Have had a debate brewing for the last couple of months in the NBA thread and I wanted to get some takes from the board as a whole. If interested, you can see most of that debate in the NBA season thread, but I don't want to rehash too much of it here. (certainly focused on a small amount of posters in general, but a decent amount have chimed in over course of season. For basic facts will point out the East currently has 11 teams .500 or better and the West has 8. There are also substantial differences in the records of the 11th and 12th teams and 4 of the 6 worst teams reside in the west.
In my 25 years of following sports I have always heard announcers and analysts use the term deep when a conference doesn't have a lot of bad teams. I am a big ten guy so will use that conference as an example. The conference is described as deep when they have 7-8 teams make bowls (teams like Rutgers, Northwestern, Illinois etc make bowls) and not a year where ohio state, wisconsin and penn state are all top ten teams but they only have 5 teams make bowls. (Am also interested if others have heard the term deep used differently, but I have always heard it this way across sports. What do you all think?