How often does the Mario double jump happen?
an exploration of if Florida Atlantic is 2014 Wichita State, 2018 Wichita State, or neither
The Discourse is here.
If Woj is tweeting about it, then it’s escaped our little college basketball bubble. The mighty Florida Atlantic Owls are this year’s off-season hype champions, a team that’s returning 90% of available minutes from a group that was a buzzer-beater away from a championship game bid. Any time a 35-win team returns almost every available minute and point, they’re going to get a lot of hype. I think that’s just a basic fact.
Of course, the question should be asked: if Memphis had been granted their timeout in the Round of 64 game and gone on to win, would anyone rank Florida Atlantic in the top 5 this offseason? Top 25, potentially, but top 5 would’ve been a serious stretch even for the most devoted FAU supporter of them all. Such is life in a sport that values the last three weeks over the final 20.
However, there’s a nagging question at the bottom of this for me. Every season has its breakout teams; every season, a team has its best year in school history. It doesn’t happen to everyone, obviously, but it happens to someone. What happens to the teams that return a lot of talent from those rosters the next year? Do they actually take the next step forward, a la 2013-14 Wichita State? Or are they unable to crack the ceiling already set for themselves in a previous season?
Using a combination of KenPom and previous poll data, I’ve gone hunting for:
Teams that overachieved their preseason KenPom rating by 8+ points;
Who either made the Sweet Sixteen or further or finished in the KenPom top 25;
Who returned no less than 70% of their minutes in the following season;
And were preseason Top 25 teams in any of KenPom, Torvik, or the AP Poll.
We’ll further refine our search to find teams with on-paper talent ranges like FAU’s, but the first pull of this data provided a list of 19 teams.
The results they’ve provided are possibly surprising if you’re not familiar with why power conferences are named that for a reason. For FAU, however, it provides a look into the road ahead.
Yes, teams can make the double jump…
This initially started after a pithy tweet I sent to friend of the Substack Jim Root about how no one ever does the double jump. Maybe this is just a recency bias thing of having lived through it. After all, we watched media members rush to shove UNC to #1 in the AP Poll just seven short months ago on the strength of one good month of basketball.
Of course, that UNC team opened the previous season in the AP Top 20 and wasn’t really a Butler-level surprise; they were just a pretty good team for most of the season that turned into a great one at the perfect time. Because UNC didn’t overachieve their preseason standing of 2021-22 by that much, they weren’t included in this research. However, 2015-16 UNC followed a 2014-15 Tar Heel team that ended up quite a bit better than anticipated. Same for 2012-13 Indiana. Same for 2015-16 Xavier.
Of the 19 teams I measured from 2011 to present, eight did proceed to best their previous year’s finish in KenPom. The above names are the ones you already know, but many have forgotten about 2019-20 Louisville (top 10 KenPom team pre-COVID), 2015-16 Oklahoma, or 2016-17 West Virginia. The consistent feature here is an obvious one: they’re all members of power conferences.
…but talent is the premier indicator of if they’ll do so
Our 19 teams all returned a fairly similar amount of production: somewhere between 70-90% of minutes logged and points scored, no fewer than 3 starters returning from a surprisingly great team. Only one of the 19 cases, 2021-22 Loyola Chicago, featured a coaching change, but even so, said change was hiring the lead assistant from the 2020-21 staff. At a surface level, all 19 situations were similar enough. The teams had heavily overachieved the previous season, they returned a lot of bodies from those teams, and they were looking forward to building on it in the next season.
The main reason we’re talking about a variety of outcomes here, by far, was on-paper talent. Bart Torvik has a Talent metric on his site that’s a combination of returning pieces and their recruiting ratings. Obviously, recruiting ratings aren’t everything, but there’s a reason that no one below UConn’s 66 last season, aside from 2020-21 Baylor, has won it in the last 15 years.
Of everything I researched, nothing correlated stronger with a second Mario jump than this talent rating. The correlation between Talent Rating and year-over-year overachievement is +0.66, a strongly positive outcome. This chart spells it out fairly nicely: the more talent you have, the greater your odds become of overcoming history.
