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This is the third and (I promise) last of the series “A Little College Sports Analysis”, wherein I attempt to use data from the Learfield Directors’ Cup to evaluate the prowess of college athletic conferences. The first article focused on data wrangling with the available pdf scoring files. The second then detailed an approach to assessing school and conference performance based on DC data for the single school year, 2017-2018. One year’s data is unlikely to be stable enough to pick winners from losers, so in this final blog I average school performance scores/rankings for five years to attempt to answer the “burning” question of which athletic conference performs best with Directors’ Cup data.

Below is the R code for the analyses. The technology used is Microsoft Open R 3.4.4 running Jupyter Notebook. The R data.table and tidyverse environments drive data manipulation, while ggplot2 produces the charts.

In the end, I believe the Pac 12 reigns as the top conference using Directors’ Cup scoring/ranking as the point of departure. My beloved Big Ten might compete for that honor if only the NCAA would do away with untoward spring sports programs!

Read the entire blog here.