Primary Question
Is NIL Widening the Gap Between College Basketball’s Power Conferences and Everyone Else?
Is NIL Widening the Gap Between College Basketball’s Power Conferences and Everyone Else?
Hello! My name is Kevin Howse. I am a graduating senior at Xavier University studying Business Analytics and Marketing. I’m originally from Rochester, New York, but I will be staying in Cincinnati after graduation to join PepsiCo. In my free time, I enjoy both playing and watching a wide variety of sports.
For my Programming in Analytics course, I was tasked with performing an analysis on a dataset of my choosing, and college basketball was an easy decision. As an avid fan, I had a hunch that the competitive landscape had been shifting in recent years, and I wanted to see if the data backed that up.
What makes this topic especially personal is that it is not my first time here. Back in high school, I tackled NIL as my Capstone project when the concept was brand new — working alongside Ryan Guerinot, who was the Assistant Athletic Director at Niagara University at the time, and got a firsthand look at how the industry was thinking about it in its earliest days. Now, years later and with a lot more tools at my disposal, I find myself back at the same question — only this time with real data, a programming background, and a lot more to say about it.
Part 1: Intro, Question, and Primary Dataset
Introduction to the Data
This dataset leverages the Simple Rating System (SRS) to evaluate the relative strength of college basketball conferences over the last decade. By quantifying performance through this metric, we can objectively compare conference depth across different eras and identify which specific league earned “elite” status in any given season.
Beyond historical rankings, this data serves as a lens through which we can observe the evolving landscape of the sport. Specifically, it allows us to analyze whether the gap between “Power” and “Mid-Major” conferences is widening, providing statistical insight into whether the recent introduction of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) is concentrating talent and further consolidating power within the nation’s top programs.
Seasons are indexed by their ending year. Accordingly, the 2024 season denotes the full 2023–2024 campaign.
Quick Summary of SRS
Simple Rating System; a rating that takes into account average point differential and strength of schedule. The rating is denominated in points above/below average, where zero is average. Non-Division I games are excluded from the ratings. (Sports Reference)
Doug Drinen wrote an in-depth explanation that you can view here. (Pro Football Reference)
Raw Data
This data was ethically scraped by looping through pages of Sports Reference and combining it to one complete data set.
Dataset: Conference_Data
Part 2: Descriptive Analytics
Using the dataset built from ethically scraping Sports Reference, we will walk through a series of descriptive analytics designed to answer questions that speak directly to the primary research question — and to the things college basketball fans actually argue about.
Question #1: What are the top 5 conferences each year since 2016?
Example: 2017 Top 5 Conferences (by SRS): Big 12, ACC, Big East, Big Ten, and SEC
# A tibble: 55 × 5
Season Conference SRS SOS Rank
<dbl> <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 2016 Big 12 Conference 15.0 10.1 1
2 2016 Atlantic Coast Conference 14.0 9.24 2
3 2016 Pac-12 Conference 11.8 8.52 3
4 2016 Big East Conference 11.6 7.92 4
5 2016 Big Ten Conference 10.9 7.12 5
6 2017 Big 12 Conference 17.4 11.3 1
7 2017 Atlantic Coast Conference 14.7 9.67 2
8 2017 Big East Conference 13.2 9.11 3
9 2017 Big Ten Conference 12.6 8.75 4
10 2017 Southeastern Conference 11.7 8.82 5
11 2018 Big 12 Conference 15.2 9.83 1
12 2018 Big East Conference 14.2 9.28 2
13 2018 Atlantic Coast Conference 13.4 8.51 3
14 2018 Big Ten Conference 13.0 7.99 4
15 2018 Southeastern Conference 13 9.34 5
16 2019 Big Ten Conference 15.1 10.8 1
17 2019 Big 12 Conference 14.8 10.5 2
18 2019 Atlantic Coast Conference 14.2 9.06 3
19 2019 Southeastern Conference 12.7 9.29 4
20 2019 Big East Conference 9.92 6.96 5
21 2020 Big Ten Conference 15.1 10.5 1
22 2020 Big 12 Conference 14.4 10.0 2
23 2020 Big East Conference 13.7 9.19 3
24 2020 Pac-12 Conference 11.5 7.66 4
25 2020 Atlantic Coast Conference 11.1 7.73 5
26 2021 Big Ten Conference 14.9 11.9 1
27 2021 Pac-12 Conference 11.9 9.86 2
