How Strong is a Division II Team?

In 2007-08, the UTEP Miner's womens basketball team started off their season with a game against St. Mary's (Texas), a high-ranked Division II school. I decided to have my fictional UTEP Miners play the Central Oklahoma Broncos, a real life Division II team ranked #16 among Division II teams at the time.

If both of these teams were pro teams, card creation would be easy: load in the statistics, print out the cards, and play the game. However, one would expect that the two teams wouldn't be on an equal basis. So how do you alter the cards? And which set of cards do you alter?

I figured that at least for now, I would let the UTEP cards alone and make alterations to UTEP's prospective opponents. We would look at Central Oklahoma's statistics, but we also know that Central Oklahoma's statistics are derived from playing other teams in Division II. How do we change the cards to reflect the difference?

The first question was: How strong is Division II compared to Division I? We really don't have an answer for this question in basketball. Division I teams don't play Division II teams that often, and when they do, the sample of Division II teams probably isn't a representative sample. This might be an insurmountable problem.

However, there is a division that is similar to Division II - the football division that was formerly called "I-AA" before they changed it to some convoluted name. I-AA teams play BCS teams all the time, usually at the beginning of the season. Was there a way to rank the I-AA teams compared to their BCS counterparts?

As it turns out, this has already been done. There are sites on the internet that rank Division I and Division I-AA teams together in the same table - after all, if you're making bets, you want to know exactly how strong that unknown Division I-AA team is. I managed to locate such a table and found that the strongest Division I-AA team was ranked about #50 overall.

There are about 120 BCS-type football teams. I came up with the calculation: 50/120 = 5/12. The strongest Division II basketball teams should be 5/12 of the way down the table of Division I basketball teams.. This puts that team at about #142 on the total ranking of 340 or so Division I women's basketball teams.

However, the I-AA teams, when they appear, did not appear in close order. There was an average gap of about four places between appearances among I-AA teams in the BCS/I-AA table. I came up with a new rule:

The #1 Division II women's basketball team would be ranked about #142 overall in Division I women's basketball,
The #2 Division II team would be ranked about 142 + 4 = #146 overall in Division I,

and so on.

Central Oklahoma at the time was ranked about #16. This put Central Oklahoma equivalent to about #202 on the scale of Division I women's basketball teams.

Meaning that Central Oklahoma is, believe it or not, better than UTEP. I don't find that too implausible. Central Oklahoma was nationally ranked at the time, and UTEP was sitting around .500.

The next question: Now that we know the team's relative positions to each other, how do we adjust the stats? More on my next post.