022: More experience, but less continuity
Experience and continuity through the lens of the NCAA Tournament.
The 2023 NCAA Tournament starts this week. As Ken Pomeroy shared, teams are by far the oldest in age in recorded history or at least since 2008.
The landscape of college sports is different in 2023. Players are free to transfer and COVID brings an option for an extra year of eligibility too.
The way you manage or construct a roster is more like putting together a grocery list instead of building a house. Teams have more experience and less continuity. Schools still have different budgets too.
Using Pomeroy’s data, the chart below plots the average years of experience and minutes continuity for NCAA Tournament teams since the 2008 tournament.
Experience: value is in terms of years of college experience using a player’s eligibility class (freshman has zero years, a sophomore has one year, etc.).
Continuity: measures what percentage of a team’s minutes are played by the same player from season to season.
The average experience is 2.29 years and the average minutes continuity is 46.3 for teams in the 2023 NCAA Tournament. Continuity is down and experience is up.
Take these extreme examples for field in the 2023 Tournament:
Penn State: 4.07 years of experience and 47.5 minutes continuity
Kennesaw State: 2.57 years of experience and 81.3 minutes continuity
And if you’re curious, 2019 Duke (0.33 years) and 2018 Kentucky (0.21) are the least experienced teams over the years in these NCAA Tournaments.
2010 Butler (93.2 minutes continuity) and 2013 Davidson (91.4 minutes continuity) are the teams with the most continuity across NCAA Tournaments from 2008 to 2023.
What about the Big Four?
Because this publication’s proximity to tobacco road, here are these numbers for any Wake Forest, Duke, North Carolina, and NC State teams that made the tournament.
Duke’s championship teams were quite different. 2010 squad had 61.2 minutes continuity and 2.34 years of experience compared to the 2015 team that had 38.1 minutes continuity and 1.28 years of experience.
Carolina’s Final Four and championship teams all had minutes continuity of 58 or higher, including 75.7 in 2016, while experience all hovered around ~2 years. This also makes this past Carolina season more maddening because it was the Heels most experienced team (2.94 years) and it had 69.2 minutes continuity.
NC State has the most experienced team of this Big Four tournament segment, and it’s this season’s team. After all, the Wolfpack’s Jarkel Joiner is 23 years old and on his third collegiate team. State’s 2014 and 2018 has less continuity though than the 2023 Wolfpack.
While Wake Forest did not make the tournament this season, the squad had 24.2 minutes continuity. This is far from the continuity of the Deacs three tournament teams during this span (53.3 in 2017, 62.9 in 2010, and 75.3 in 2009).
check out the code for these charts, and special thanks to hoopR for making it easy to fetch this data with a kenpom subscription.