With the Big Ten expanding next year, SBN's Off Tackle Empire (Big Ten Blog) conducted a rather detailed performance review of the last decade in Big Ten women's sports.
That review began with the most televised women's sport: basketball.
Decade in Review Part I: Women’s Sports - Off Tackle Empire
For each sport, the teams were ranked top to bottom and normalized to a 10 point scale. If a team finished first in the conference, they were awarded 10 points and down to 1 for last place. For sports that had all 11 schools participating, the breakdown ended up being 10, 9.1, 8,2 …. 1.9, 1. For sports using less than 10 schools, the points were again normalized to 10 to 1 for placement. If there was a tie for first, I did not award 10 points to each school (like each school likes to claim a co-championship as a full one). I split the totals between the placements. In the case of two or more way ties, they split the totals equally. For example if two teams in a 10-team sport finished first, they both got 9.5 points.
So who was the winner?
Talonk writes that by his analysis, "Purdue’s dominance in the early part of the decade has held off Ohio State’s late charge."
But which school has been the best overall? (Please cue this beautiful music before checking it out. Seriously, it helps.)
On to the present, yesterday, I linked to SBN's Addicted to Quack's (Oregon) call to change the Pac-10 Tournament with news of the Pac-10's partnership with YouTube. But I missed a similar, and perhaps more vehement, call from SBN's California Golden Blogs.
Women's Week In Review: Improved Effort Not Enough Against Stanford - California Golden Blogs
I hate the new Pac-10 tournament format. It’s a joke. And I say that knowing full well that the Bears would have benefitted greatly from the format just two years ago. But the level of advantage it gives to the top two teams in the league is absurd. If you are Arizona, you know that maybe the only way to secure a tournament spot is with season-defining win over Stanford. To do that you just need to beat an Oregon team that will run up and down the court endlessly for 40 minutes, then probably beat another up-tempo team in USC, and then play a fully-rested Stanford team in your 3rd game in 3 days? That’s insane. With the current format, they should just give every team a week off and let Stanford and UCLA play in the championship game straight away.
Although we shouldn't judge the worth of a conference tournament structure by the competitive hierarchy of the present, the fact that this was a conference dominated by the top two teams this year makes this structure seem even worse..
Other links:
- The Rutgers University men's basketball team suffered arguably one of the worst officiating injustices in Big East tournament history yesterday. But SBN's On the Banks (Rutgers) wonders if C. Vivian Stringer's Rutgers squad suffered a worse fate in 2008 with Clockgate against Candace Parker and the Tennessee Lady Vols.
Ouch. - SBN's Hustle Belt (MAC Sports) takes a geographical look at The Center of MAC Women's Basketball.
- Whenever you get done listening to the accompanying music for the Big Ten conference on repeat, former Tennessee Lady Vols point guard Cait McMahan aka Babi Mac officially released "Quick Flow" a day after the announcement that Stanford Mel Murphy was in producing a video for her new single "I Got Bounce". Who would win a batttle? (h/t Holly T aka BuiltByDays)