An Empirical Look at Gonzaga’s Impact on the West Coast Conference
Note: This is long as hell. There are cool charts throughout, especially in the bottom two-thirds. You should read it, but if you aren’t going to, the cool charts will give you a decent TLDR experience.
Over the years on Twitter there have been a few fans of WCC programs who have expressed to me their displeasure with Gonzaga. Normally it was along the lines of Gonzaga, a behemoth program, makes it virtually impossible for anyone other than BYU or Saint Mary’s to so much as sniff a trip to the NCAA Tournament.
Understandable and reasonable.
Recently though, a new variation has emerged. Instead of the displeasure stemming from something passive — Gonzaga’s continued presence in a league which it has been a member for four decades — this new displeasure with Gonzaga was born out of something the Zags were actively, allegedly, taking part in — damaging the league for their own greedy benefit.
I should say, these are discussions among fans on Twitter, and generally civil and respectful by the standards of that at times atrocious website. In the grand scheme of things, they’re a complete waste of time. But, since fan is short for fanatic, and I am very much that when it comes to college basketball, they led me to spend roughly a dozen hours, and write thousands of words, to figure out if the argument being made was correct.
My belief heading in was that it was flat out wrong, and likely the exact opposite of what was actually taking place. I wanted to figure out, as definitively as possible, what the actual truth was. What if Gonzaga was, in fact, damaging the conference I’ve come to love? No matter how much it might hurt, I had to know.
First, a synopsis of the accusation against Gonzaga.
The general premise of the argument was this: Gonzaga took advantage of its courtship with the Mountain West back in 2018 to pull more cash from the West Coast Conference and as a result of the Zags’ greed, they’re now getting way more money than the other programs in the league, which has led to a team like Portland having one of the worst seasons in league history. As Gonzaga takes a larger piece of the pie, the Portlands of the league have to work with less. Which leads to on-court struggles and poor performance in the metrics and rankings. The worry is that these issues will spread beyond just Portland. In coming years, the number of cash-strapped athletic departments around the league will increase. The inequality gap will continue to grow, and it will become a vicious cycle that only gets worse, and worse, and worse.
Here’s what’s undeniably true, and provable with almost no research, in that argument: the Zags took advantage of their courtship with the Mountain West back in 2018 to pull more cash from the West Coast Conference. That’s it. And even that true statement, when put in the proper context, undermines the argument as a whole.
So now, the context.
Towards the end of the 2017–18 season, a year after Gonzaga’s run to the national championship game, there were serious talks between Gonzaga and the Mountain West about the Zags changing conferences. Reports came out that BYU may follow suit, too. Had it happened, the West Coast Conference would have been devastated. Gonzaga is the league’s bell cow, and BYU’s a high level program with a global brand. Lose both of them and the WCC goes from jockeying with the A-10, AAC and MWC for best non-power conference to somewhere around, I don’t know, the Patriot League? They go from nationally relevant to a league that only alumni and sicko college basketball freaks like me pay attention to.
The league isn’t dumb. It recognizes the reality of its situation.
So, the WCC did what it needed to do. The league lowered the number of conference games from 18 to 16, shifted to an unbalanced schedule that essentially allows Gonzaga to trade a second game against Portland and San Diego, or whoever is expected to be at the bottom of the metrics in any given year, for a pair of non-conference games against, whoever they want, honestly. Instead of playing Portland twice, they can play, say, Kansas once instead. That’s huge.
Perhaps the most important change, though, at least in the argument being made, was that the league changed how it distributed revenue among the 10 member institutions. Specifically, revenue generated by the NCAA Tournament. No longer would the league distribute that revenue evenly among the 10 schools. Instead, the schools that produced the revenue would get more of it than the schools that didn’t produce it. What we’re talking about here are called “units” which are generated by qualifying for and then advancing in the NCAA Tournament.
Gonzaga earns multiple units every season, while Portland has earned a grand total of one unit, ever, 25 years ago. On the surface, I’ll admit, this sounds like a recipe for inequality spiraling out of control. But again, context.
