NCAA Tournament: 50 biggest individual game performances from 2010-19
By Logan Butts
There were plenty of memorable March Madness performances from the past 10 years. Let’s take a look at the top 50 from the 2010-2019 NCAA Tournaments.
Just like every other college basketball fan across the country, I was saddened by the cancellation of the 2020 NCAA Tournament due to COVID-19. Having a March without the Madness didn’t feel right. In lieu of getting to watch this season’s candidates compete for a One Shining Moment, let’s take a look back at the top 50 individual NCAA Tournament performances the decade. But first, a few notes:
- The 2009-10 season, culminating in the 2010 NCAA Tournament, will be our starting point. The eligibility period will end with last season’s Big Dance.
- Only one appearance per player per tournament. Players like Kemba Walker and Anthony Davis had famously dominant tournament runs, but they can only take up one spot on the list. However, there is one player that shows up for two different years.
- The performance has to come from a player on a winning team. Most of the players who would have qualified under this circumstance ended up making it anyway off of a different game. My deepest apologies to Bryce Cotton’s 2014 tournament.
- At first, I tried to limit the number of appearances for each tournament to an even five each. As you will see, the past few tournaments exceeded that number. I don’t think this is completely due to recency bias; there were just more and more elite performances the longer I dug into the recent tournaments. Feel free to tell me any I forgot.
- Context matters. The performances on this list are a combination of statistically impressive and memorable. If you put up big numbers in a first-round blowout as a one seed, that will be weighed differently than a supernova national championship game performance or a Herculean upset bid. There are a few notable exceptions to this.
Onto the list!