Britton: Outside of KU, Iowa State, Big 12 guards will take a big step back this year
Written by Kelly Britton
The 2016-2017 men’s college basketball season is fast approaching, and so begins the very popular practice of breaking down the strengths and weaknesses of players, teams and conferences. As a Jayhawk, the conference that I care the most about is, of course, the Big 12. And it's a conference that I'm worried about, at least as far as guards go.
As a power five basketball conference, the Big 12 conference sends a large portion of its teams to the NCAA tournament every year. Given the strength of the Big 12 Conference as a whole, many people often assume that all of these teams are extremely strong. This assumption is not wrong, until you look towards the set of guards that populate the Big 12 teams. They're not exactly bad, but the guards in the conference this year are nowhere near as good as the last year's. Even so, there are two points of interest in the relatively poor selection of guards that the Big 12 has to offer.
One of these is Monte Morris, a senior at Iowa State, who projects as the strongest guard option in the conference, and will look to improve on his previous season as he helps his team move on from Georges Niang. As a junior, he averaged 13.8 points and 6.9 assists per game (the most in the Big 12) on his way to making the All-Big 12 Second Team. He was an extremely important piece for his team, averaging an insane 38 minutes per game. For context, his amount of minutes leads all guards in the Big 12 by about 5 minutes.
Kansas will likely have strong guards as well. Kansas’ backcourt of junior Devonte’ Graham and senior Frank Mason III will likely be the strongest backcourt in the conference, and they will be looking to guide the Jayhawks to another Big 12 title. The two spent a huge amount of time on the court — Mason averaged 33.5 minutes per game, Graham 32.6 — and combined for an average of 24.2 points and 8.3 assists per game. The statistical impact of these two guards — alongside their impressive trophy haul — was unmatched by any other guard in the Big 12, other than Morris.
Other than Jevon Carter of West Virginia, these three are the only guards who made any of the All-Big 12 teams and are still playing college ball this year; every other guard either graduated or left early for the draft.
This set of graduates includes Buddy Hield of the Oklahoma Sooners, who tore through the college basketball landscape, winning a number of awards naming him the most outstanding collegiate basketball player of the year. Numerous other guards had extremely large impacts on their team, including Wayne Selden Jr. of Kansas, Isaiah Taylor of Texas and Isaiah Cousins of Oklahoma.
On other end of the turnover, the Big 12 has not seen an equal level of incoming high-level guard talent. There are two freshman guards that will be good to watch this year: Baylor’s three-star recruit Wendell Mitchell and West Virginia’s four-star recruit James Bolden.
However, replacing five top-tier guards with two new, unproven guards, does not stop the Big-12 from experiencing a talent deficit. As a result, I predict a fall-off in guard play across the Big 12.
Notes on this piece: When I was assigned this piece, I could immediately tell that the writer was brand new to the newspaper. His paragraphs were long and unclear and the story was 200-300 words over what the paper typically uses for columns. Yet it was well-informed and a good idea in theory. The writer was so knowledgeable, in fact, that the amount of facts he put into the story required 45 minutes of fact-checking. But there was so much work to do in terms of cutting and making paragraphs clearer (a process that was complicated by the fact that I couldn't get a hold of the writer initially). In the end, I cut out about 225 words of unnecessary detail, tangents and confusing phrases. I finally got a hold of the writer and reviewed it all with him and asked him to help me on a few things I hadn't quite figured out how to reword. He was very happy with the edits, which was great to see, but the best moment came when I edited his next column, which was far-and-away better in terms of focus, length and clarity.