Every team that makes the field, be they automatic qualifiers or at-large teams, gets one unit simply for landing in the bracket. Win a game, and the team generates another unit. That process plays out from the First Four to the Final Four — for some reason winning at that point no longer generates additional units.
So, for example, take 2017, when Gonzaga made the national championship and Saint Mary’s made the second round. The Zags generated 5 units and the Gaels generated 2 units for a total of 7 units for the WCC, and that part is important. The units, which at the time were worth about $1.7 million, paid out over six years, are not given to the programs that earn them. They’re given to the conference from which those programs came. Which means in 2017, Gonzaga making the title game and Saint Mary’s making the Second Round generated units worth roughly $11.9 million for the West Coast Conference.
Those two teams did all the work, but at the end of the day they were set to get just as much as the teams that sat at home during March and generated units worth exactly $0.
Portland, which hasn’t generated a unit since 1996, was profiting off of the units Gonzaga generated at the same rate Gonzaga was, despite not doing anything to generate those units themselves.
Now though, since the league made those changes in 2018, the Pilots aren’t getting the same share as Gonzaga — neither the league nor any of the member institutions have disclosed the details of the new revenue distribution system, so just how much the Pilots’ share shrunk relative to Gonzaga’s is unknown. But, are they actually any worse off? Did Gonzaga wanting to make a greater profit off the work that it was doing really damage the Pilots?
Historically speaking, absolutely not. Yes, the Pilots would make more if everyone got the same amount, but they’re still making a TON of money off of Gonzaga.
The system of paying conferences through units was introduced for the 1991 NCAA Tournament. There are three clear eras of WCC basketball from 1991 to the present. The first, 1991–1998, before Gonzaga’s Elite Eight run that sparked the now of-legal-drinking-age NCAA Tournament streak.
During those eight seasons, the WCC generated 12 total units. Gonzaga was responsible for just one (8.3%). That’s 1.5 units per year, on average, for the conference.
The second era is 1999–2011, from Gonzaga’s Elite Eight run until BYU joined the league. That 13 year stretch saw 40 units generated for the WCC, of which 29 came from Gonzaga (72.5%). 40 units over 13 years averages to about 3.1 per year. Gonzaga’s rise to prominence led to the conference’s revenue stream, from units specifically, increasing more than two fold.
The third era is 2012-present, with BYU joining in the 2012 season and Pacific in 2014. Over those eight seasons (there wasn’t a 2020 NCAA Tournament, so there were no units generated during that season, so there’s no point in counting it here) the WCC generated 35 units, at a rate of 4.4 per year, with 25 coming from Gonzaga (71.4%).
Combine those last two eras and you see just how much of a difference Gonzaga’s success has meant for the league as a whole. Before Gonzaga’s ascension to national prominence, from 1991–1998, the league was generating 1.5 units per year. Since Gonzaga burst onto the scene, the league’s been generating roughly 3.6 units per year.
Using today’s money, the league was generating $2.55 million worth of units per year from 1991–1998. Split among eight teams, that’s just under $320,000, per year, per program.
Since 1999 the league has been generating $6.12 million worth of units per year. Gonzaga’s directly responsible for $4.40 million of those earnings. But instead of getting 72% of the revenue from units, despite generating 72% of the revenue from units, Gonzaga was splitting it evenly with seven, then eight, then nine other teams.
Split evenly among ten teams, $6.12 million worth of units per year comes out to $612,000 per team, per year. $612k is a hell of a lot more than $320k. Gonzaga would have to take a gargantuan chunk of Portland’s revenue from units to put the Pilots in a worse position now than they were before Gonzaga became big enough to bully the league for a greater share of revenue from units.
I don’t know how much Gonzaga’s getting now. The league didn’t disclose it and the programs haven’t disclosed it. But I’m fairly certain it’s not enough to kneecap the Pilots, or any other program in the WCC for that matter. Especially when you consider what Mark Few said a couple of years prior to the league making the change in revenue distribution.
