Building an NCAA basketball champion (Part I)

July 9, 1:59 PMCincinnati Bearcats ExaminerTom O'Brien

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How di the 'Heels do it?  (AP)

The game of college basketball is always changing. Styles, strategies, and team structures are popular one year and old news the next.

Fans of every Division I basketball team begin each year hoping their team has a chance to win the championship. Being a fan of basketball, particularly the college game and the Cincinnati Bearcats, I started to wonder if there were any recognizable traits on championship teams. Does a team need a certain mixture of ingredients to win it all or is it simply random from year to year?

Any basketball fan knows a good team needs a solid point guard and a good big man, but I wanted to look deeper than that. I wanted to know if it was possible to scour through statistics and pinpoint common threads between recent national champions. I undertook this task more out of curiosity than anything else, and I used only statistical data from the five most recent NCAA champions. In the end I was able to identify the key player elements needed to build a championship basketball team.

My total analysis will be shared over the next six weeks. In the end maybe you’ll be able to tell if your team a shot to win the national championship or not?

The best place to start is team offense. Obviously, you can’t win if you can’t score points. Championship teams not only score a lot of points (80 points or more per game on average) but they do so in a balanced manner. Teams with only one or two big scoring threats are not typically going to make it far into March. One or two scorers can be contained depending on their opponent’s defensive prowess. Teams with four or five scoring threats are not easy to defend. If one or two options are taken away by the opposing defense, the other two or three scorers can compensate.

To constitute a player as a legitimate scoring threat I used a double-digit minimum. Each of the past five national champions has had four or five scoring threats.

To add credibility to my findings I compared a few powerhouse teams from last year to see if they had the number of scoring options necessary to win a championship. My findings were as follows: Memphis and UConn had 4 double-digit scorers, while Pittsburgh, Michigan State and Louisville had only three double-digit scorers. This proves, to some degree of certainty, that a team bidding for a national title increases their chances of accomplishing said goal by having a minimum of five players that can score 10 or more points on average. Balanced scoring is definitely one component needed to build an NCAA basketball champion.