The term "Power 5" has been a source of confusion for years when applied to men's college basketball. There are six major conferences in hoops, but because there are five in college football, the label gets tossed around in both sports.
Next season, however, we will at last have a true Power 5 in college basketball. The Pac-12 is dissolving, and 10 of the league's 12 teams will join different major conferences for 2024-25. (Of course by then college football fans will be talking correctly about a "Power 4." Cross-sport confusion will continue. So be it.)
With a new alignment of Division I's top basketball conferences just around the corner, let's forecast what the pecking order might look like within this emerging Power 5. Which conferences stand to benefit from all of this realigning?
Expansion and basketball strength
A reminder is in order at the outset: Our preferred criterion for ranking leagues is simply how good its teams are likely to be going forward. While this sounds straightforward enough, it's also true that top-to-bottom strength isn't the sole measure of a conference's basketball prowess.
Consider, for example, the ACC in 2018-19. The league earned three No. 1 seeds, Virginia won the national title and the ACC produced six lottery picks in that year's NBA draft, including three of the top four selections (Zion Williamson and RJ Barrett from Duke and De'Andre Hunter from UVA). Any conference commissioner would quite rightly be thrilled to preside over that kind of season.
Nevertheless, in terms of overall strength the ACC ranked just No. 3 at KenPom that season, behind the Big 12 and Big Ten. It turns out the 15-team ACC's long tail included no shortage of members that weren't very good at basketball that season.
Expansion need not be synonymous with this kind of "dilution" of your league's basketball strength, but in practice that has indeed been a strong tendency -- particularly when so many expansions have been driven by football considerations.
As it happens, "dilution," however slight, is in fact what we're likely to see statistically next season. While the Big East sits out this round of realignment, three of the other four major conferences could see their overall strength dip -- slightly but measurably -- as a result of expansion.