“We need to talk long and hard about (NCAA Tournament) money distribution that we’re making for the league,” Few said to the Spokesman-Review in March of 2016, “and if they’re not spending it on basketball, we don’t need to be sponsoring swimming at those schools or whatever they’ve got going. They’re not all in.” He went on to say, “Our league needs to really step back and take notice. It’s time for some of these other institutions to start picking it up. They’re really dragging the top three down.”
Those comments led Santa Clara to take out a full-page ad in the Spokesman in 2018 to promote the new athletic facilities on their campus.
So, now that we all know just how much Gonzaga’s ascension to the top of the sport means for the rest of the WCC in terms of revenue from units — not to mention the TV contracts the league wouldn’t otherwise get, or BYU wanting to come over which almost certainly wouldn’t have happened without Gonzaga, or Saint Mary’s rise to a premier mid-major program which also likely wouldn’t have happened without Gonzaga, or any of the other ways the league benefits, monetarily, from having a modern day blue blood as a member — it’s time to move on to the next part of the argument.
Now that we know that Gonzaga’s a damn goldmine for the league, rather than a gluttonous monster sucking dry the coffers at Portland or San Diego or San Francisco, it’s time to look into the effect the argument claims Gonzaga’s causing. Are there really more sub-300 teams than there used to be? Is this alleged greed to blame for a downward trajectory of the teams in the league? Is the WCC really getting worse as a whole, while Gonzaga, and to a lesser degree BYU and Saint Mary’s, float around in the warm waters of the sport?
The answer is no and it’s not even close.
If you’ve made it this far, nearly 2,000 words in, your reward is more words, but also a lot more coloroful pictures. Images, if we’re being specific. Visualizations actually might be the best way to describe them. Actually, your reward is math. Colorful math, but math nonetheless. Sorry.
Anyway, to quantify and define the trend of the West Coast Conference in terms of “are the teams good or bad and are they getting better or worse” I poured through years and years of data. From the deceased but not missed RPI, to the NET, and even KenPom. Sure, there are plenty of other ways to define “good,” “bad,” “better” and “worse” but I chose those three because:
- The RPI was, and now the NET is, the primary ranking system used by the NCAA
- KenPom is by far the most popular and common secondary ranking system used by the NCAA
I treat the RPI and NET as the same system, even though they aren’t, because the RPI was the primary tool until being replaced by the NET. Close enough for me. For those, I plotted data going back to the 2010–2011 season, one year prior to BYU joining the league. This was the first set of data I analyzed. By the time I got to KenPom I was a lot more comfortable with the process and the spreadsheets and the charts, so I went all the way back to the very first season in his database: 1996–1997.
The overall trend is that the West Coast Conference is on the rise, even if you take Gonzaga out of the mix. The conference as a whole is getting better, generally, year over year. Not as much as I was expecting, and not nearly as fast as Gonzaga’s been getting better, but all the trendlines are heading up… Except for one. But we’ll get to that soon enough.
Let’s start with the RPI/NET trends.
Here we have the best and the worst WCC teams in each season as well as the average and median of the rankings of all 8, 9 or 10 teams in the league in a given season.
As you can see, Gonzaga’s on the rise. The Zags are the team listed in green in the chart above. They’ve been the league leader in RPI/NET each year since sometime prior to 2011. You can also see that the average and median ranking among WCC teams has risen roughly 12 to 15 spots over those years. What happens if you throw Gonzaga out, though? They’ve climbed from being best in the league at №50 back in 2011 to three straight years atop the league and no worse than №2 in the rankings. Is that performance alone enough to skew the league average up?
Nope.
In this chart the red line is the exact same as it is in the previous chart, but the other three lines are different. Gonzaga is no longer included, so the green line represents either Saint Mary’s or BYU, and the blue and yellow are the median and average ranking of all the teams in the league except for Gonzaga. Those three lines are heading in the right direction, albeit in a slightly less steep fashion than they are if you keep the Zags in the mix.
As it turns out, though, the bottom of the league does seem to be getting worse. Specifically, the worst team each season nowadays is, depending on the metric you’re looking at, based on the trends, expected to be as bad if not outright worse than the worst team was 10, 15 or 20 seasons ago. That doesn’t prove the argument that Gonzaga is making the league worse, though.