28 2021 Big 12 Conference 11.7 8.94 3
29 2021 Southeastern Conference 11.2 8.48 4
30 2021 Big East Conference 10.6 8.73 5
31 2022 Big 12 Conference 15.5 9.75 1
32 2022 Southeastern Conference 12.3 8.45 2
33 2022 Big Ten Conference 11.9 8.6 3
34 2022 Big East Conference 11.2 8.16 4
35 2022 Pac-12 Conference 9.49 7.35 5
36 2023 Big 12 Conference 15.6 10.2 1
37 2023 Big Ten Conference 12.5 8.75 2
38 2023 Big East Conference 11.3 8.25 3
39 2023 Southeastern Conference 11.0 7.66 4
40 2023 Pac-12 Conference 10.5 8.01 5
41 2024 Big 12 Conference 15.1 9.12 1
42 2024 Big Ten Conference 13.0 9.15 2
43 2024 Big East Conference 12.8 9.58 3
44 2024 Southeastern Conference 12.2 8.38 4
45 2024 Atlantic Coast Conference 11.4 8.31 5
46 2025 Southeastern Conference 18.8 12.1 1
47 2025 Big Ten Conference 16.2 11.3 2
48 2025 Big 12 Conference 15.9 11.4 3
49 2025 Big East Conference 12.1 8.63 4
50 2025 Atlantic Coast Conference 9.81 7.38 5
51 2026 Southeastern Conference 16.8 11 1
52 2026 Big 12 Conference 16.4 11.2 2
53 2026 Big Ten Conference 16.0 11.4 3
54 2026 Atlantic Coast Conference 13.9 9.04 4
55 2026 Big East Conference 12.7 9.49 5Although this doesn’t immediately answer the question… it is cool to be able to pull up any season and immediately see which five conferences were operating at the highest level that year — something that would have taken hours of manual research before tools like this existed. For most of the decade, the answer was predictable: the Big 12 was “the basketball conference,” consistently sitting at or near the top of the SRS rankings year after year, and it was hard to argue otherwise. But the last two seasons have told a different story, with the SEC claiming the number one spot back to back and doing so by a margin that is hard to ignore. The most fun part of this kind of data, though, is being able to rewind — it’s one thing to know who’s on top now, but being able to ask “who were the top five conferences back in 2017, and in what order?” and actually get a clean, defensible answer is where SRS really earns its value.
Question #2: What are the strongest seasons by a conference in the last 10 years?
# A tibble: 351 × 4
Season Conference SRS SOS
<dbl> <chr> <dbl> <dbl>
1 2025 Southeastern Conference 18.8 12.1
2 2017 Big 12 Conference 17.4 11.3
3 2026 Southeastern Conference 16.8 11
4 2026 Big 12 Conference 16.4 11.2
5 2025 Big Ten Conference 16.2 11.3
6 2026 Big Ten Conference 16.0 11.4
7 2025 Big 12 Conference 15.9 11.4
8 2023 Big 12 Conference 15.6 10.2
9 2022 Big 12 Conference 15.5 9.75
10 2018 Big 12 Conference 15.2 9.83
11 2019 Big Ten Conference 15.1 10.8
12 2020 Big Ten Conference 15.1 10.5
13 2024 Big 12 Conference 15.1 9.12
14 2016 Big 12 Conference 15.0 10.1
15 2021 Big Ten Conference 14.9 11.9
16 2019 Big 12 Conference 14.8 10.5
17 2017 Atlantic Coast Conference 14.7 9.67
18 2020 Big 12 Conference 14.4 10.0
19 2018 Big East Conference 14.2 9.28
20 2019 Atlantic Coast Conference 14.2 9.06
21 2016 Atlantic Coast Conference 14.0 9.24
22 2026 Atlantic Coast Conference 13.9 9.04
23 2020 Big East Conference 13.7 9.19
24 2018 Atlantic Coast Conference 13.4 8.51
25 2017 Big East Conference 13.2 9.11
# ℹ 326 more rowsSome Key Takeaways:
1st: Southeastern Conference (2025) — 18.76 SRS
2nd: Big 12 Conference (2017) — 17.44 SRS
3rd: Southeastern Conference (2026) — 16.76 SRS
4th: Big 12 Conference (2026) — 16.35 SRS
5th: Big Ten Conference (2025) — 16.22 SRS
6th: Big Ten Conference (2026) — 15.98 SRS
7th: Big 12 Conference (2025) — 15.90 SRS
The SEC has emerged as the new standard of conference excellence, claiming the top spot in 2025 and returning even stronger in 2026, signaling that NIL and roster construction through the transfer portal have fundamentally shifted the balance of power in college basketball. The Big 12 remains the most consistently elite conference of the decade, appearing six times in the top 10 across multiple years, but is now being challenged at the very top rather than operating unchallenged as it did from 2017 to 2023. Perhaps most striking is the clustering of 2025 and 2026 seasons at the top of the all-time list — six of the top seven performances come from just the last two years, strongly suggesting that conference strength is not cyclical but accelerating, with the gap between elite and average conferences widening by the season.
Question #3: Has NIL created stronger conferences, or were elite conference performances already the norm before the NIL era?
