10 truths of the 2015 college basketball season

The Elite Eight, this year: Arizona, Duke, Gonzaga, Kentucky, Louisville, Michigan State, Notre Dame, Wisconsin. The only team in that bunch that didn’t start a senior was Kentucky. The only one without a prospect in the current DraftExpress top 100 was Gonzaga, and the site projects both Domantas Sabonis and Kyle Wiltjer to be drafted in 2016. This was a chalky bunch of teams chock-full of talent, with the only “Cinderella” being a Michigan State squad with plenty of top recruits.

Teams without great talent can still make runs: Northern Iowa might well have made the Elite Eight had it not run into Louisville in the second round, and Wichita State made the Sweet Sixteen before being bombed into dust by Notre Dame. But to get all the way to a national title, a team either has to have oodles and oodles of talent or a cohesive, mature rotation -- and preferably both.

If you’re taking just one of the two things, talent or “maturity,” go with talent.

Kentucky’s successes with essentially a largely new team every year under John Calipari were the best testament to talent trumping all else, but the Wildcats being better this year with more upperclassmen to complement a typically great crop of freshman would actually seem to undermine that argument to me. Better support for it comes from Duke: Four freshmen, including three starters, powered the Blue Devils to their title.

Grayson Allen stepping up and helping those freshmen score almost all of Duke’s points against Wisconsin makes this narrative easier -- Duke’s freshman class was arguably the best in the history of college basketball before Monday night, but now that conversation might start with it. But Jahlil Okafor and Tyus Jones were steady performers all year, and Justise Winslow -- despite early inconsistencies on the offensive end -- was a defensive ace.

Take away any of Jones, Okafor or Winslow, and this Duke team -- one that had a nine-man rotation even before the dismissal of Rasheed Sulaimon -- is much, much worse. One player can still do so, so much for a basketball team’s fortunes, and it’s the elite players who help the most.

The two teams that met for the title on Monday did so essentially without players who played at least 18 minutes in their season openers: Duke obviously dismissed Sulaimon, and Wisconsin didn’t have the version of Traevon Jackson that suited up for the Badgers early in the season, after a foot injury kept him out from early January until the Sweet Sixteen. Louisville made the Elite Eight without Chris Jones, and Kentucky lost Alex Poythress and still had the best team, by efficiency margins, of the KenPom era.

It helps to be deep, as every team in that paragraph had players that could step in after those players were hurt or dismissed. But all of those teams were arguably better for losing those players. Duke’s rotation got tighter and more efficient. Wisconsin rotated in Bronson Koenig, whose shooting far outstrips Jackson’s. Louisville didn’t have Terry Rozier and Jones doing redundant things, which freed Rozier, and got more touches for other players. Kentucky ended up giving a lot more playing time to matchup nightmare Trey Lyles and sniper Devin Booker than it otherwise might have.

When your really good team loses a single player, you may not need to panic.

This year’s best case for major turnover being ruinous was obviously Florida. The Gators went from 2014’s No. 1 overall seed to a losing team that turned down a CBI berth after losing four senior starters.

But the Gators weren’t alone. Connecticut lost Shabazz Napier, DeAndre Daniels, and Niels Giffey, and recorded its worst record since 2010, the last time the Huskies missed the NCAA Tournament without a postseason ban in place. Michigan went from the Elite Eight to the same not-even-in-the-CBI status after losing Nik Stauskas and Glenn Robinson, Jr. (and Mitch McGary, sort of) before the season and losing Caris LeVert and Derrick Walton during it, with only a win over Division II Hillsdale College keeping the Wolverines from a losing campaign. Tennessee lost every starter except Josh Richardson from 2014 (and coach Cuonzo Martin) and thudded to a .500 year in Donnie Tyndall’s only season on Rocky Top.

Losing one or two players from a powerhouse doesn’t do all that much. Losing three or four might -- and losing one or two from a merely excellent program might hurt a lot, too.

Exactly three months to the day before its first game of the 2015 NCAA Tournament, Michigan State lost at home to Texas Southern. (The Spartans’ best non-conference win was over Marquette -- which finished outside the KenPom top 100 in Steve Wojciechowski’s first season.) Duke lost at home -- in stunningly listless fashion -- to NIT runner-up Miami. Wisconsin lost to Rutgers. Kentucky ... well, Kentucky seemed pretty mortal against Missisippi and Texas A&M to start SEC play, and did get threatened by Buffalo and Columbia in non-conference action, I guess?

