Court Report: Freshmen finally matter again in college basketball; how committee will handle seeding the SEC

More than halfway through the season, here’s one of the big plot twists in college basketball: freshmen matter again. Their collective statistical impact to this point is more than we’ve seen in almost a decade. 

Ironically enough, it’s happening in the final year of COVID bonus-season eligibility. The past few seasons, freshmen, broadly speaking, had been reduced, their impact across college basketball falling far behind the juniors, seniors and super seniors taking advantage of the extra year afforded due to the shortened 2020-21 season. This dip in relevance coincided with the transfer portal era.

But that’s not the case in 2024-25.

Now we’re seeing an explosion of productivity from first-year players. This goes beyond the obvious stat-monster candidates of Cooper Flagg at Duke and the promising-but-frustrating Dylan Harper/Ace Bailey tandem at Rutgers. Though, it should be noted: Flagg is now the favorite to win national player of the year (and would be only the fourth freshman to ever do that), while Harper and Bailey are right alongside Flagg as the projected top three NBA picks come June.

On Tuesday night, Texas Tech won at Cincinnati to improve to 14-4. The best player in the game was freshman Christian Anderson, a guy ranked outside the top 100 who came off the bench and dropped a game-high 18 points. Shortly after TTU won, Ohio State gave No. 11 Purdue its first home loss in 697 days. The clinching shot with 11 seconds remaining came via freshman John Mobley Jr. That’s just a glimpse in one night of college basketball.

Look across the landscape and you’ll see newbies making their mark in myriad ways. In fact, this freshman class’ collective impact on college hoops might wind up ranking near the top over the past 20 years if things keep going the way they’ve been going. As of Tuesday there were 15 freshmen averaging more than 14.5 points, 23 averaging 6.0 or more rebounds and another 12 averaging more than 3.5 assists. Per Stathead, there are 12 other years on record in which those three thresholds were met by at least that many freshmen in all three categories, with six of them coming between 2014-2020.  

On the scoring front, there’s a litany of stars above 15.0 points per game: Flagg, Texas‘ Tre Johnson, Oklahoma’s Jeremiah Fears, Illinois‘ Kasparas Jakucionis, Georgia’s Asa Newell, UNC’s Ian Jackson, Maryland’s Derik Queen and Arkansas‘ Boogie Fland. Many of those players are doubling as the deciders for how good (or not) their teams will be. As a result, they’re also all projected first-round NBA Draft picks. (To that point: It was reported Tuesday night that Fland is done for the season due to a hand injury, which likely torpedoes any faint chance Arkansas had of turning its campaign around.) 

Rare is the season where at least five freshmen average at least 8.0 rebounds (with most being high-major frosh), but we’ve got that right now with Flagg, Queen, Georgetown’s Thomas Sorber, Arizona State’s Jayden Quaintance and Fresno State’s Elijah Price. When it comes to running an offense, college basketball has had Fland, Jakucionis and BYU distribution dynamo Egor Demin all above five assists per night. With good health, all should be lottery picks. Other guys — Harper, Fears, Flagg and Baylor‘s Robert — are north of 4.0 dimes on average.

We haven’t seen this many power-conference freshmen average this many assists since 2018-19.

The class is so deep, I haven’t even gotten to projected top-20 picks Kon Knueppel (12.7 ppg, 3.3 rpg at Duke), VJ Edgecombe 12.8 ppg, 5.6 rpg, 3.2 apg at Baylor), Khaman Maluach (8.9 ppg, 6.3 rpg at Duke), Labaron Philon (Alabama) and Drake Powell (UNC).

UConn barely escaped at home against a bad Butler team Tuesday night. The Huskies have been bumpy as of late. But the hope? All will return to form once a freshman, Liam McNeeley, is back from an ankle injury. At UNC, the Tar Heels’ wobbly season seems to rest on how well Jackson plays more than returning All-American RJ Davis. 

None of these guys are the reigning national freshman of the week either. That’s Auburn’s Tahaad Pettiford.

This isn’t to say veterans aren’t producing in big ways. Of course they are. Johni Broome, Mark Sears, Keshon Gilbert, Kam Jones, Hunter Dickinson, Chaz Lanier, Chucky Hepburn, Lamont Butler, Ryan Nembhard and many more graybeards are making their mark and will be prominent players in the second half of the season. (Unless Duke can be the rare team to buck the trend, you win titles in college basketball by primarily relying on older guys.) 

