The NCAA Tournament is not for the kids anymore
An age evolution is taking over the NCAA Tournament this year. In a sport long dominated by younger players when the allure of NBA riches limited some of the all-time greats to just a single year of college basketball, a surprising shift recently started.
Just as they did in decades past, the older upperclassmen are once again dominating the game.
Some of the most memorable NCAA Tournament moments of all time featured freshman players. Carmelo Anthony was a freshman when he scored 33 points in the Final Four game against Texas before nearly grabbing a triple-double while leading Syracuse over Kansas for the national title.
So was Anthony Davis when he won MOP and led Kentucky to a championship in 2012, Michael Jordan when he hit the championship-winning shot against Georgetown in 1982 and Mike Bibby when he led his team past three No. 1 seeds in North Carolina, Kansas and Kentucky on the way to winning the title with Arizona in 1997.
This year, seven of the 10 players in Bleacher Report's most recent ranking of the top freshmen in men's college basketball made the NCAA Tournament. Only one of them, Jared McCain, made the Sweet 16.
The Wall Street Journal recently took an in-depth look at the age of players in this tournament and found several surprising facts and stats:
"Through the round of 32, nine of the top 10 most prolific scorers were seniors. Oregon fifth-year Jermaine Couisnard leads the pack with 72 points."
"In all, a whopping 296 players in their fourth, fifth or sixth seasons have logged March Madness minutes this year. That number is the highest since at least 2008, the earliest year Stats Perform has such data."
"Maybe most astonishingly, the North Carolina Tar Heels feature a starting lineup whose average age—22.2 years old—is nearly as high as that of the Oklahoma City Thunder, an NBA contender. That’s because the Thunder are built around a pair of stars who spent a combined two years in college, while the Heels are built around upperclassmen like Armondo Bacot."
Two of the tournament's most talented young teams, No. 3 seeds Kentucky and Baylor, were eliminated in the first and second rounds, respectively.
Kentucky head coach John Calipari directly addressed the issue of his team's youth in his comments immediately after the game.
While Calipari has vowed to make changes to the program, he'd be wise to take some external counsel from legendary Villanova coach Jay Wright, who somewhat brutally but succinctly identified the problem in comments he made on CBS after the Kentucky loss to Oakland.
"The guys on Kentucky will be far better pros than any of these guys on Oakland or any of these guys in the tournament. But they're not as good college basketball players," Wright said.
According to ESPN's most recent mock draft, three Kentucky players are projected to be taken in the first round of the NBA Draft this summer.
One does not have to be a wise old soul to know that the era of youth is over, and for at least the foreseeable future, NCAA basketball is an old[er] man's game.
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