Dreaming big next season? Experience did matter for mid-majors in 2016-17

Want to get a jump start on finding out which mid-majors will grab those precious auto-bids next season? Look for the ones loaded with juniors and seniors.

At least that’s what the 2017 NCAA Tournament field would suggest.

KenPom — in all his/its greatness — lists an “experience” figure for every college basketball team, which spits out the average “class” level of the players getting minutes for the given team. Since that’s a terrible explanation, here’s a description from the source:

Experience

– The experience value is in terms of years of college experience where a player’s eligibility class is assumed to determine this. For the purposes of the calculation, a freshman has zero years of experience, a sophomore has one year of experience, etc.

– Like the average height calculation, the experience calculation weights the experience of each player on the roster based on minutes played. Players that have played less than 10% of their team’s minutes are not included.

So a team that has seniors playing all of its minutes would have an experience value of 3.0. A team that has nothing but freshmen would have an 0.0. Last season, NC Central was the most experienced team in the country per the metric with a value of 2.91. That makes sense since junior Pablo Rivas, who averaged 18.4 minutes per game, was the only non-senior part of the rotation.

Does more experience make it more likely a team will play in the NCAA Tournament? That would seem to still be the conventional wisdom, especially on the mid-major level where there isn’t a Kentucky-type disruptor.

In terms of NCAA bids in 2016-17, the answer was yes.

The average experience value last season of all 351 Div. I teams was 1.70, and the mean was 1.72. The average value for the 68 teams that made the NCAA Tournament was slightly higher at 1.81. And for the 27 teams that we consider to be mid-major, the average value was even higher at 1.96.

Here’s the breakdown:

The narratives in this list are all over the map.

The “season’s never lost” rally came from teams both young and old. Two of the least experienced teams — Northern Kentucky and Kent State — were considered surprise winners, to varying degrees, of their respective league tournaments. Troy was also a surprise but had plenty of experience. And two final non-favorites — South Dakota State and Jacksonville State — were right in the middle.

Bucknell dominated its league without any seniors getting more than 8.7 minutes per game. NC Central, as mentioned before, dominated its league with essentially all seniors. And there are “higher” mid-major teams on both ends of the list, such as Nevada skewing younger and Dayton/VCU skewing older.

So there’s nothing in here to run to Las Vegas with, but it does show that more experience made it marginally more likely for a mid-major to play in the NCAA Tournament last season. That’s especially the case when compared with the power conference teams that got bids. The average experience value for that group was just 1.6655, broken down here:

One might say that this is all well and good, but the real value would be breaking this down for each year that KenPom has data on. Since that’s behind my limited capabilities, I’ve enlisted a friend of the blog to help out. We’ll hopefully have that infinitely more useful information soon.

Thanks to KenPom.com for this data and the vast majority all of my college basketball knowledge.