Ranking the Conferences: 2010 NCAA Tournament

I love how fans of different conferences are always trying to figure out which conference is "best". I do it myself. So now that the NCAA Tournament is done for the year I thought I would share with everyone the scoring system I developed to determine which conferences performed the "best" during this year's tourney.

I developed this simple scoring system before the tournament started and had fun keeping track of the points as teams got knocked out in each round. I feel like it is a fair scoring system and when you look at the final rankings it is hard to argue with them.

I decided that teams would earn points for their conference when they LOST instead of when they won (minus the champion). Here is how is worked:
1st round loss: -3 points (Conferences should be penalized for having 1st round losers)
2nd round loss: 0 points
Sweet 16 loss: +3 points
Elite 8 loss: +6 points
Final 4 loss: +9
Championship game loss: +12
Win it all: +15

Conference Rankings:
1. Big 10 +12 points (-3 Minnesota, 0 Wisconsin, +3 OSU, +3 Purdue, +9 Mich State)
1b. Horizon +12 points (Butler)
3. ACC +9 (-3 Clemson, -3 FSU, 0 Wake, 0 Ga. Tech, 0 Maryland, +15 Duke)
4. SEC +6 (-3 Vandy, -3 Florida, +6 Kentucky, +6 Tennessee)
4b. Big 12 +6 (-3 Texas, -3 Ok State, 0 Kansas, 0 Mizzou, 0 Texas A&M, +6 KSU, +6 Baylor)
6. Pac 10, MVC, Ivy League, WCC all had +3
All other conferences had zero points or less
The Big 10 clearly made the most of the 5 tourney invites, putting 3 teams in the Sweet 16 and one in the Final Four.
I put the SEC over the Big 12 as they did not make the most of 7 tourney invites to the SEC's four.
Despite producing this year's National Champion, the ACC was pretty pathetic and overrated otherwise, with only Duke advancing past the 1st weekend.

Other scores of note:
a. The Big East finished with a total of zero points. A pretty poor showing for a conference that most people felt was the deepest this year.
b. The Mountain West Conference (4 teams), Conference USA (2 teams), and the WAC (2 teams) all finished with -6 points. Good luck getting multiple teams into next year's field.
c. The A10 also finished in the negative points (-3) even though they had 3 teams in the tourney.