Is this year's team really young? Yes, it's a thing!

If you assign 1 to freshmen, 2 to sophomores, up to 4 for seniors and take the weighted average of minutes played and points scored it looks like this.



You can see that using the entire season, this 2019 team is the 6th youngest under Self. But you can see there is a pretty big jump to the next team in minutes played which was the 2010 team. So by this measure it is a pretty young team but nothing like the 2015 team. But what if you limit to the last 4 games since Vick left. Things change pretty dramatically. This team becomes the youngest under Self by minutes played and almost equal to 2014's team in % minutes played by freshmen. Since Vick left the team, the freshmen have played 54% of the minutes! That is incredible. If you look at the 4 youngest teams under Self (2019, 2014, 2009 & 2006), You will see 4 of the 7 freshmen in 2014 are now in the NBA, 4 of the 6 non-walk-on freshmen in the class of 2009 played in the NBA and 3 of the 4 non-walk-on freshmen in the class of 2006 played in the NBA. Will this team deliver that kind of pedigree? Without Vick for the rest of the season, this team will be the youngest, or essentially tied for the youngest under Self and by a pretty good margin.

I would agree about transfer players, but add a caveat:

Some of them (Charlie Moore, D Lawson) did play significant D1 minutes....just not at KU. Dedric played 2 years at Memphis and averaged 30+ minutes per game. Moore averaged 28 minutes at Cal.

Based on this, I'd say it's more like 1/2 credit for season played when you factor in a year off and a total change of program. So for Dedric (3rd actual year) I'd say that he's more like a true Sophomore on this team. Moore is more like a "freshman and a half" on this team (1/2 year of extra credit plus this year).

Totally willing to be flexible if each previous year is 1/2 year or some other fraction, but I think the overall point is that despite the actual number of years of experience, these guys are often behind where they would have been in terms of development had they not transferred.

Okay, interesting point on the experience at KU. I made the same calculations replacing the class (Fr, SO, JR, SR) with years playing at KU. Incidentally, I graphed both vs. the Home/Away average point differential by year and it trends pretty radically toward more experience yields a much less differential between home and road. Actually to the tune of a 1.5 average years at KU the Home/Away differential is 14.5 points per game and a 3.5 average years at KU yields a Home/Away point differential of 5.0. That's pretty eye opening.

You will notice that if you are going by years of experience playing at KU, this team is far far and away the least experienced. A whopping 83% of minutes are played by 1st year players over the last 4 games and 69% for the year.