From 2017 to 2020, college basketball saw three conferences consistently performing at an elite level each season, suggesting an era of relatively balanced power at the top where multiple conferences could legitimately claim dominance. That parity collapsed between 2021 and 2024, with only one conference per year cracking the all-time top 25 — a period that coincides with the early and chaotic years of NIL, where roster instability and transfer portal volatility may have leveled the playing field by disrupting everyone equally. It is no coincidence that this same window produced some of the most memorable Cinderella runs in recent tournament history, with teams like FAU, St. Peter’s, Oral Roberts, and FDU capturing the country’s attention in ways that felt increasingly rare. Many reporters and analysts have since pointed to NIL and the transfer portal as the reason those stories are disappearing — as rosters stabilize around money and movement, the gap between the haves and have-nots widens, and the magic that made those runs possible becomes harder to replicate. Now the trend is reversing sharply, with 2025 returning to three elite conference performances and 2026 hitting four — the highest single-season count in the dataset — indicating that the programs and conferences who figured out NIL and the portal first are now pulling away, and a new era of concentrated dominance may be just beginning.
Question #4: What does the SRS and SOS trend look like for the top 5 and bottom 5 conferences over the last decade?
Both the Simple Rating System (SRS) and Strength of Schedule (SOS) lines tell the same story — elite conference performance peaked early around 2017, dipped through the early NIL era from 2021 to 2023, and has since surged to its highest point in the entire dataset by 2026. The trendlines make the direction undeniable: both strength of schedule and overall conference quality are moving upward across the decade, but the rate of acceleration in the last two years is what stands out most.
The dip between 2021 and 2023 is particularly meaningful in the context of NIL. That period coincides with the chaotic early years of name, image, and likeness — roster instability, portal volatility, and collectives operating without oversight — and the data reflects it. Conferences were weaker on average, schedules were softer, and that is exactly the window where Cinderella runs flourished. Now, as NIL matures and power programs consolidate talent, both lines are climbing sharply together, suggesting that stronger conferences are also playing each other more — making schedules harder and performance higher simultaneously.
What makes this even more telling is what is happening at the other end of the spectrum. The bottom 5 conferences — your mid-majors and smaller programs — have seen their SRS and SOS trend in the opposite direction, with both metrics declining over the decade and taking their most dramatic drops in 2025 and 2026. The gap between the top and bottom of college basketball is not just growing — it is accelerating, and the data on both ends of the spectrum points to the same culprit. As power conferences consolidate elite talent through NIL and the portal, the programs left behind are not just staying in place — they are actively getting weaker.
Question #5: Which conferences have been consistently elite over the last decade, and which ones are less consistent?
Using the all-time top 25 conference-season performances, we can identify which conferences have shown up most consistently at an elite level — separating the programs that peak once from the ones that have made dominance a habit.
The Big 12 is the definition of sustained excellence — appearing in the top 25 all 10 times, they have not had a single season over the last decade that didn’t rank among the best conference performances in college basketball. The SEC, by contrast, has been a quiet underperformer historically, but both of their top 25 appearances have come recently, including the single strongest conference-season performance in the entire dataset this year — suggesting the SEC may be done waiting its turn. They hold 2 of the top 3 seasons by a conference over the last decade within the last 2 years. With an abundance of resources, massive media deals, and programs that have shown a clear ability to attract top-tier talent through NIL, it is worth asking whether the SEC is not just having a moment — but whether they are becoming the conference of the future.
Question #6: Do the conferences with the highest SRS ratings actually earn the most NCAA tournament bids, or are there other factors such as strength of schedule that inflate their numbers?
To answer this, we will take the top 5 conference-season performances of the last decade by SRS and cross reference them against their NCAA tournament bid totals and Final Four appearances — putting the numbers side by side to see if elite SRS ratings actually translate to March success or simply reflect a conference beating up on itself.
# A tibble: 5 × 5
Season Conference SRS NCAA FF
<dbl> <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 2025 Southeastern Conference 18.8 14 2
2 2017 Big 12 Conference 17.4 6 0
3 2026 Southeastern Conference 16.8 10 0
4 2026 Big 12 Conference 16.4 8 1
5 2025 Big Ten Conference 16.2 8 0The SEC’s 2025 season stands alone as the most dominant conference performance of the decade, posting an SRS of 18.76 and sending 14 teams to the NCAA tournament — more than any other top-5 conference-season by a wide margin. Their 2026 follow-up was nearly as impressive, placing four more teams in the field than the Big 12 despite ranking third overall on this list, signaling that the SEC’s rise is not a one-year anomaly but a structural shift. The 2025 SEC season also delivered where it mattered most in March, producing both Auburn and the eventual national champion Florida Gators in the Final Four — but outside of that historic year, the other four top-5 conference-seasons combined for just a single Final Four appearance, Arizona in 2026, who were blown out by Michigan, raising real questions about whether conference-level SRS dominance actually translates to March success.
