Well, with the close of that monstrous version of “One Shining Moment,” (seriously, is the NCAA determined to ruin everything about the Tournament?) Duke is the new National Champion. The crowning of a new champion always spurs a desire to rank them against their predecessors; this desire is even stronger when the new champ is perceived to be significantly better or worse than the norm, which is absolutely the case this year. Ranking champions based on scoring margins or efficiency margins can be interesting, but because of variances in speed and style of play, it does not really provide a true measure of how teams from different years would stack up against each other. However, a measurement of a team’s talent, and more specifically its NBA-ready talent, should provide a better (albeit not perfect) metric by which we can rank past champions. The following is a presentation of of a new scoring system (Talent Score) that ranks individual teams based on the amount of draftable NBA talent they had on their roster.
Simply ranking teams based on the total number of eventual NBA players they had on their rosters, or what those players became in the NBA, does not accurately reflect the level of talent that the team had at the time of the championship because it does not account for the player development (or digression) that occurs after the players leave college. At the same time, a scoring system based on drafted players must also be weighted to account for when (in relation to a championship) a given player is drafted, as a 1st Round pick in the draft following the championship almost always provided more value to the championship team than a player on the roster who is drafted in the 1st Round two years after the fact. As such, the Talent Score was developed to provide a weighted measurement of the draftable NBA talent on a team’s roster. The values assigned to each draft pick on a teams roster are described in Table 1:
Table 1. Talent Score Breakdown
| Championship Year | Following Year | |
|---|---|---|
| Top 10 Pick | 10 points | 6 points |
| 1st Round Pick | 5 points | 3 points |
| 2nd Round Pick | 2 points | 1 point |
Players drafted in the 1st round two or more years after the championship was won are assigned 2 points. Based on this scoring system, I have calculated the TS for all 25 champions since the Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. The predicted draft positions of Cole Aldrich (1st round; 2 points), Sherron Collins (2nd round; 0 points), and Ed Davis (Top-10; 6 points) were used to calculate the scores of the previous two champions. It is still to early to accurately calculate the TS for Duke, but I will provide a projection at the end of this post. Listed in Table 2 are the four teams with the highest Talent Scores in the 64-team Tournament Era.
Table 2. Highest Champion Talent Scores
| Year | Team | Talent Score (TS) |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 | Florida | 37 |
| 2005 | North Carolina | 33 |
| 1996 | Kentucky | 31 |
| 2004 | UConn | 26 |
There are four teams tied for the 5th position (including last year’s UNC team) with 23 points. At the opposite end of the talent spectrum, Table 3 lists the four championship teams with the least amount of draftable NBA talent on their rosters since 1985.
Table 3. Lowest Champion Talent Scores
| Year | Team | Talent Score (TS) |
|---|---|---|
| 1998 |
Kentucky | 10 |
| 1988 |
Kansas | 10 |
| 1987 |
Indiana | 4 |
| 1994 | Arkansas | 3 |
While the Talent Scores of individual teams provides a good starting point for discussing which championship team was the best (or worst), a more accurate ranking can be had when both the talent of the champion and the talent of the other members of its Final 4 are considered. To provide this measurement, the TS of every Final 4 team since 1985 were calculated and then the TS of the champion was multiplied by the sum of the TS of the other three teams to
