This Is One of the Best — And the Most Experienced — Men’s Sweet 16’s in Recent History
This Is One of the Best — And the Most Experienced — Men’s Sweet 16’s in Recent History
What can this year's NCAA tourney tell us about how to build winners in modern college basketball?
With the first two rounds of the 2024 NCAA men’s tournament in the books, one of the prevailing storylines is just how little madness there has been this March.
Each of the top eight overall seeds in the field have made it to the tourney’s second weekend — just the fifth time that’s happened since the 64-team era began in 1985 — and there’s only one double-digit seed remaining: 11th-seeded NC State. The average seed of the remaining teams (3.3) is the second-lowest in any tourney since 2009, and this is just one of three tournaments in that span (joining 2015 and 2017) where a single 11-seed was the lone team aiming for a Cinderella bid in the Sweet 16.
Naturally, that means this Sweet 16 is absolutely stacked. Among the teams still dancing are 13 of the top 14 teams in Ken Pomeroy’s ratings (Auburn is the only missing squad), and 14 of the top 17. According to the average KenPom efficiency rating of the remaining teams (25.0), only the 2019 tournament produced a better group of 16 squads coming out of the first weekend:
But that’s only part of the story. On Saturday, I highlighted a great video by YouTuber (and former basketball player) Michael MacKelvie, in which he points out a very interesting trend: the successful teams from recent NCAA tourneys have been filled with upperclassmen, particularly seniors, while teams with less experience have faded more than in the early part of the one-and-done era.
That phenomenon has held extremely true this tournament. While John Calipari’s Kentucky team, which had a few seniors but still many of his usual freshman phenoms, flamed out early — even prompting the coach himself to say he was thinking about changing his roster-building strategy — four of the 14 most experienced teams in the nation (UNC, Creighton, Illinois, NC State) are still alive, as are other senior-laden squads like Clemson, Tennessee and San Diego State.
Looking at the entire group of Sweet 16 schools, the average of 2.53 years of D-I experience (according to KenPom’s experience metric) is by far the highest for any tournament since 2007, the first year he began tracking the stat:
UNC’s roster average of 3.21 years in D-I is nearly a half-season more than any other team in any Sweet 16 over that span, and even the most inexperienced team in the Sweet 16 — Duke, at 1.74 years — is far more experienced than the teams with the least experience from previous years. (Duke isn’t actually that far off from the average years of the most experienced team of the 2017 Sweet 16, Wisconsin.)
There’s a pretty obvious explanation for this: Changes to transfer rules and the havoc COVID played on college sports in 2020 have set up situations where prominent players can be on their third team (or more) and playing well past their fourth year in D-I. UNC’s Cormac Ryan, for instance, had previously played for Stanford and Notre Dame and is in his fifth season as a major-conference starter. He’s far from the only example of this.
But it tells a powerful story about how to build great teams in college basketball right now. In the past, there was an arms race for recruits right out of high school, and churning through dream teams of one-and-done prospects. Against that backdrop, the market inefficiency may have been age and experience — and the transfer portal let today’s best teams exploit it more than ever.
Not that there still isn’t major roster churn going on now. In 2019, the most stacked year in our sample from above, there was a 0.83 correlation between a team’s experience and its continuity — the common minutes between a team’s roster in one season and the next — for Sweet 16 teams. This season? It’s actually negative, -0.21. Because of the transfer portal, more experience actually means less continuity.
That means coaches matter as much as ever — think of Utah State’s Danny Sprinkle rebuilding a second-round NCAA team from a roster that returned practically no production from 2022-23. It also means recruiting still matters, just of players leaving other programs, not ones fresh out of high school.
In some ways, this represents a new spin on an old formula — a return of sorts to the upperclassman-filled champs of the 1980s and earlier. How they got there is totally different, but it’s clear from this year’s Sweet 16 that experience is a winning formula in college basketball again.
Filed under: College basketball
The major difference b/w the Upperclassmen filled champs of the 80s and today is that those players were the best 21-23 year olds in the WORLD and these are not. As an example, the starting 5 of the OKC Thunder is essentially the same age as the starting 5 of UNC.
Put another way ... in 1989, NCAA Division I was probably the second best basketball league on the planet (maybe some of the Eastern/Southern European leagues were close). Now, it's probably not even in the Top 5, maybe not even Top 10.