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So I’ve been tinkering around with a lot of college statistics lately… you’d think the clock had turned back and I was a high-school senior again or something, the way I’ve been looking at everything from win percentages to academic standards to the revenue that major schools spend on their sports teams.

Now the analysis that follows is by no means conclusive, but at least I think my methodology is sound…

Basically the goal in this week’s statistical analysis was to look at five of the six major conferences in both college football and men’s college basketball (the two sports that both generate the most revenue and swallow that revenue) to determine their relative strength both on and off the field. (I declined to analyze the Big East due to the fact that only half of its members compete in both sports at the top division.) Through my analysis I’ve created two different statistics:

• COST/WIN — This is sort of a simplification in description. Rather the formula works more like this:
    Revenue ÷ [(wins in football + men's basketball) × win % in both sports] …
  The basic goal is to assess how well that revenue is producing results in the two sports that both produce the most revenue and also use the greatest portion of the expenses, football and men’s basketball. How are the blue-chip athletic departments handling their finances. Are they getting outplayed by the little guys who were expected to have no chance due to the disparity in the playing field?
• SUCCESS RATE – Success rate weights the figure produced by the cost/win analysis against the graduation success rate the NCAA uses to assess what percentage of kids a school graduated over a rolling six-year window. Using a formula that divides the cost/win from the academic success rate divided by ratio of scholarships granted in each sport per year (85 for football, 13 for basketball).

The numbers came from two sources. First, the NCAA’s report on graduation success rate by sport was the source for graduation rates for each school in football and men’s basketball. School athletic expense data came from USA Today’s report on college finances. All data is for the 2009-10 fiscal year and the seasons which fell during that year (2009 football season, 2009-10 basketball season)…

So how do the top five conferences stack up against one another?

So what does this data mean? The Big Ten spends slightly more than the SEC on its programs, and gets slightly less value for it in terms of wins. But at the same time their success rate is higher in large part because they graduate five percent more of their athletes (which would translate to 29 more kids getting degrees from Big Ten schools than their SEC counterparts over that six-year window.

The Pac-10 graduates fewer football and men’s basketball athletes than any other major conference, but they also spend on average less than any other conference on their programs. Because of this even the mediocre schools from each sport fail to drag it down far enough (especially with Stanford and USC, both top schools, not included in the study due to lack of private-school data).

Even without its four top-shelf private schools — Duke, Boston College, Wake Forest and Miami — included in the data, the ACC graduates more players than all but the Big Ten. Its public-institution member schools spend on average just $1.34 million more than their Pac-10 counterparts on athletic finances. Yet their success rate in general is abysmal when compared to the other conferences.

What does this tell us? Who knows… but it can be fun to think about the proposal that Mike Leach made back when he was still the coach at Texas Tech. When his Red Raiders were tied with Oklahoma and Texas atop the Big XII South standings, and they needed to break the tie to see who would play in the championship game against the top North team, Leach proposed using academic success as a tiebreaker. It would certainly be a novel way to include the student aspect of the student-athlete in the equation…

But let’s take it further. How much is what a school spends on sports indicative of its success on and off the field? What follow are the grades for every one of the public universities from the five conferences included in the study. Consider this a new sort of way of looking at team success in college sports…

Okay, so that’s a lot of numbers. But the same rules apply as the did in the conference analysis. The less a school is spending relative to their success rate, the better. In a way, you could argue that — while they falter when it comes to football for the most part — the ACC is the best in the country at graduating players and getting victories relative to the amount of money that they spend on sports. Only Virginia — who had a losing record in both football and basketball in the 2009-10 analysis year — was above a 10 success rating.

What are the failings in such a rating? Only that it lacks the depth to properly account for the value of a football win versus a basketball win… which perhaps will be fixed soon enough in a future edition of this column.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this look, which if anything else is illuminating. The cost per win figures are definitely legit, while the success formula could still use some tweaking. Be sure to leave your thoughts and suggestions for future analysis!