Anyway, the point’s obvious: One bad game, or one bad stretch, doesn’t mean a team can’t get rolling and make a deep NCAA Tournament run. We see this every year: 2014 UConn lost at Houston in its first AAC game, 2013 Louisville had a three-game losing streak in its last Big East season, 2012 Kentucky lost to Indiana and Vanderbilt, teams with far less talent, and 2011 UConn -- maybe the best example of how a team can get hot out of friggin’ nowhere -- went 4-7 in its last 11 regular season games.

Those teams all won titles, obviously. You knew why I put them in that paragraph.

I don’t think we’ll ever have a great explanation for why Duke morphed into Kentucky on defense during the NCAA Tournament. Playing overmatched Robert Morris and punchless San Diego State early on probably helped, but Duke allowed fewer than 0.900 points per possession in the first five games of its title march (after doing that just 12 times previously in 2014, Kentucky allowed more than 0.900 PPP just 12 times all year), then put the clamps on the best (and hottest) offense of the KenPom era in the title game. But it happened, and it’s why Mike Krzyzewski will have five rings to count when Jostens is done throwing diamonds on this latest one.

2014 UConn played really good defense when it needed to in the NCAA Tournament, too, and 2013 Louisville got its offense in gear against Syracuse in the Big East Tournament final and never slipped a gear from then on, handing all of its final seven opponents one of the three best offensive performances they had seen all year. 2011 VCU got good at everything at just the right time after playing fairly forgettable ball for more than a month.

It’s silly, but timing really does matter. Ask Michigan State.

Mark Titus hit on this in his year-end wrap, but it bears repeating: Teams with great guard play and great defense have sure been winning a lot of NCAA titles recently!

In the last eight seasons -- or since Florida won back-to-back titles with a team best defined by truly incredible balance -- the only national champion I would say doesn’t fit the guards-and-defense paradigm is 2012 Kentucky ... which had Anthony Davis, and a top-10 offense and defense. North Carolina had the iffiest defense of those champions -- finishing at No. 21 in defensive efficiency, lowest of any national champ in the KenPom era -- but still held five of six NCAA Tournament foes under a point per possession ... and it had probably the best threesome of guards of any of those recent champions, with Ty Lawson, Danny Green, and Wayne Ellington forming a terrifying trio. (Also: Tyler Hansbrough and Ed Davis were on that team.)

Picking a team solely on the basis of great guards and great defense would have been difficult this year: Kentucky’s guard play was its lone “weakness” all year, and it was a Mona Lisa smile wrinkle; Wisconsin’s defense was relatively poor, compared to its elite brethren; Arizona had T.J. McConnell at guard, not quite the same as having Tyus Jones; Duke’s defense was nowhere near great before the NCAA Tournament; Virginia’s guard play was never the same after Justin Anderson’s injury. But Duke made itself the obvious choice in retrospect by playing hellacious defense for three weeks.

So maybe just picking the team with the greatest potential for superb guard play and defense will work just fine, too.

Remember when teams like Murray State and Temple didn’t make the NCAA Tournament, and then universally-lampooned at-large selection UCLA beat the only AAC team (SMU) and the only Conference USA team (UAB) in the field on the way to the Sweet Sixteen? The AAC and Conference USA certainly will when NCAA Tournament units are distributed.

If a unit — earned for each conference by each team from that conference appearing in each round of play, up to the Final Four — is still worth about $1.7 million to a conference over six years, UCLA’s mere inclusion in the field over Temple gave the Pac-12 $1.7 million that could’ve gone to the lowlier AAC from the start. And UCLA being in a spot that could’ve theoretically gone to Temple cost the C-USA another $1.7 million, considering that UAB would’ve had a better chance at a Sweet Sixteen berth against Temple — or another lesser No. 11 seed. (Obviously, AAC teams SMU and Temple would not have met in the first round.)

UAB earning two units for Conference USA is a massive victory in its own right: The conference has been a one-bid league over the last three years, and was reduced to an also-ran in basketball by Memphis’s decampment for the AAC after 2013. And with a much larger conference — there were 12 C-USA teams in 2012-13, but 16 in 2013-14, and 14 this season — those units are spread more thinly. Tulsa making the NCAA Tournament in 2014 earned one unit for C-USA — but a theoretical distribution of the $260,500 the league will receive from that unit in 2016 over 16 teams (without a cut for the league office) would mean that each school gets just $16,281 from the NCAA Tournament. With the C-USA down to 14 teams, that number should tick up a bit, and revenues do increase over time, but that’s still a tiny, tiny piece of the most massive pie in the sport.