Point is, it’s refreshing to see freshmen truly matter again after a five-year lull. They bring new energy and build the buzz for college hoops. The NBA-mandated one-and-done rule has given college ball some of its biggest stars over the past two decades. This season is the best of both worlds: a glut of young faces to get excited about combining with a robust package of familiar veterans, some of whom are guiding their teams to historic seasons.

The upshot: It’s led to college basketball having its most efficient scoring year ever. Best of all, check all the names I listed above. The overwhelming majority of them play for projected tournament teams, most of them good seeds, too. This March, we’re going to get a big blast of new stars. It’s going to be an awesome NCAA Tournament.

How selection committee will handle seeding so many SEC teams

It’s going to be one of the most persistent questions over the next seven weeks: How many NCAA Tournament bids will the SEC get? The 16 schools collectively went 185-23 outside league play, the most victories and best non-con winning percentage (.889) in men’s D-I history for a conference with at least 10 teams.

The SEC continues to lord high over the hoops world nearly a month into the conference schedule. Thirteen of its teams rank in the top 40-45 of most and/or all team sheet metrics. It’s a mortal lock at least 11 will go dancing … and it’s mathematically possible we get to 13. Let’s say it lands at a dozen, breaking the Big East’s record of 11 (set in 2011). Getting 12 out of 16 teams in would be as incredible for the SEC as it would be challenging, from a bracket-building perspective, for members of the selection committee. There are rules in place to prevent intra-conference foes from meeting too early in the Big Dance — with first-round rematches flatly not allowed and would-be second-round rendezvouses avoided whenever possible.

With the superconference era officially activated in 2024, the potential for something like this was on the table eventually (but nobody saw it immediately being a factor). The temporary elimination of the Pac-12 also puts one more at-large bid out for the taking. Fortunately, the committee got ahead of this issue months ago. 

“The committee talked about this over the summer, not specific to the SEC, but acknowledging that with bigger conferences there’d be more bids,” a source told CBS Sports. 

If 12 out of 16 teams get in, there will be plenty of instances of SEC teams having at least two head-to-heads by Selection Sunday. Invariably, there will also be a few cases where highly seeded SEC squads will have met three times. Prior NCAA rule dictated teams that played each other twice couldn’t meet until the Sweet 16 at the earliest. Last July, the committee altered its rulebook language, amending for that protocol to be relaxed (allowing for second-round affairs) if a league got nine or more teams into the Dance.

“The committee will try to avoid it for as long as possible and not have two teams playing in the second round, but historically they’ll prioritize keeping everyone on the same seed line,” per a source.

That means they wouldn’t drop a No. 7 seed to a No. 8, or vice versa, to circumvent a No. 2 vs. No. 7 matchup. Seed integrity still trumps conference familiarity, but it is avoided as a competitive courtesy as much as the bracketing process allows. The committee has often moved a team laterally from one seed line to another, in a different region, even if doing so would mean more travel. The SEC is going to test this method more than ever before.

One potential example: Say Tennessee gets a No. 2 and Missouri is a No. 7. Those teams are only scheduled to play once this season. If they don’t meet in the SEC Tournament and they wind up on those seed lines, it’s easily conceivable they’d be paired to meet in the second round if shipping Missouri to another region isn’t feasible for a number of other complicating factors. 

The thornier issue that could rear its head is the amount of really good teams that break into the top four seed lines, something the committee has been acutely aware of before, in the few years when the Big 12 had more than four really good teams (like in 2021 when it had five). 

The principle is this: The top four seeds from a conference are placed away from each other in the four regions, provided they are a No. 1, 2, 3 or 4 seed. But with five or more teams from a league with a top-four seed (and the SEC is almost definitely going to get at least five of the top 16 seeds, if not six and maybe even seven), that rule will have to be broken. Seed lines are still protected in these scenarios, meaning we could have SEC rematches one round earlier than otherwise would happen. 

You can get really twisted on hypotheticals, so I’ll sidestep that for now, but just know the committee should do everything it can to evade rematches through every avenue possible, so long as it doesn’t compromise seed integrity. Barring first round upsets, we’re likely to get SEC battles before the start of the second weekend — and we could have a dose of more in the Sweet 16.

One rule that won’t change: If SEC teams (as is true with all leagues) have played thrice prior to Selection Sunday, they will be placed away from each other to meet no sooner than the Elite Eight, in keeping with longstanding bracketing procedures. Additionally, if two SEC teams wind up being sent to Dayton for the First Four, they won’t play each other. But it’s also critical to know that, if it so happens that the overall seed list winds up in a place where three SEC teams just barely get in — and all three as a result are First Four teams — then two of them will be forced to play each other, with the least-common rematch winning out. The committee won’t (and obviously shouldn’t) move a team up on the aggregate seed listing just to avoid sending three teams from the same conference to the First Four. 

