The Shocking Truth Behind ND’s Season of Sorrow

Like most others, I was surprised by our dreadful season last year. My recognition of the importance of experience has grown over the years, mostly thanks to postings of others on the Bench. In fact, spurred by last year’s debacle, I’ve modified my average ratings collections to also account for experience. That’s a future subject, however.

I wanted to put together some stats to show why Notre Dame’s lack of experience played a major role in last season’s poor performance. But when I gathered the facts together, I was shocked.

I selected Notre Dame’s top six players in playing time last year, along with the top six from some other schools, and compared their previous minutes of playing time before the season began. I chose Connecticut, because that is typically the standard and a rival, and also South Carolina since they ended up ranked number 1. I also threw in Oregon’s experience for fun (Note, like the other schools, this is Oregon’s average of their top six players’ experience at the beginning of last season!). Here are the results:

After the surprising results, I threw together the average ratings for those same players.

There is plenty of fodder here for discussion. I’ll let you handle that, but I was shocked at the relative lack of experience in both Connecticut and South Carolina. Numbers never tell the whole story (I’d start with our only 2 players with significant experience.), but they can lead us to find explanations.

A few notes:
• Column 3 is just the average of the minutes in column 2.
• Just from glancing at other teams, I’d guess that most teams’ top six average 1,200 to 2,000 average playing time minutes going into a season. The three teams selected for comparison just happened to have a number of freshman playing significant minutes. Oregon was special in the other way.
• The ratings for Mikayla Vaughn, Aubrey Griffin, and Mikiah Harrigan were inconsistent. In Vaughn’s case they ranged from 25 to 56 with 150 by Prospects and 107 by Sports Madness. For Mikiah Harrigan they were in the 64 to 74 range with a 151 by Blue Star. Aubrey Griffin’s ratings were 21 through 59 with a 90 by Prospects. (Dillon’s druthers to throw out the worst rating, at least, would have merit, though in Vaughn’s case it might be best to throw out the 2 worst.)
• UConn’s ratings were the average of only 5 since Anna Makurat is from Poland. Also, imagine UConn’s ratings if Griffin were thrown out since she only averaged 16 min/game.