Part 3: Secondary Data Source
To capture unstructured public sentiment, I scraped the 10 most relevant Reddit pages worth of threads discussing NIL in college basketball from the past year, pulling comments directly from r/CollegeBasketball to understand how everyday fans are actually talking about the topic.
Question #7: What do people think of NIL?
Using sentiment analysis on the scraped Reddit comments, we can measure whether public discussion around NIL has skewed positive or negative over the last year — giving us a data-driven read on how college basketball fans actually feel about the topic rather than relying on media narratives alone.
The massive spike in July 2025 aligns directly with the House v. NCAA settlement kicking in on July 1st — the single biggest structural moment in NIL history, where revenue sharing officially began and collectives rushed to dump money before new College Sports Commission oversight took effect. The overwhelmingly positive sentiment during that period suggests fans and analysts were largely optimistic about what the new era would bring, making it the loudest and most enthusiastic moment over the last year.
What follows is telling — sentiment stays mostly positive but quieter through the fall, with the first red bars appearing around December 2025 into early 2026, right when transfer portal windows open and NIL spending criticism tends to peak. The April 2026 surge likely reflects March Madness energy, with positive sentiment dominating as fans engaged with whether expensive, NIL-built rosters actually delivered when it mattered most.
Question #8: What keywords are repeated in these comments?
Over the last year, across 10 scraped threads of Reddit discussions about NIL in college basketball, the conversation is dominated by exactly what you would expect — NIL itself, the transfer portal, and money are the three most frequently mentioned terms by a wide margin, showing that fans are deeply engaged with the financial and roster-building side of the sport. What is surprising, however, is how infrequently the more negative or emotionally charged terms appear. Words like “unfair,” “parity,” “gap,” and “upset” barely register, suggesting that while fans are clearly aware of and talking about NIL, they are not as openly frustrated or critical about its impact as the mainstream media narrative might suggest. “Cinderella” appearing only 13 times across all threads is perhaps the most telling finding — it is a concept that coaches, analysts, and journalists bring up constantly when debating NIL’s effect on March Madness, but the average Reddit fan is not making that connection nearly as often as expected.
Question #9: What does Reddit data actually say about the Cinderella Story in college basketball?
While Cinderella stories were not a dominant theme across the dataset, a couple of threads referenced it directly in their title — let’s take a closer look at what those conversations were actually about.
[1] "Cinderella is dead - she was murdered by NIL & the Transfer Portal"
[2] "The Cinderella Story in Crisis: How NIL May Be Eroding the Magic of March"The two threads that referenced Cinderella directly in their title tell you everything you need to know — both frame the Cinderella story not as something fading naturally, but as something being actively killed by NIL and the transfer portal. The consensus is clear: fans who are engaged enough to write about it believe the magic of March is eroding, and they are pointing their fingers directly at the financial transformation of college basketball as the reason why.
Overall Takeaways and Reasoning
The reason I chose this topic is simple — I am an avid college basketball fan who enjoys debating conference superiority with friends who root for rival schools, and SRS gave me a legitimate analytical framework to back those arguments up. What drew me to it specifically is that SRS puts every conference on a level playing field, using math rather than reputation to determine which conferences are actually having stronger years.
The surge of Cinderella stories between 2020 and 2023 makes complete sense in hindsight — that was the exact window where power conference SRS ratings were at their weakest and the gap between the best and worst conferences was at its narrowest, creating the conditions where an upset was not just possible but almost inevitable. As that gap widens dramatically in both directions — power conferences surging to all-time highs while mid-majors sink to all-time lows — the margin for a Cinderella run shrinks with it. It is not impossible, but the data suggests that pulling off that kind of magic moving forward will require an almost perfect storm, making those moments rarer and, when they do happen, far more miraculous than anything we saw during that golden window of parity.
Another takeaway is that the Big 12 has been the most consistently elite conference over the past decade, but the SEC is coming off back-to-back historically strong seasons and appears well-positioned to become the dominant conference of the next decade. From a Xavier fan’s perspective, I’d love to see the Big East reclaim some of that ground and return to being consistently “elite,” which feels increasingly possible with revenue sharing and the absence of major football programs across the conference.
What makes all of this feel even more real is the impact on individual player movement. Yaxel Lendeborg was reportedly offered around $2.3 million to transfer from UAB to Michigan—a clear example of a mid-major to power-conference jump that continues to widen the gap. Similarly, Xavien Lee chose to leave Princeton for Florida, opting for greater opportunity and compensation over staying with the program that developed him. While it’s completely understandable for players to pursue those opportunities, these decisions are no longer exceptions—they’re becoming the norm, and they highlight just how quickly the divide between power conferences and everyone else is growing.
