NCAA Basketball: Top 16 combined basketball and football programs

Which schools have the best combination of NCAA Basketball and football success? We break down the Top 16 programs here.

As the off-season for both NCAA Basketball and Football continues to wear on, NCAA.com recently put together a list of the Top 16 schools for combined success in basketball and football. Though the methodology was straightforward, simply looking at overall winning percentages in each sport, the final results didn’t seem to really capture the intended results.

To create a more satisfying ranking system for the best combined basketball and football programs, I came up with a more complex methodology. First of all, I only looked at the results from the last 20 seasons in each sport. College sports are very much a “what have you done for me lately” business. Our perception of each team is shaped much more by recent results than championships from decades ago, so this seemed like a reasonable strategy.

For each season, a team was awarded five points for a championship, three points for a Top-10 finish, and one points for a Top-25 finish. Those points were then adjusted, giving more weight to recent results. Michigan State’s basketball championship in 2000 was only worth 60% of Virginia’s championship from last season, for example.

After the points from each season were added for each sport, an overall rating was calculated by averaging the two values and multiplying by a consistency factor. If a team had identical scores for basketball and football, the consistency factor was 1.0. If one sport did not score at all, the consistency factor was 0.5. So a team like Clemson is only getting 50% credit for their football success, because their basketball team did not finish in the final Top-25 in any of the seasons considered.

If a school did not finish in the Top-50 overall in either sport, they were thrown out (sorry Kansas and Alabama). This was done to prevent one dominant sport from carrying all of the weight for the other lagging one and skewing the final results.

Finally, just for clarification, the AP Poll was used as the standard for college football and the Coaches Poll was used for Basketball. This was simply because the AP Poll was not published after the NCAA tournament for older seasons, so the Coaches Poll was the only option.