After reading that, I was left wondering how these two programs compared over the years. I didn't think comparing records was legit because a team like Baylor is typically worth 2 or 3 losses each year. Maryland has had a good run, but they haven't been as consistent and it may only give Iowa one loss typically. And that is only since they've been in the conference.
So I thought the best way to compare the team's season is by using NCAA seeding. Both teams frequently make the tournament, so there's plenty of data. I had no idea how this comparison would work, so I had no preconceived notion of how it would turn out.
I searched ISU seeding by year first and I found a chart in WIki that went back to 1997 which was the first year of the Big 12. So it seemed like a good place to start, rather than pick an arbitrary date. Once I captured the data, other time periods could be looked at.
To create a graph I converted the seeding into points. A 1 seed would be worth 16 points, 2 would be 15 and so on. Missing the tournament is 0 points. I did this conversion so on a bar chart the lower seeds would have bigger bars, making the comparison easy.
After creating my first cut, I quickly realized it's hard to conclude anything, so I added lines to represent the cumulative points for each team. With lines you can easily compare and see changes in the slope of the line to see how the trends changed over the years.
So having said all that, here is my graph. Red is ISU. Black is SUI. I leave it up to the reader to make observations and comment.
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