Basking in The Prestige

When ESPN is bored, it loves to rank things... mascots, titletowns, whatever. Since there's nothing college basketball-y going on now, they decided to rank the "prestige" of every D-I college basketball team.

Nobody knows what the hell this means. It might mean how successful the team has been over the past couple decades, but then why don't they just say that?

Anyway I'm not gonna complain about it because BU somehow scored startlingly high on the prestige scale.

America East:
108. Boston University
159. Vermont
T-256. UMBC
270. Hartford
T-278. Maine
297. New Hampshire

Others of note:
69. Siena
T-70. Boston College
93. Drexel
100. George Mason
T-111. Providence
T-115. Holy Cross
T-118. Northeastern
123. George Washington
T-145. Delaware
T-183. Hofstra
T-210. Towson
T-284. Harvard

Highest of the America East (Albany, Bing and Stony Brook haven't been D-I long enough to qualify), higher than 4 out of the 5 teams that left AE for the Colonial, higher than all but 1 team from the MAAC, higher than most of the A-10, Pac-10 and Conference USA.

Most importantly, higher than our main rivals NORTHEASTERN and VERMONT.

How did they come up with this? Well, the system put a high premium on winning the regular season title (higher than winning the conference tournament even). And it gave just as many points for an NIT berth as it did for an NCAA berth. That means those 3 years in a row where BU finished #1 in the regular season but lost in the tourney were BETTER than winning the tourney and going to the NCAA. It also subtracted points for losing seasons, of which BU has not had many.

So, all hail BU, the most prestigious team in the America East (AKA the tallest midget in the world).