Which Conference Is Best Represented in This Year's NCAA Tournament?

If there's an argument that always sparks debates around the water cooler, it's regarding which conference is best in college sports. For college basketball, the Big Ten always has formidable teams, and the ACC always has a great showing in the big dance. The SEC isn't the power they are in college football, but they generally have a handful of teams getting in each year, including an undefeated Kentucky this year.

So how will we determine which conference is the best? Math, of course. But for a conference to qualify, it must have had at least four teams make the tournament. We'll then take the average nERD ranking of the teams within the conference in order to rank the groups from best to worst.

If you're unsure what our nERD metric is all about, it tells us how many points we would expect a team to beat an average team by on a neutral court.

Before we get started, here are some numbers to know: 32 conferences get an automatic bid to the tournament, but only 11 conferences saw more than one team make it to the dance. Of those 11 conferences, only six of them have at least four teams in the dance: the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big East, Pac-12 and SEC.

So which conference is best? Click through to find out!