The average talent rating of our dataset was 42.3. Of the nine teams below that average, one (2012-13 Creighton, 38.5) got better the next season. The rest either stayed the same or declined in metrics production. In fact, no one below Creighton’s 38.5 got better.
This is meaningful, because now that FAU’s roster is set, Torvik’s Talent Rating sets the Owls at 20. That’s more in line with 2012-13 Saint Louis or 2019-20 Utah State than it is the 2012-13 Creighton team. It’s also worth noting that those Bluejays had Doug McDermott on their roster. Whatever you may think of McDermott now, he was an NBA lottery pick and has sustained a nine-year career in the league with presumably a few more to come.
Even prior to Alijah Martin and Johnell Davis announcing their respective returns to the FAU roster, I was unable to find a single Draft Big Board out there that had either in a top 80. Jonathan Givony at ESPN, the guy with the most connections re: the draft, didn’t have either in his top 100. This is not to say that neither player will make it in the NBA; it isn’t to say that either player is bad, obviously. It’s just that McDermott, and other members of the Creighton roster, had a higher on-paper ceiling than the Owls do.
The average team below that 42.3 line saw their AdjEM decline by an average of -3.86 the next season, with only 2012-13 Creighton overachieving. Those above the average actually improved and were +1.34 better on average the following season. Whether it’s satisfying to state it or not doesn’t matter; it’s the truth that talent matters.
Sure, fine, but what about 2013-14 Wichita State?
Other friend of the Substack (and technically one of my bosses) Mike Miller pointed out this comparison in the replies to Root’s initial tweet. On its surface, it makes a ton of sense and Mike was wise to bring it up. Wichita State was also an underrated 9-seed who made the Final Four. They opened the next season in the AP Top 20 and proceeded to merely win their first 35 games of the year en route to a 1 seed. Also, they were a member of a one-bid conference in that 2013-14 season.
Unfortunately, that’s where I think the comparisons end. Wichita did not qualify for our study here because they returned just 50% of their minutes and points from that Final Four team; if included, they would far and away be the single biggest outlier on our list. That Wichita team lost two starters and was one of the least experienced teams in America, while FAU stands to be one of the 20 or so strongest teams in terms of years of D-1 experience.
Now, of course, none of this means that Florida Atlantic is confirmed to not overachieve their lofty preseason standing in 2023-24. There’s still five months until the season. Every single Owl supporter alive should be relishing in these five months of hope and hype. Why wouldn’t you if you had the chance? If 2013-14 Wichita could do it, and if 2012-13 Creighton improved a bit, an FAU team with high-end coaching and a ton of seniority could get a little better, too.
This is merely spelling out that the odds are heavily stacked against them doing so. The teams that traditionally make that second leap have far more next-level talent than FAU does. For teams who ranked above average in Torvik’s talent metric (43 or higher), six of the 10 overachieved their previous year’s finish. If we were doing this monster hype train for Marquette - a team that stands to return about 85% of its minutes with a talent rating of 59.8 - I would be more understanding and/or intrigued. Or Duke (75%, 90.2), Michigan State (77%, 76.4), or even Purdue (84%, 61.0), none of whom need my analysis.
Plus, if Florida Atlantic were simply to run the exact same numbers back - 17th overall, +19.38 Adjusted Efficiency Margin - it would be massively, massively successful. We’re discussing a program with zero top 100 KenPom finishes prior to last season. Even if you applied that average -3.9 point penalty and FAU finished 39th this next season, it would still qualify as a gigantic overachievement for a program with zero basketball history whatsoever.
For a team at 20, like FAU, there really isn’t a case in their favor unless you tweak our data set to include 2013-14 Wichita State. (Or, if you really squint, 2012-13 VCU.) Even if you did tweak that, there’s an obvious cancelling-out of that case: 2017-18 Wichita State. That Shockers team returned 89% of their minutes and 92% of scoring from a 10 seed that ranked 8th in KenPom. They started the season 7th in the AP Poll.
They finished 21st on KenPom, 16th in the polls, and lost to a 13 seed in the first round. Overachieving: harder than it looks.