College Hoops 3rd Best Conference History - Big 12

Amazing that a conference as dominant as the Big 12 could in turn be so dominated by one team. Kansas record streak of 14 consecutive titles finally ended in 2019. That year Iowa State won the tournament title after Texas Tech won the regular season title and then just missed the National Title.

However, from Wilt Chamberlain in 1957, to Paul Pierce in 1997 and Mario Chalmers in 2008 - three of the top six teams are from Kansas and those teams have combined for a 17-7 mark with a 5.5 rating, the third best in the game.

When you consider that Texas Tech team, Baylor's dominant 2021 national champs, and Wayman Tisdale's 1985 Sooners are the others in the Top 6, you can see the top six is tough to beat.

The 2008 national champs from Kansas ranked 2nd in the game with a 15.2 currently, but that is a bit suspect. In typical Kansas fashion they rolled up huge margins of victory against the other 21st century Big 12 teams to pass shoot up through the rankings.

Note I do list Danny Ainge's Brigham Young team with the Big 12 teams rather than in the "other" grouping since they are joining the Big 12. I did not include the American Athletic Conference teams that are moving to the Big 12 since they are in a conference list I include.

Rnk	Great Team	Year	Key Player	W	L	Pts	Allow	Rate
	Top 6 Big 12			17	7	74.1	68.3	5.5
1	Kansas	2008	Mario Chalmers	5	1	74.7	56.0	15.2
2	Kansas	1997	Paul Pierce	3	0	75.3	60.3	10.1
3	Baylor	2021	Jared Butler	2	2	86.0	78.5	7.1
4	Oklahoma	1985	Wayman Tisdale	3	1	75.3	73.8	1.9
5	Texas Tech	2019	Jarrett Culver	3	2	65.6	67.2	0.3
6	Kansas	1957	Wilt Chamberlain	1	1	67.5	74.0	-1.5
7	Oklahoma St.	2004	John Lucas	1	3	68.8	71.0	-3.1
8	Kansas St.	2008	Michael Beasley	1	1	75.0	75.5	-3.3
9	Oklahoma	2016	Buddy Hield	1	3	60.3	67.3	-4.4
10	West Virginia	2010	Kevin Jones	1	3	70.3	76.0	-4.6
11	Oklahoma St.	1946	Bob Kurland	0	1	80.0	82.0	-5.0
12	Texas	2003	T.J. Ford	1	2	68.7	76.3	-5.3
13	Kansas	1988	Danny Manning	0	1	58.0	67.0	-7.6
14	West Virginia	1959	Jerry West	0	1	68.0	69.0	-8.4
15	Brigham Young	1981	Danny Ainge	0	1	67.0	77.0	-8.6

We invented the Value Add Basketball Game, and since then have grown it to to 135 teams of all-time great teams and players. We have played 188 games to date, and 63,000 unique visitors have clicked on the game. 

Seven current conferences have at least six all-time great teams in the game. We decided to rank those conferences based on the average rating of their top six teams so far in our games against other teams.

Click on the game to play yourself - it contains everything you need to play the Value Add Basketball game, which lets you pit any of 136 great all-time college teams against each other. To pick your two teams it is best to click on this Google doc and print the pages of the teams you want (each team is one page). I track my games on this google sheet, but play your own for free!

Danny Ainge's 1981 BYU Elite 8; Crowder and Butler's 1st of 3 Marquette Sweet 16 Teams,

The loaded Brigham Young trio of Danny Ainge, Fred Roberts and Greg Kite not only led the team to the Elite 8, but all three of those players had long NBA careers to show just how good they were. Both teams are on the updated google doc of 136 of the greatest college teams and players of all time. The cards are used with our free Value Add Basketball Game, still our most popular post with 56,800 visitors so far.

After adding a few teams from 2020 and 2021 we ended up with an odd number of teams per region, so we added the 1981 BYU team to the West Region and the 2011 Marquette team to the Midwest Region.

Ainge was WAC player of the year as three ranked teams battled through the season, with BYU finishing one game behind both Utah and Wyoming for the title. Not many saw BYU play as their only two nationally televised games before the tournament were a win against Washington early in the season, and then a crushing win over rival Utah to close out the season.

However the twin towers of future NBA players Roberts and Kite took over with Ainge to beat Princeton, destroy UCLA in an upset, and then stun Notre Dame 51-50 to reach the Elite 8, where they fell to Ralph Sampson and UVa. 

Both teams start ranked right around 75th of the 136 great all-time teams in the game.

The additional team to round out the Midwest is the 2011 Marquette team, which made a stunning run to the Sweet 16 as a No. 11 seed to set the stage for three straight Marquette teams to make the Sweet 16.

Under-the-radar Jimmy Butler led this team before his shocking selection by the Chicago Bulls in the 1st round of the next NBA draft, then going all-NBA within a few years.

Also off the radar was Jae Crowder, who was setting the stage to team up with his buddy DJO (Darius Johnson-Odom) to take the team the next year to the Sweet 16 before also being a surprise NBA pick who has gone onto hit 1,000 3-pointers in the NBA.

Coming off the bench were the much more heralded 5-star Vander Blue as well as Davante Gardner, who would survive near certain 1st round elimination by Davidson, then went all the way to the Elite 8.