NCAA Basketball: 3 recent examples where “one and done” has worked

One and done is a growing strategy but, if the ultimate goal is a national championship, does the strategy work in NCAA Basketball?

With every passing season, fans and media alike seem to get caught up more and more in the one and done phenomenon. Like the NBA trying to create super teams like the league is a video game, the college game has become a bit of a freshmen frenzy, that is to say that, NCAA Basketball is becoming more positionless and more about who can gather as many five-star recruits to their program, worrying about how they fit together later.

To a lot of people, the more high-end one-year talent you can fit on your roster the more that becomes a correlation to the type of success you should have in the upcoming season. For the most part, if your team has a top recruiting class, you expect to, and more often than not, you do see them at or near the top of early summer or pre-season rankings.

But is this strategy a successful one for the teams that employ it? If the hope for the strategy as it is undertaken by the nation’s top programs is that at the end of it all they will be cutting down the nets, the answer may be surprising to some. The answer would be aside from a few outlier seasons, sine 2005-06, only three times has a freshman on a national championship winning team, who subsequently left for the NBA following the win, averaged more than 10 points per game. Here are the three times that one and done has paid the ultimate dividend over the last 14 years.

For the purpose of this piece, I have qualified a one-and-done success as a freshman who contributed at least double-digit points on a team that won the national championship. After all, the expectations of one-and-done players are that they are immediate contributors, and for the teams that have been the likeliest to recruit them the goal is more often than not is a national title.