that last measure when rating conferences early in the season, of course, but we can certainly look at both top-to-bottom strength and, thanks to my colleague Joe Lunardi, potential 2021 NCAA tournament seeding.

Here is how the nation’s six major conferences rate out on each of these metrics.