The college basketball season is just over a month old, but we've already hit the start of conference play, the unofficial stage two for the campaign. While most squads still have a small handful of non-conference games remaining on the slate, there's no better time to take a step back and break down some of the most interesting notes across the country from an analytics perspective.
What's real and what's fake throughout the season's first month? Which teams and players are bursting onto the scene outside of the national media's microscope? Here's what to know and pay attention to as the 2025-26 season turns towards its next chapter.
Tanner and Miles: The Nation's Most Efficient Backcourt
You take your pick about what's more impressive when it comes to the ultra-efficient Vanderbilt starting backcourt of Tyler Tanner and Duke Miles. Their combined 37/80 (46%) from 3, 62/102 (60.1%) from 2, or their 79 assists to just 24 turnovers. All of those numbers combined make the pair two of only 24 players in the country to have an offensive rating over 139 on at least 22% possession usage.
Mixed among the duo on that list of efficient high usage players are potential All-American Bruce Thornton, Michigan star Yaxel Lendeborg, LSU's $2M+ guard Dedan Thomas, Louisville sniper Ryan Conwell, and Player of the Year frontrunner Cameron Boozer. All of whom receive far more love than Miles and Tanner.
Tanner burst onto the scene as a 3-star freshman last year, but immediately carved out a major role. He miraculously went 16 college games before committing his first turnover, which immediately had my eyes drawn to him. He cooled off in SEC play, and couldn't buy a bucket from deep, but he's seemingly fixed those woes early this year, sitting at 50%.
In retrospect, Miles should have been an obvious add for a team with a larger transfer portal budget than Vanderbilt after moving over from Oklahoma. There were just two players that averaged 50% from the field, 40% from 3 and 80% from the line in the SEC last year, and Miles had 122 more combined rebounds, assists, and steals than the other guy (Kentucky's Ansley Almonor).
Vanderbilt is certainly reaping the benefits of their underrecruited duo. Prior to their dominant win over SMU, they were a whopping 134 points in the 137 minutes when the two have shared the floor. All other lineup combinations were just a +61 in 183 minutes.
While the competition is bound to get tougher and more physical in the SEC gauntlet, Vanderbilt is positioned to make a serious run for a league title, led by their electric pairing.
Variance Wins & Losses Shouldn't Count
On this week's episode of Weekend Under Review, I went to bat for TCU and their ever-growing public perception after losing every shred of it during an opening night buy-game loss to New Orleans in which they shot 11% from 3 on a 40% attempt rate.
After thinking about it more, and diving into the numbers, I have created my very own "15-and-55 rule." This rule is simple - if a team shoots under 15% or over 55% from deep on at least a 40% 3-point rate, that result should not count towards the perception of a team. In other words, if you are a whole 20% off the general average for threes on a legitimate sample size, throw that game in the trash.
So far this year, 29 games qualify for the 15% part of the rule (2-27 record), and 19 games qualify for the 55% part (19-0). I am hereby deleting those games from my memory. Goodbye Colorado State's 83-68 win over South Florida where they shot 16/22 from deep. Goodbye Ball State's 55-37 loss to Lafayette where they shot 3/29 from deep. You both equally mean nothing to me.
While some may think I'm being a tad harsh, the reality is these games are so far in the outlier spectrum for a shot that is so much more analytically important than any other in the game in a sample size as small as 40 minutes that throwing it away should be the only decision. After all, it's not a coincidence that no team is featured on either list more than once. (Though it is worth mentioning that New Mexico and New Orleans were both featured twice as defenses allowing under 15% and Bellarmine was featured twice as a defense allowing over 55%.)
By far my favorite example of this rule is the matchups between Florida and Tennessee last year. In January, Tennessee shot 13.8% from deep on a 52% rate and lost by 30. In February, Florida shot 14.8% from deep on a 51% rate and lost by 20. When both teams shot in the 30s from 3-point range in their third meeting, the game was close. Would you look at that!
Variance is a real thing, and variance within the confines of a basketball game with approximately 70 possessions in it is even scarier. Don't let a wild shooting game on either side of the spectrum ruin your perspective of any given team this season. Make TCU your lesson.
The One-Man Rebounding Wrecking Crew
Let us not bury the lede here, though the sample size is a small six games, Villanova big man Duke Brennan is currently on pace to crush the offensive rebounding rate record across KenPom's 22-year history. The record is currently held by Pitt legend DeJuan Blair, and Brennan is a monstrous 5.2% higher than Blair's mark at the moment.
Brennan was a top 50 offensive rebounder by percentage in each of his two seasons at Grand Canyon, but has taken things to a different stratosphere for new Wildcats head coach Kevin Willard. He has 40 offensive rebounds in 155 minutes. No other player on the team has more than 12. And yet, because of Brennan's prowess, Villanova still sits second nationally in grabbing second chances, only behind Virginia, who has six players who would rank second on Nova in that stat.
