For some reason, every year in college basketball brings new debate about whether this team or that team is a “Mid Major” or a “Major” program, and recently we seem to have extended that discussion to the leagues that incorporate our team and whether a league is “Mid Major” or “Major.”

Honestly, I do not understand this notion. While some of the smaller leagues like the Missouri Valley Conference have indeed shown a proclivity for putting more than one good team in the NCAA Tournament a couple of years in a row, and as much as we all love the NCAA Tournament for its glorious upsets and unpredictability (who can forget Steve Merfeld being carried around the court after his Hampton Pirates upset second-seed Iowa State in 2001?), the reality is that the “Big Six Conferences,” the ACC, Big East, (mathematically challenged) Big 10, Big 12, Pac-10, and SEC absolutely dominate the event.  Since 2003, the members of these conferences account for 48% of the Tournament’s bids and an astounding 77% of the wins.  My immediate reaction to the second number was – sure, but that is because 90% of the Final Four teams are from those conferences (by the way, these numbers reflect those conference affiliations at the time of the Tournament, so Marquette’s 2003 run to the Final Four does not count for the Big East but for Conference USA instead).

I decided to look a little deeper at the data for each Tournament since 2003, and I found that not only do teams from the Big Six Conferences win 77% of all the games, but they also win 71% of the games in the first round, while only garnering 48% of all the bids! While those numbers may not seem overwhelming to the casual observer, I will also tell you that I have not taken into consideration what happens when two teams from the Power Conferences play each other in the first round like Boston College and Texas Tech did in 2007.