Remember all those things you heard from SEC coaches last season about young teams trying to figure things out?
That wasn’t just coach-speak. That was simply reality for lots of teams throughout the conference.
According to KenPom.com, the SEC ranked 32nd out of 32 conferences in experience last season.
This is how each SEC team ranked from top to bottom (out of 351 teams) in KenPom’s ranking. The higher the number, the younger the team:
- Mississippi State (350th)
- Kentucky (340th)
- LSU (337th)
- Auburn (332nd)
- Tennessee (328th)
- Missouri (327th)
- Texas A&M (283rd)
- Alabama (239th)
- South Carolina (233rd)
- Georgia (193rd)
- Vanderbilt (126th)
- Ole Miss (92nd)
- Florida (71st)
- Arkansas (18th)
Nearly half the league ranked in the bottom 25 in terms of overall experience. That’s a lot of youth on the court.
But this year, the young will grow a little older.
Kentucky will still be near the bottom in KenPom’s experience ranking due to another complete roster overhaul, but promising young teams like Mississippi State, Auburn, and Tennessee will have an opportunity to go from a season of frustrating growing pains to a season of enormous potential.
One of the most fascinating parts of college athletics is watching players evolve from their freshman season to their last season on campus. Of course, some players only stay one season and thus don’t have that opportunity to complete their evolution in the college ranks.
But for those that do stay multiple seasons, each year is a building block. The game starts to slow down for players transitioning from freshman to sophomore. We start to see more finely-tuned leadership qualities for players transitioning from sophomore to junior. And then things can completely come together for players transitioning from junior to senior.
It’s part of the growing process for college athletes. Not every player is a one-and-done player that makes the game look easy from the moment they step on a college campus.
Take the two players in the photo above as an example.
Mississippi State big man Schnider Herard came into Starkville as a highly-coveted 4-star recruit with all the tools necessary to be a standout player for the Bulldogs.
But as expected, his freshman campaign had its ups and downs due to him trying to catch up with the speed of the game and not yet fully developing into the player that he could be by the time he exits the program.
And then there’s Grant Williams, who essentially came into Tennessee flying under the radar. Williams was a 3-star recruit that received offers from only two other power conference schools – Rutgers and Texas Tech – before deciding to take his talents to Knoxville.
The result? Williams exceeded expectations by grabbing SEC All-Freshman Team honors during his freshman season – one that included becoming the first freshman in 27 years to have multiple 30-point games.
Others that joined Williams on the SEC All-Freshman Team are back as well.
There’s Mustapha Heron at Auburn – who joined three other freshman in helping the Tigers become the only team in the country with freshmen as its top four scorers.
There’s Alabama’s Braxton Key – who has officially withdrawn from the NBA draft and will return as the Crimson Tide’s leading scorer from a season ago.
There’s also Lamar Peters – who averaged 10.7 points in 24.6 minutes per game as a freshman.
And let’s not forget about the surefire lottery pick in the 2018 NBA draft: Texas A&M forward Robert Williams. He’ll enter the 2017-18 season with the longest blocked shot streak in the country after having a block in every single game last year.
The moral of the story is pretty simple: it’s hard to know exactly how a player’s freshman season will turn out.
For every player that made the SEC All-Freshman Team, there were just as many that couldn’t make the same amount of strides in year one. The adjustment period is different for everyone.
Williams only scored double-figures three times in Tennessee’s first nine games before going off for 30 in a mid-December win over Lipscomb. Did we really know that he was going to become the type of player that would explode for 30 points on multiple nights throughout the season?
Herard will be a better player in 2017-18. So will Williams and the rest of the talented young core that helped lift the level of competition in the SEC last season.
Seeing these young players develop in front of our eyes is one the most exciting part of watching college basketball, even if it isn’t always fun for coaches that must experience the frustrations that come along with the process.
But the payoff can be well worth the wait.
If Mississippi State, Tennessee, Auburn, and others get that payoff due to the growth of their rising sophomores, the level of competition from top to bottom in the SEC is something that no one will want to miss.
This story is a part of the “100 Reasons to Watch SEC Hoops in ’17-18” series.