Iowa Basketball: Why Luka Garza should win National Player of the Year

3) Level of competition

Being consistent is one thing, but being consistent in the best conference in the country against elite big men virtually every night is another matter entirely.

According to Sports Illustrated’s Jeremy Woo, five of the nation’s 21 best players were big men in the Big Ten with the Iowa center obviously included. Yet that list didn’t include Illinois’ Kofi Cockburn, Penn State’s Mike Watkins, or Michigan’s Jon Teske, who are three of the nation’s best defensive big men. There’s also just the general size Purdue has down low that Garza had to deal with, too.

Take those elite individual matchups in a conference that had six teams ranked in the final AP poll and three more that were ranked at some point in February, and it’s clear Garza was going up against a tougher gauntlet than anyone. That said, he still found a way to consistently produce at an elite and historic level and was the best player virtually every time he stepped on the court.

The same can be said for Toppin as well, as it often looked like he was head and shoulders above everyone else Dayton played in the A-10. Some of that is absolutely because Toppin is just that good of a player and most college teams don’t have the ability to stop him, yet some of it is also the level of competition he was facing in conference play. Most A-10 teams simply don’t have a ton of size, and that size certainly isn’t as athletic as Toppin.

In the six games Dayton played against power conference teams or teams expected to make the NCAA Tournament (which includes North Texas, who finished first in Conference USA), Toppin only had two 20+ point games (Georgia, Virginia Tech) and never reached double figures in rebounds. He averaged 18.5 points and 6.8 rebounds in those six games – certainly nothing to dismiss, but also not something that compares to Garza’s averages in Big Ten play.