And why do teams like UCLA make the NCAA Tournament over teams like Temple? Because they have established brands that allow them to schedule better teams and recruit better players, and live in the halo of a better conference that makes it harder to miss the NCAA Tournament. Why should leagues like the Ohio Valley hope and pray that their best teams, like Murray State, make the NCAA Tournament? Because a single win in March doubles what these leagues get from the NCAA. Why does this section seem so slanted toward the little guys? Because the big guys always, always win.

College basketball occupies a unique spot in the American sporting landscape — temporally, if nothing else. Its season runs from the cusp of late October/early November — smack in the middle of the NFL and college football seasons that absolutely consume the fall — until April, when the NCAA Tournament final usually falls on baseball’s Opening Day. It is a long season, with literally tens of thousands of games, and the vast majority of those games are ultimately forgettable, not least because most individual games don’t matter very much.

Until March, that is — when the NCAA Tournament puts 68 teams in do-or-die situations for a three-week spectacle that many sports fans would call the highlight of their year.

But we still hear caterwauling every damn year about how college basketball is in crisis, because scoring is down, or because the pace or quality of play is awful, or because watching a game is an excruciating experience. “The 2014-15 season is shaping up to be the worst offensive season in modern history,” Seth Davis writes in the above piece. The 2014-15 season also produced the most efficient offense in this millennium of college basketball, Wisconsin’s Swiss Army attack.

Those things can both be true, but Wisconsin’s offense being efficient is empirically so; there’s no way to shade those numbers. Davis calling this “offensive season” the “worst” depends on you and I and everyone accepting that “lowest-scoring” means “worst” — an elision of the “lower scoring is baaad” parenthetical that seems attached to most critiques of a sport that is getting more and more efficient on a whole.

And I’ll freely admit that lower-scoring games are generally less interesting to most: Missed shots are worse than makes, good defense is less enthralling than good offense, and the pervasive perception that college basketball is an “inferior” game to the NBA’s “superior” product is grounded partly in the idea that the college game is “slower” and produces less scoring, which is another whole concept to unpack.

However, the prevalence of these narratives isn’t a testament to “the quality of the game,” which is nebulously defined and immeasureable at best, and hand-waving nonsense at worst, but to their appeal to many, many people. I would wager that the people most disenchanted by college basketball’s lack of “quality” are the people who talk to sportswriters most — their fellow sportswriters, coaches, and lifer fans — and that those conversations are not wholly representative of a sport in which literally millions of fans attend tens of thousands of games. The narratives are compelling, to be sure, but I’m not sure they’re entirely fair.

Especially, because, uh, the NCAA Tournament has never been bigger, and rarely been better.

This season’s NCAA Tournament was a really, really good one. Its first day was historically fertile with close, dramatic games, and the quality of game from the Sweet Sixteen onward — and definitely from the Elite Eight onward — was remarkably high. Final Four ratings hit a 20-year high, and advertising revenues are north of a billion dollars.

Attribute that to a historically great and polarizing Kentucky team or the passel of big-name teams still around after the Sweet Sixteen if you like, but there’s no way to spin the NCAA Tournament as anything other than a tremendous success for the sport of college basketball. It’s an annual delight, and it just keeps making more money, even if how that money gets distributed means the loot doesn’t trickle down like it could.

And, importantly, very, very few people care about college basketball being “in crisis” while the Tournament is in swing. Sure, that’s partly due to many casual fans watching their first full college basketball games of the year in March, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; casual fans are what sustains every major American sport, and not one is surviving based on diehards alone.

Plus, every once-questionable attempt to fatten the goose that lays the golden egg, whether by moving games from CBS to Turner’s stable of cable networks or adding four teams to the field, has worked. The NCAA Tournament is unkillable, so far as we’ve seen, and given the organization that runs it, that’s remarkable.

Did we still get “B-b-but the game needs to change!” narratives after this NCAA Tournament? Yes. Will it change? Yes. Will that be enough to satisfy people whose livelihoods depend on being able to sell narratives? I don’t know.

But the NCAA Tournament is great. It’s fantastic. It’s on the very short list of best sporting events in the entirety of human existence. And we get one every year.