The 10 Best College Basketball Teams Since 2000
Over the years, there's been a number of great college basketball teams. Usually, when we think of the greatest, we think about championship teams and those squads full of future NBA players.
We recall Billy Donovan's Florida Gators, who won back-to-back championships in 2006 and 2007. In the same way, we recall Kemba Walker leading the Connecticut Huskies to an improbable title in 2011. On the flipside, we remember Kevin Durant's Longhorns and Anthony Davis' Wildcats. But, if we're talking about the best teams since the turn of the century, who are we forgetting?
Using advanced analytics, we're here to point those teams out but also to confirm or deny those we often associate with the best.
Our in-house metric, nERD, is here to help us do just that. What's nERD, you might ask? It's a measure of overall team efficiency and acts as an estimate of a team's score differential against a league-average team on a neutral court. For example, if Duke's nERD is 17.5 and Kansas' is 15.1, we would expect Duke to win by 2.4 points at a neutral site.
Basically, nERD is an accurate way to show who's been the best team on the court. It's not all about wins, championships or NBA draft picks -- it's more concerned with a team's level of play and efficiency.
For that reason, we rank the top 10 teams, from 10 to 1, with 1 possessing the highest nERD since 2000.
Who would those be?
