The knock on our conference often comes up in the context of a UConn superlative. If Stanford, South Carolina, Baylor, Tennessee, or whomever from a P5 conference, were in our shoes the last eight years when we moved to the AAC, does anyone think any of those teams would be 160-0 in conference games? How many more games do UConn detractors think this team would lose in a "tough" conference? Last I checked we were in the strongest basketball conference before being forced into the AAC, and we spent years kicking the crap out of all of those now P5 teams too.
Back in the 1980s before South Carolina joined the SEC, the basketball programs spent time in the Metro Conference for eight seasons. The Metro was what the Conference USA was once before it became the Conference USA. During the years that the Gamecocks were in it, the Metro also had Louisville, Florida State, and Virginia Tech. Also had a few schools that now are in the AAC: Cincinnati, Tulane, Memphis.
It was a different era - not long prior to joining the Metro, the South Carolina program had been built up pretty good under Pam Parsons before all the unpleasantness, and her successor Terry Kelly still had some talent on the roster when he led the program into the new conference. He was succeeded by Nancy Wilson, and she led South Carolina to five Metro regular-season titles and three tournament titles in her seven years as head coach. Led them to five NCAAT appearances - mostly 1st and 2nd RD stops with one Sweet Sixteen, but 2-3 years in the top 25. The team didn't go 160-0, but did go 77-18 in their 8 years in the Metro against conference opponents.
Then we joined the SEC in 1992, when Pat Summitt's Tennessee were in their prime, and other teams were at top strength: Georgia, LSU, Arkansas, Alabama, and Vanderbilt were all Final Four teams in the early 1990s, and Auburn - who was a Final Four team in the late 1980s - was still an Elite Eight level team. Wilson's Gamecocks fell off the Earth: we went 13-54 against the SEC in Wilson's six years in the SEC before being fired. With the exception of a couple years under Susan Walvius where we reached an Elite Eight, the program hadn't really done much until Dawn Staley took over.
Those Gamecocks teams in the early years after joining the SEC wouldn't hold a candle to the teams under Staley over the past eight seasons, I'm positive. Perhaps if these recent teams joined a conference like the AAC today, I don't know if they would go something like 160-0, but in those 8 seasons they've gone 114-14 against the SEC, and 121-22 against all others. Of those, South Carolina is 38-7 in the SECT and NCAAT, so that leaves 83-15 against non-conference foes beginning in 2013-14:
13-14: #14 UNC
14-15: #2 CT
15-16: #1 CT
16-17: NR Duke, #1 CT
17-18: #6 ND, #1 CT
18-19: #9 MD, #9 OR St., NR Drake, #4 Baylor, #4 CT
19-20: #17 Indiana
20-21: #8 NCSU, #2 CT
So of those 15 non-conf. losses, only the Drake loss was the really bad one. The unranked Duke loss was in Cameron. All others (13 losses) were against top 25 opponents, and 11 of the 13 were to top 10 ranked opponents (6 of those to Connecticut).
Of the 14 losses against SEC regular-season foes:
13-14: #25 TXA&M, #10 UT
14-15: #13 UK
15-16: N/A
16-17: NR UT, NR Mizz
17-18: #16 Mizz, #6 UT, #2 Miss St., #15 UT
18-19: #7 Miss St., #16 UK, #5 Miss St.
19-20: N/A
20-21: #21 UT, #3 TXA&M
The 2016-17 losses to unranked Tennessee and Missouri look bad, but Missouri finishes just inside the top 25, and both teams end with 20+ win seasons and advance to the NCAAT, so they were not bad losses, especially compared to how the Gamecock team was that season. All other 12 losses have been to top 25 ranked SEC opponents at the time - 6 of them to top 10 ranked opponents.
So then of 29 total regular-season losses in the past eight seasons - in and out of conference - 25 of them were to top 25 ranked opponents, and 17 of those were to top 10 ranked opponents. In the years that CT was in the AAC, were there many other AAC teams that were top 25 ranked? I know USF was for several years, but don't know of any others.
Certainly the Duke and Drake losses make me doubt that SC would have gone 118-0 in the AAC over the past eight seasons had they been in that conference, but 116-2 sounds very likely. We're talking about SC taking Connecticut's place in the AAC, is what I'm understanding of this - being in CT's "shoes".....
Finally, I feel that the Big East has a much greater chance of growing in strength throughout the conference than the AAC did. As was already stated above, the AAC was a football conference, meaning as long as college football was a part of the total equation, it stood the greater chance of generating revenue above what any other athletic program would, and therefore command a greater focus and respect from the respective athletic departments to ensure those FB programs stay viable.
But the Big East now in its current form, is a primary basketball league, and therefore basketball is the primary revenue generators for the conference. And thus the Athletic Directors will be focusing hardcore on the basketball programs, and making sure they are competitive. This bodes much better for WBB within the league....