In other words, Brennan is almost single-handedly giving the Wildcats their most prominent identity. And it's a super valuable piece of the puzzle, given the numerous ways it helps Villanova succeed.
Whether it's putting back a miss, kicking out to a teammate for a hyper-efficient second chance 3-ball, or even just drawing a foul while in the bonus, Brennan's glass crashing has led to positive outcomes for Villanova.
Case in point: Brennan along with teammates Bryce Lindsay, Acaden Lewis, Devin Askew, and Matt Hodge make up the nation's second most efficient lineup, per EvanMiya.
Perhaps the craziest part about all of this, is Brennan has actually been very bad at finishing off his second chances. He's 9-for-20 on putbacks this year, good for a 7th% rate nationally. Of all 106 players with at least 10 putback attempts, only 12 have a worse field goal percentage than Brennan. If only he started converting his record-setting second chances into more points.
A Buffalo Breakthrough
The first two years of Buffalo head coach George Halcovage's tenure in Western New York were certainly nothing to write home about. The Bulls went 11-49 and 6-30 in MAC play, all while never soaring above the bottom 30 teams in KenPom. More of the same was expected this year, with the team checking in at No. 330 to begin the campaign.
And then Buffalo starting winning, and winning again. What's perhaps more impressive than the team's 8-0 start, with their seven DI wins tying the most ever under Halcovage's watch, is the fact that they've seen a KenPom ratings boost after every single contest. No magical variance from deep. No inconsistent performances. Slow, steady, growth from game-to-game, otherwise known as the most sustainable source of success compared to relative expectations.
The method in which Buffalo has acquired its players is a perfect representation of what rebuilding looks like in 2025. Its seven-man rotation features two players they recruited out of high school that stayed patient through losing (Ryan Sabol, Tim Oboh), two former high major recruits who were willing to settle into smaller roles despite the drop in level (Angelo Brizzi, Noah Batchelor), and two NAIA superstars (Ezra McKenna, Derrick Talton).
And that's all while saving the best for last with superstar guard Daniel Freitag. A 4-star prospect and the highest ranked point guard prospect in Wisconsin history, Freitag was buried behind a tremendous Badgers backcourt last year, and chose to jump ship this summer.
Freitag has been a revelation for the Bulls, scoring at least 17 points in each of their last seven games, shooting over 42% from deep and getting to the line an absurd nine times per game. He also has just nine total turnovers as their lead on-ball option, and has helped the team slow the pace down, which has in turn led to a significantly more efficient offense. He's also been exceptionally clutch this season.
While it's worth mentioning Buffalo has yet to play a single Top 100 KenPom team and their only current matchups against one will be their conference tilts against Akron, the Bulls should at least be considered a competitor in the MAC this year, something that surely could not have been said the last few campaigns.
Quick Hitters
- All six of Kennesaw State's DI games have seen at least 28 free throws from each team. That is insane. No other team has more than three games where that's occurred, and it's Troy, where all three games in question went to OT. The Owls are 3rd-nationally in free throw rate offense, and 2nd-worst in free throw rate defense.
- The flipside of all this variance shooting luck talk is the true value of shot volume. The best shot volume team in the country so far this year is Gonzaga, who stunningly is Top-35 in both offensive and defensive turnover AND rebounding percentage, which is unheard of. The Zags have taken 84 more shots than their opponents so far this year.
- I used arbitrary numbers of 70%+ true shooting percentage sub-15% shot percentage, and sub-5% assist percentage to represent low usage bigs who are deceivingly not valuable, led by Purdue Fort Wayne's Eric Mulder, who is 2-5 from the field in seven games at Iowa State this year. Some guys that fit that threshold this year so far: Rhode Island's Keeyan Itejere, Penn State's Ivan Juric, Houston's Khalifa Sakho, Notre Dame's Kebba Njie, and Utah's Josh Hayes are on the list.
- It's obviously early, but so far, 15 of the 21 teams that returned absolutely 0 production from last year have a worse KenPom rating than when the season started.
- On the flipside, only nine of the 21 teams that returned 50%+ of their minutes from last year have seen a KenPom boost this season. If anything, this shows the exceptionally delicate balance of roster building these days.
- Some fun statistical leaders that you won't find on your typical leaderboard:
- Dunks Leader: North Carolina's Caleb Wilson, 29 dunks
- Catch-and-Shoot Threes Leader: Texas A&M's Ruben Dominguez, 35 threes at 50%
- Off-Dribble Threes Leader: Arizona State's Moe Odum, 19 threes at 44.2%
- Transition Rate Leader: William & Mary, 28.3%
- Lowest Transition Rate: Denver, 3.8%
- Best After Timeout Coach (Points Per Possession): Idaho's Alex Pribble
- Worst After Timeout Coach: South Carolina State's Erik Martin