Seeding is always a debatable topic, but this year could be the committee’s trickiest assignment yet.

Nova’s Dixon leads nation in scoring, but it’s not enough  

The best high-major scorer usually makes the NCAA Tournament, but that’s not looking like the case for Eric Dixon and Villanova. VU lost to Georgetown on Monday, its first home defeat to the Hoyas since 2011. (If Georgetown can win Saturday at Providence, it will be above. 500 after nine Big East games for the first time since 2016.) 

The Wildcats are 12-8 and currently lack an NCAA Tournament dossier. Despite this, they’ve got Dixon, a fifth-year senior who is statistically one of the most impressive players in the country. Aesthetically, he seems the most valuable. Dixon leads the nation in scoring (24.9), in addition to averaging 5.1 rebounds and 2.2 assists in 34.1 minutes. His first season he took eight 3-pointers and made two of them. Now he’s a 46.7% shooter from deep who averages 7.2 3-point attempts. The growth is incredible. 

But despite his one-man tour de force, Villanova’s not an above-average high-major team. Typically, the leading scorer among all power-conference players finds themselves on an NCAA tourney team. That’s been the case in 12 of the past 14 seasons, with Washington‘s Markelle Fultz and Virginia Tech‘s Erick Green the only exceptions. 

Dixon is unfortunately pacing to join them. What’s more, if Nova misses out and Dixon winds up the scoring champ, he’ll join Green as the only high-major player of the past 25 years to do that. Here are the players to lead all high-majors in scoring in the past 14 seasons.

2024: *Zach Edey, Purdue (25.2)
2023: Edey (22.3)
2022: Keegan Murray, Iowa (23.5)
2021: Luka Garza, Iowa (24.1)
2020: *Markus Howard, Marquette (27.8)
2019: Howard (25.0)
2018: *Trae Young, Oklahoma (27.4)
2017: ^Markelle Fultz, Washington (23.2)
2016: Buddy Hield, Oklahoma (26.0)
2015: Joe Young, Oregon (20.7)
2014: *Doug McDermott, Creighton (26.7)
2013: ^*Erick Green, Virginia Tech (25.0)
2012: McDermott (22.9)
2011: *Jimmer Fredette, BYU (28.9)

* also led nation in scoring | ^ didn’t make the tournament

Recruiting news: NCAA Academy is no more

A quick recruiting calendar note here in January: the NCAA Academy is off for 2025, with the likelihood it won’t return again, sources told CBS Sports.

“NCAA budget cuts due to potential (House) settlement helped that decision,” one NCAA source said.

You may find yourself asking: What was the NCAA Academy? It was the NCAA-funded recruiting event for high school prospects, created as a result of the Rice Commission. What’s the Rice Commission? It was that fatuous committee which came to be because of the notorious FBI investigation into bribery and fraud in college recruiting back in 2017. A few years later, players wound up getting NIL rights, rendering much of the Rice Commission’s objectives a massive, misguided waste of time. (You can thank former NCAA president Mark Emmert.) 

Nevertheless, the NCAA Academy was created six years as a counter to apparel-company-run high school leagues and tournaments in the summer. After holding its first camps in 2019 at four locations across the U.S., the Academy went on hiatus from 2020-2022 due to complications tied to COVID. It was revived in 2023 and 2024, with last year’s late-July event in Rock Hill, South Carolina, being the most well-received yet. Still: it fell far short of many other high-profile recruiting events run by Nike, Adidas, Under Armour and others.

The Academy failed to attract most four- and five-star talent. Most coaches didn’t embrace another recruiting affair on the summer calendar (with most power-conference head coaches skipping it). With the NCAA purportedly set to pay out billions in the coming decade as part of the looming House settlement, the Academy (with costs north of $8 million annually) was an easy chopping-block decision. I’d be stunned if it ever got revived, meaning, yet again, the recruiting calendar will undergo changes.

@ me

Find me on Bluesky or  X/Twitter and drop a Q anytime!

I think the high-major record is Iowa State going from two wins in 2020-21 to 22 the following season. A less drastic but more recent example is South Carolina jolting last season with a 15-win improvement (from 11 to 26). Louisville went 8-24 last season. It sits at 15-5 after dusting SMU on the road Tuesday, needing nine more wins to best the Gamecocks. I’ll say the Cards finish with 24 wins in all, besting South Carolina by one. Pat Kelsey has moved into top-five territory for national coach of the year.

