MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – For many years, at least since the mid-1980s, the Atlantic Coast Conference reigned supreme in college basketball.
 
The ACC was the dominant conference in March Madness, winning 66.5% of its NCAA Tournament games and boasting 10 national champions during a 33-year period from 1985 to 2018, according to research compiled by Daniel Wilco in an article posted on NCAA.com on Oct. 5, 2018.
 
The ACC's 270 NCAA Tournament wins were 27 more than the Big Ten had then, 28 more than the Big East had and 61 more than the SEC had.
 
Farther down the list, in a distant fifth place, was the Big 12 with 155 tournament victories and only one national title – Kansas in 2008. To outsiders, the Big 12 was basically Kansas and the Nine Dwarfs.
 
Texas Tech began to change that narrative in 2019 when former coach Chris Beard led the Red Raiders to the national championship game where they lost to Virginia in overtime.
 
And since COVID shut down March Madness in 2020, there has been no league in the Big 12's league. Baylor won its first national championship in 2021 and last year, Bill Self got national championship No. 2 with the Jayhawks.
 
In the three NCAA tournaments since Wilco's article, only the Big 12 and the Pac 12 own winning records in all three seasons. The Pac-12's 65.6 tournament winning percentage is slightly better than the Big 12's 65.3, primarily because of the Pac-12's impressive 13-5 mark two years ago.
 
However, last year the Pac-12 was just a three-bid league as it was in 2019. This year, the conference is probably looking at four bids, based on Joe Lunardi's latest Bracketology.
 
The Big 12 had six teams dancing in 2019, a record seven two years ago and six again last year. Lunardi has 70% of the Big 12 on the right side of the bubble right now, while analytics expert KenPom has nine of 10 Big 12 teams in his top 37 in adjusted efficiency margin, which is his formula for determining a team's offensive and defensive efficiencies.
 
What that exactly means is far above what I can understand, but it looks great on paper.
 
What also looks great on paper is where the Big 12 currently sits in KenPom's conference efficiency ratings with an adjEM of +18.73. That's No. 1 among all conferences by a wide margin.
 
The Big Ten is next at +15.26, followed by the Big East (+13.75), SEC (+13.44), Pac-12 (+11.46) and the ACC (+9.60).
 
The NCAA NET rankings, one of the metrics used by the NCAA Tournament selection committee to help determine this year's field of 68, has nine Big 12 teams in the top 55, with last-place Texas Tech theoretically one spot out of the field at No. 69.
 
Six Big 12 teams are lumped between No. 8 and No. 17, with ninth-place West Virginia now at No. 25 following its 80-77 victory Saturday over No. 31 Auburn in the SEC/Big 12 Challenge.
 
The Big 12 won seven of 10 games against the SEC in the challenge, including eighth-place Oklahoma's 24-point home win over then-second-ranked Alabama and Texas Tech's 76-68 victory at LSU. Don't forget, Texas Tech reached the NCAA Tournament "Sweet 16" last year and is less than five years removed from an appearance in the national finals.
 
Therefore, what has made the Big 12 so daunting from top to bottom?
 
Hall of Fame coach Bob Huggins says it's simply a matter of great coaching. There isn't a bad coach in the Big 12.
 
"If you look, there have not been good, but great coaches in this league," he said earlier today.  "And I think the other coaches have really kind of stepped up. You start thinking about the changes the athletic directors, the presidents or whomever made – it's great coaching decisions. They were able to go and recruit guys that are nationally known and nationally renowned.
 
"You can't look at our league and say, 'Well, that guy is going to struggle in our league.' Nobody does. Obviously, somebody has to finish last, but just the tremendous coaching that goes on in this league, and because of (their) ability to attract players. The more recognition the coach gets, and the school gets, the easier it is to recruit."
 
Huggins continued.
 
"You look at what Kansas has done over the last number of years, what Baylor has done over many years, and I think everybody knows how good of a coach Jamie (Dixon) has been and what Jamie has done to build the program at TCU," he said. "They lose a great coach at Oklahoma (Lon Kruger), and they bring in a great, young guy (Porter Moser) who did a terrific job where he was at a school that was certainly not known for being a basketball power and took them on a big NCAA run.
 
"Mike (Boynton) has done a fantastic job at Oklahoma State. It's just a hard, hard league and you can't make mistakes. We made a mistake at Oklahoma State and lost," he said.
 
Huggins has been in other strong leagues such as the Big East when Connecticut and Syracuse were considered superpowers, but there were also the bottom teams that he knew he could beat when his team wasn't at its best.
 
He was in other leagues before that where there were breathers in between the big games.
 
"I have been in leagues with Denny Crum when Louisville was Louisville. They were it. (DePaul's) Joey Meyer could really coach, but then we also had guys that were kind of just breaking in and they got beat around pretty good because they didn't understand what the veteran guys did understand," he said. 
 
That's simply not the case in the Big 12.
 
Compare winless Texas Tech to the other power-conference bottom dwellers and it's not even close. The ACC's Louisville, at 2-19 overall, has a NET of 337. What program wanting to go to the NCAA Tournament is going to schedule No. 337 on next year's nonconference schedule? 
 
Three-win California brings up the bottom of the Pac-12 with a NET barely above 300 at 297.
 
South Carolina sits at the bottom of the SEC with a NET of 272. The Big East's last-place team, Georgetown, has a NET of 241, while Minnesota is at the bottom of the Big Ten at 221.
 
Incidentally, among ACC programs, Louisville has lots of company with Notre Dame (184), Boston College (195), Florida State (201) and Georgia Tech (218) pulling down this once-proud hoops conference.
 
With Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams now enjoying retirement, and Jim Boeheim not winning nearly as much as he used to, there has become a big power vacuum in ACC right now.
 
In the meantime, the Big 12 is experiencing a Golden Era in hoops - perhaps the best it has ever been. Will it remain that way when BYU, Central Florida, Cincinnati and Houston come on board and Oklahoma and Texas eventually leave? Or will it become more diluted like some of the other conferences have because of football expansion.
 
Time will tell.

Is the Big 12 today as dominant as the Big East was in 1985 when three teams reached the Final Four and Villanova upset Georgetown in the finals?
 
No.
 
Is it as good as the ACC was in the 2000s when three different Tobacco Road programs won national championships in 2001, 2002, 2005, 2009 and 2010? 
 
No, again. But since 2020, the Big 12 has clearly become college basketball's No. 1 conference. The numbers clearly bear that out.
 
Tuesday night, West Virginia takes on No. 17 TCU in Fort Worth in a rematch of the Mountaineers' 74-65 victory over the Horned Frogs in Morgantown on Jan. 18.
 
Tipoff is set for 9 p.m. and the game will be televised nationally on ESPNU (Ted Emrich and King McClure). Mountaineer Sports Network radio coverage with Tony Caridi and studio host David Kahn gets things underway at 8 p.m. on stations throughout West Virginia and online via WVUsports.com and the mobile apps WVU Gameday and The Varsity Network.