By Gordon Mann

Each year the NCAA puts together a couple resources that I love. There are two basketball record books, one for men and one for women, which are available online. At the end of the season, the NCAA puts together a NCAA Tournament media guide that has box scores, records and historical tidbits galore.

A couple years ago, I wondered what it would be like to create a media guide focused on individual conferences. Something that summarized the major award winners for each conference and then made it easier to make comparisons across conferences.

I started to build a Conference Guidebook for men’s basketball in the Mid-Atlantic and Atlantic regions since I was covering them for Hoopsville. The Guide Book gave me a convenient resource to enrich broadcasts, articles, front page stories and Hoopsville appearances. So I branched out to the conferences with the largest fan followings on our site and then eventually covered all the conferences.  The end result is this document.

There are three pieces for each conference:

• An introductory page that lists the conference members, their most recent conference championship (usually tournament unless otherwise noted) and membership changes since 2006.
• A summary of the 2010-2011 season with final standings, NCAA tournament results, conference award winners and statistical leaders.  Some conferences also have summaries for the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 seasons.
• A list of the conference’s major award winners, NCAA tournament results since 2000, D3hoops.com All-Americans, national semifinalists and Jostens Trophy finalists.

For schools that have changed conferences, my rule of thumb is to list the school’s awards and accomplishments where they are currently affiliated. For example, Catholic’s All-Americans are listed under the Landmark Conference even though the Cardinals were members of the Capital Athletic Conference when some of the All-Americans were active.

It took parts of three years to pull this information together. The conferences that I reviewed at the beginning of the process have more season summaries than those I reviewed at the end.  During that three year stretch, it occurred to me that this was primarily an exercise in gathering information that is already available elsewhere online.  Some conferences, like the CCIW and OAC, have their own record books with all the information I’ve gathered and much more. A few, like the CUNYAC, have the information available, though not online.  Others, like the CSAC, don’t have the information compiled at all. So I pieced together what I could find online and pestered conference officials to help me fill in the blanks.

At times during the process I wondered if this resource would really be useful to anyone other than me. But, sort of like climbing a mountain “because it’s there,” I finished this project because I started it.

Hopefully the mountainous media guide will prove interesting to you.  One section I think you’ll like is the compilation of the following information on a conference-by-conference basis.

• Record vs. non-conference opponents for the 2010-2011 season: The NESCAC tops the list with a .753 winning percentage followed by the WIAC (.729) and ODAC (.712). The NEAC was remarkable for its lack of wins, just 11 in 66 games (0.167). Other conferences that ranked in the Top 10 may surprise you.
• Record vs. Division III opponents for the 2010-2011 season: This provides another point of comparison for conferences that are geographically isolated, like the NWC and ASC.
• Record vs. non-Division III opponents for the 2010-2011 season: A derivative from the first two comparisons. Some conferences play a lot of opponents outside of Division III because they don’t have much choice. Others almost never do so. The UAA members didn’t have any games against non-Division III opponents last year. 
• NCAA tournament record for conference members from 2002-2011: If you’ve ever wondered what the strongest conferences in the country are, this is a good way to gauge that. The five conferences I’ve personally considered the strongest – CCIW, NESCAC, ODAC, UAA and WIAC in alphabetical order – all fall in the Top 7 along with the NCAC and OAC. This is also an indirect comment on why some teams don’t get Top 25 recognition even when they have great records. Pollsters remember what you do in March.
• NCAA tournament bids: Teams can’t win tournament games if they don’t make the tournament to begin with. This list shows which conferences have had the most at-large bids. I was surprised at how many at-large bids some conferences, like the NEWMAC and ASC, have received. 

Pulling this together involved a lot of data collection and entry over three years. There is some information I couldn’t locate, usually marked with highlighted blanks. And there are undoubtedly some errors or omissions. When you find errors or if you have missing information, please let me know by email (gordon.mann@d3sports.com) or by message on the Daily Dose or the message boards. If there’s sufficient interest in the resource, I’ll publish new editions with the corrections.