Conference Qualifying History

The table below shows aggregated ranking information about teams who qualified for the EBS Tournament via the different qualifying mechanisms. For example, there have been 7 Automatic Qualifiers (i.e., Non-BCS Champion or Independent in the top 12) for an average of 0.6 per year. One of the automatic qualifying teams was ranked in the top 6, 5 were ranked from places 7-12, etc. There have been 11 Merit-qualifying Conference Champions (e.g., Utah, Boise St., etc), or one in each year of the EBS; since one place is guaranteed to a non-BCS conference champion, the average will always be 1.0.

Bid	Total	Avg/ Year	Ranked 1-6	Ranked 7-12	Ranked Below 12	Highest Rank	Lowest Rank	Byes Earned
Yearly-qualifying Conf. Champion	72	6.0	42	20	10	1	22	41
Merit-qualifying Conf. Champion	12	1.0	3	5	4	4	19	2
Automatic Qualifier	8	0.7	2	6	-	6	12	1
At-Large Qualifier	52	4.3	25	27	-	3	12	-

Below are the number of teams from each conference who qualified for the EBS tournament in each season. The final column indicates the total number of teams qualified and, in parentheses, the number of teams who received first round byes.

Conference	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	Tot. (Byes)
ACC	1*	1*	1*	1	1	1*	1	2	1	1*	1	2	14 (5)
Big 12	2*	2*	3*	4*	3	3	2*	1*	1	3*	3*	1*	28 (9)
Big East	1	1*	2*	1*	1*	1	1	1	1*	1	1	1*	13 (6)
Big Ten	2	3*	1	1*	2*	2*	1	2*	3*	1*	2	2	22 (7)
Pac-10	2*	1	2*	1*	2*	1*	2*	2*	1*	2	1*	1	18 (9)
SEC	3*	3	1	3	1*	3*	2*	2	3*	3*	2*	3*	29 (8)
Independent	-	-	1	-	1	-	-	1*	1	-	-	-	4 (1)
C-USA	1	-	-	-	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	2 (0)
MAC	-	1	-	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	2 (0)
MWC	-	-	-	1	-	-	1*	1	-	-	1*	1*	5 (3)
Sun Belt	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	0 (0)
WAC	-	-	1	-	1	-	1	-	1	1	1	1	7 (0)

Numbers reflect conference affiliations at the time of qualifying.
* - indicates bye earned by conference champion that year.