What is the Tightest Conference?

In writing about the Chesapeake Conference, where there seemed to be an inordinate number of close games, we decided to see if our impressions were correct.

So we looked at the stats in Men's DI College rugby. We looked at which conferences had the most close losses (7 points or less) and also who had the most, what we'll call "competitive losses," which means losses of 14 or less.

(We tracked all of the DI Conferences in action so far except the SIRC and Red River, which haven't played enough games to make the sample worth studying.)

Here are the numbers:

Of note, the West D1A hasn't received as much notice in these pages for the league's competitiveness, but with three-quarters of the games being within two tries, you'd have to recognize it is a tight conference from top to bottom. Perhaps a surprise is that the Chesapeake is not among the top three in "close games" but it's the "competitive games" where that conference really performs well. Meanwhile, the Keystone is generally thought of as a team with a wide competitive disparity, but the numbers tell a different story.

It comes as no surprise that the Big Ten has a wide disparity - it's an issue many of the teams in the conference have talked about. The Rugby East, however, is a surprise. Last year, that conference's numbers were 10% and 28% - not astounding, but more competitive than this fall.