Basketball
There has been much debate, especially in the last decade, as to the true definition of "mid-major," particularly as it relates to college basketball. Some still believe the term uses an arbitrary litmus test of sorts, such as how many teams from a given conference qualify for the NCAA tournament in a "good" year, or how much success a given conference has in the NCAA tournament, or even conference revenue and attendance. The Missouri Valley Conference, which is widely considered a "mid-major" conference, has received two, three, or even four NCAA tournament bids every single year from the 1990s through the 2007 tournament, while the Horizon League has had a higher NCAA tournament winning percentage than most "Major" conferences over the last seven years (17-9). The Horizon League has also advanced three different teams (Butler, Milwaukee, Cleveland State) to at least the 2nd round of the NCAA Tournament every year for the last seven years, and 11 of the last 14 years with four teams (Detroit). Moreover, the Missouri Valley Conference had an average attendance of nearly 2,000 more people per game than the Atlantic 10, and outdrew Conference USA by over 2,000 per game during recent seasons.
Given the sustained success of many so-called "mid-major" conferences, "higher profile" conferences are finding it more difficult to distinguish themselves with any clarity when it comes to the "mid-major" and "major" labels, unless one is using the sole distinction of being a BCS football playing conference.
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Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)