We only have three seasons of data since the WCC changed how it allocates revenue from units. The trend among the worst team in a given year has been flat to down since long before the league made that change. Remember, the NCAA units are distributed over the span of six years. So yes, the two worst RPI/NET rankings in the league since 2011 have come since the change to revenue distribution in 2018. If units were paid out in one lump sum, you could point to the change as a very likely causal factor in that regard. But since they come over six years, the impact of the change is blunted — again, if the league would just release the details on how they’ve changed the system we’d have a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on, but alas.
Also, the worst place team has by far the most variance of the four trends I measured. Yes, of the 11 seasons in the charts above, the two worst teams were in 2019 and 2021, but the seventh worst was between those two in 2020. With the KenPom data, which covers 25 seasons rather than just 11, you’ll see how all over the place the worst team has been for decades rather than years, and you’ll also see a different story when it comes to that trend.
KenPom uses adjusted efficiency margin (if you’re reading this I’m sure you know but just in case, adjusted efficiency margin [AEM] is the amount of points a team would win, or lose, by against a hypothetical statistically average Division I opponent in a 100 possession game) to sort his rankings. If you’ve got the best AEM, like Gonzaga does right now, you’re №1, if you’ve got the 75th best AEM, like Saint Mary’s, you’re 75th, and so on.
Here you can see, once again, Gonzaga’s meteoric rise. The Zags are in green in every season on the chart above other than 2010 (Saint Mary’s) and 1997 (Santa Clara). You can also see that the league’s average and median AEM has trended from just around 0 to closer to +5 over those 25 seasons.
You’ll also note that the most erratic than of the four colors is red. In 2005, the least efficient team in the conference (Loyola Marymount) had an AEM of +0.54, a year prior the worst team (San Diego) was at -12.41, while just three seasons later it was once again the Lions, this time at -22.33. That 2008 LMU team rates as the least efficient and lowest ranked team in West Coast Conference history (KenPom era). Since 2010, the worst team in the league year over year has been actually pretty stable, according to this metric.
Once again though, how much of this is inflated by Gonzaga?
First of all, the vertical axis is different here. My spreadsheet, numbers, charts and graphs skills improved over the course of putting these together, but I am still not entirely sure how to make these. So instead of going from +40 to -40, this chart goes from +30 to -30. Honestly, I don’t even know if that matters.
Anyway, as is the case with the RPI and NET, throw Gonzaga out of the mix and the rest of the league is still a league on the rise. The best team other than Gonzaga is expected to be better now than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. That was true even before BYU joined as Saint Mary’s began to transform itself in the mid-2000s.
The biggest difference I see between the KenPom data and the RPI/NET data is among the worst team in a given season. According to the RPI/NET, the league’s last place team is worse relative to the rest of the sport than it is according to KenPom. You also see the worst teams according to the RPI/NET both occur after the switch from RPI to NET. That could have something to do with it.
But, I’ll admit, just like it’s too soon to tell what the change in revenue sharing has done to the bottom of the league, it’s too soon to tell what the change from the RPI to the NET is doing to the bottom of the league. It’s entirely possible that one or both of those changes will have a detrimental impact on the bottom of the WCC. It’s also entirely possible Portland was just really damn bad for the past few seasons, bad enough to fire its head coach mid-season. We could look back ten years from now and view those Portland teams much like we now view the late-2000s LMU teams that finished sub-300 in KenPom back-to-back seasons, as part of an uncharacteristically bad few years in a program that’s normally at least a little better.
What’s undeniable, though, is that the West Coast Conference has been on the rise. Even without Gonzaga, the league from top to almost bottom, is getting better. Some of that, maybe even most of that, is directly because of Gonzaga. From the units they generate to the TV deals they make possible, from the ascension of Saint Mary’s into a rival worthy of primetime ESPN slots to the decision by BYU to land its non-football sports in the WCC, Gonzaga makes the West Coast Conference better.
Fans on Twitter might not be able to see it, but the data prove it to be true.
