NCAA Basketball: Ranking the 5 Naismith Trophy finalists for 2019-20

Stats: 23.9 ppg, 9.8 rpg, 1.8 bpg

Now to the guy who is my pick as National Player of the Year in Luka Garza, with the reasons for it being many and obvious.

Garza put up numbers than no one in the history of the Big Ten has ever been able to match, and he did so in a year where the Big Ten was clearly the best conference in the country. His numbers where even more impressive when looking just at what he did against conference foes, where his scoring average jumped to 26.2 points per game.

Keep in mind, too, that a large majority of the sport’s best big men reside in the Big Ten, so he was going up against the very best competition on a nightly basis and still couldn’t be stopped.

And, while Iowa was not in line to be a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament like Dayton or their conference’s regular season champ like Oregon, the Hawkeyes still overachieved in a huge way.

When star point guard Jordan Bohannon was lost for the season on December 16 due to a hip injury, virtually everyone (myself included) wrote Iowa off. Yet that didn’t happen thanks to Garza, who routinely carried a largely less-talented supporting cast and had them ranked in the top 20 nationally for most of 2020.

Garza certainly isn’t as flashy as Toppin and doesn’t have a plethora of game-winners like Pritchard, but there’s no one else in the country who can match the ruthless consistency of his high-level production. That, plus the way he carried Iowa, should earn him National Player of the Year honors.