Nothing to worry about, just a typical Court Report jinx. Standard protocol. Growing. Michigan will be fine.

Will the SEC win the 2025 national title? I’m going to tease you with a link to my answer, because this topic was a recent discussion point in our weekly Dribble Handoff writers’ roundtable.

I think the ACC sends only four teams to the NCAAs. Duke is a lock, while Clemson and Louisville seem on their way. The last one is going to come from the trio of Wake Forest, UNC and Pitt, with one of those teams being the last cut. Five is most likely … but I have a nagging feeling it’ll be four.

Nope. That’s done, and man I thought it wouldn’t go this way. VCU (15-4) is building out a résumé to potentially give itself leeway as an at-large. In that scenario, if it doesn’t win the A-10 tournament, this league is two bids at most. (Again.) St. Bonaventure, Dayton, George Mason and Saint Joe’s will have too many warts to overcome, unfortunately. 

If you want to put a number on it, Torvik has us covered. As of Wednesday, GU is 97.7% to make the field … which seems too high? (Then again, the program’s made it 25 straight times.) A year ago, Memphis started 15-2 against a much weaker schedule before being done in by compounding Q2/3 road losses against mediocre teams. Gonzaga‘s got a key stretch forthcoming. It plays at Portland this weekend then hosts Oregon State (which it lost to last week) and then plays at Saint Mary’s. GU needs to go 2-1 minimum in order to avoid being a bubble team on Feb. 2. 

Norlander’s news + nuggets

• It’s Jan. 22 and No. 20 St. John’s has the best record in the Big East. That hasn’t happened this late into the season since 1986. A shocker. Per SJU: “The Johnnies, led by National Player of the Year Walter Berry, were 5-1 in the league, half a game ahead of Syracuse and Villanova at 4-1. That team finished 31-5, shared the Big East regular season title and won the Big East Tournament.” A tasty tip awaits vs. Xavier, which beat No. 7 Marquette over the weekend, its first road win at a top-seven-ranked team since 1996 (No. 1 Cincinnati).
• No. 4 Alabama comfortably beat Vandy on Tuesday to improve to 16-3, the win coming three days removed from the 102-97 victory at Kentucky. Here’s a stat for ya: The Tide have scored 100-plus this season against ranked UK, ranked Illinois and ranked Oklahoma. They’re the first team to hit a century three times in one season against Top 25 competition since 2001-02 Kansas (made the Final Four).
• Something to eye: No. 12 Kansas will be without KJ Adams (shoulder) for at least three weeks, Bill Self said Monday. Adams, a traditional near-the-rim power forward, has been replaced by another big, freshman Flory Bidunga. If it goes well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bidunga keep the starting spot for the rest of the season.
• The longest mid-major winning streak in the country belongs to the Cleveland State Vikings. Third-year coach Daniyal Robinson has his team atop the Horizon League (8-1) and riding a 10-game streak. It’s highly likely to get to at least 12: its next two are at home against Detroit Mercy and Green Bay, which have a combined eight wins.
• Speaking of Green Bay, Rodger Sherman wrote a piercing post about just how disastrous the Doug Gottlieb hire has been.
• Miami (4-14) has allowed 206 points in its past two games. Other than the program ceasing to exist from 1971-85, this is the program’s nadir. The Canes could get run again Wednesday, this time by Stanford, which has the most under-discussed player in the country, Maxine Reynaud. He had 25 and 13 against UNC and is top-10 in scoring (20.8) and top-five in rebounding (11.6).
• In 2022, I wrote a feature on how Jalen Williams went from off-the-radar WCC prospect to a lottery pick in two months’ time. That potential has been met and then some. If you haven’t been following Williams or the OKC Thunder too much, I recommend reading Mirin Fader’s latest feature on one of the NBA’s most flexible player.
• Baylor should be better than 11-6, but regardless, senior big Norchad Omier should hit rarefied statistical air in the next week. He’s 17 rebounds away from reaching 2,000 snares which, when it happens, will make him the 14th D-I player ever with at least 2,000 points and 1,500 rebounds.
• The list of high-major teams without a conference win: Arkansas, Colorado, Miami and South Carolina. John Calipari’s flop of a debut led our pod Tuesday, before news emerged that Boogie Fland is shutting it down for the rest of the season due to a hand injury.