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.
The ACC is done few basketball favors by this realignment
We here at "2025 Realignment" headquarters have already discussed this matter with reference to the ACC, so we'll be brief.
Imagine that the forthcoming 2025 alignment had instead been instituted prior to the 2018-19 season and that the Pac-12 has been gone now for a little more than five years. In this scenario, SMU, California and Stanford have been members of an 18-team ACC all this time.
If this were the case, we would have seen the ACC rank No. 5 out of the five major conferences in four of the past five full seasons. In fact, the ACC would currently be on a streak of four straight last-place finishes dating to 2019-20. So far this season, the league would again be a distant fifth behind the other major conferences.
On paper, the ACC's average KenPom strength over the past five full seasons plus 2023-24 would have been almost 9% weaker with its 2025 membership than it has been with its actual teams.
Naturally the past 5½ seasons will furnish, at best, an imperfect road map for the future. Indeed, Cal and, especially, SMU have improved measurably since last season.
These recent developments are, however, baked into the 9% figure. The new 18-team ACC will, as it stands now, claim no fewer than five members that haven't heard their names called for at least five Selection Sundays.
The Big 12 is likely to look as mighty as ever
At the other extreme of the major-conference rankings we find the Big 12, which has claimed the No. 1 spot at KenPom in eight of the past 10 seasons. For such a powerful league to add a new member such as perennially strong Houston, for example, would appear to be a case of the rich getting richer.
That's not a bad summary, all things considered. To be sure, the Big 12's overall strength will likely take a small hit when, in effect, the league loses Oklahoma and Texas in exchange for gaining not only UH, BYU, Cincinnati and UCF (all of which joined up this season) but also Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah (all due to arrive next season).
Still, if we proactively slapped a Big 12 label on next season's teams right now, the "new" 16-team league would retain its perch as the strongest conference in the nation today by a healthy margin.
In addition to top-to-bottom strength, the new Big 12 will boast an impressive number of teams with recent NCAA tournament experience. Assuming, as appears increasingly likely, that Utah reaches the field of 68 in March, all 16 members of the new Big 12 will begin play next fall having played in at least one of the past five NCAA tournaments.
With expansion the SEC pulls alongside the Big Ten
Dalton Knecht makes two 3-pointers at the end of the half to give Tennessee a 12-point lead over Florida.
Thanks to the relatively modest scope of its expansion and the fact that Texas and Oklahoma both project to be better than the average major-conference basketball program going forward, the SEC could record a slight improvement compared with what it would have showed with its current teams.
In fact, using our "expansion has already happened" experiment, a 16-team SEC would today rank second behind a new-look 16-team Big 12 for conference strength in 2023-24. SEC basketball has come a very long way since the days when it was dismissed as consisting only of Kentucky and a bunch of football schools.
At the same time, it's true that, over the long haul, the Big Ten's future 18-team membership projects to outperform the revamped SEC by a small margin. That long haul, however, hinges in part on new members such as USC and especially UCLA rebounding from the uncharacteristically "down" seasons their teams are recording in 2023-24.
The Big East is expansion's 'control group'
Alone among the major conferences, the Big East is making no changes to its membership during this round of realignment. The league would therefore figure to show us more of what we've grown accustomed to seeing from it in the past.
Most notably, Big East teams have been unusually consistent over the past five-plus seasons. Collectively, no other major conference's teams exhibit as little year-to-year variation in adjusted efficiency margin as do Big East members. The good teams have tended to stay good. Struggling programs often continue to struggle.
Add it all up and the Big East projects to stay right where it already is, in the midsection of the power conferences in terms of top-to-bottom strength. Pencil in the Big East as typically varying between Nos. 2 and 4 in the new Power 5.