Last week my colleague Eamonn Brennan wrote that Duke and Kentucky "have lifted themselves to an altogether different plane than their peers." Color me shocked, but this characterization of the hoops powers that be led to some pushback.
While it's self-evident that our big, sprawling and unwieldy sport of college basketball is much larger than any two teams, I'm here to offer one hearty, analytic "Hear! Hear!" to Brennan's thesis. If anything, he could have pushed it even further.
An inside track on elite talent
Sure, a Josh Jackson or a Markelle Fultz can look past the Big Two and go to Kansas or Washington. Absolutely, Villanova can win a national title by following its own very different path. And, yes, Duke can lose in the round of 64 to a Mercer or a Lehigh, and Kentucky can even miss the tournament entirely (as the Wildcats did as recently as 2013).
No one's saying the national champion will absolutely come from one of these two teams in April and for every succeeding season in perpetuity. But, to me, Brennan's key point was the following:
This is the state of college basketball, and the state of these two programs. They compete not merely in actual games of basketball -- how trite -- but on a grand hegemonic scale ...
Just so. These are dual hegemons bestriding the talent-acquisition globe like colossi. Mike Krzyzewski and John Calipari, at least for the moment, define the recruiting landscape for the other elite schools.
If you want Harry Giles, Malik Monk, Jayson Tatum or De'Aaron Fox to come play for your team, well, too bad. They're taken. To an extent that does vary year to year but never dissipates entirely, the rest of Division I must now content itself with what's left after Duke and Kentucky have swept through the top of the talent rankings.
The numbers behind the hegemony
I've tracked the program selection of every top-100 recruit since the 2006-07 season. That's 1,100 decisions, and over that span two main dynamics have made themselves felt:
Kentucky has been a model of recruiting consistency under Calipari. In eight seasons at the helm in Lexington, he has never once signed a freshman class ranked lower than No. 2 in the nation.
Over the past three recruiting years, Duke has competed on an even basis with, and indeed on occasion surpassed, UK. No program has ever hung with Calipari-era Kentucky for this long before in terms of recruiting.
One method I like to use to measure recruiting success is based on recruiting "points," a metric created by Boston Celtics basketball operations analyst Drew Cannon. In Cannon's scheme, signing the No. 1 recruit in the country is worth 10 points, and getting the No. 100 prospect is equivalent to one point. In between, a heavily front-loaded sliding scale reflects the tendency wherein most of the production from any given group of freshmen nationally comes from the elite recruits at the very top of the rankings.
In each of the past three recruiting years, Duke and Kentucky have earned more recruiting points, by far, than any other program. That's hardly surprising, of course, but what's interesting is how, in terms of recruiting points, the two programs have stayed: (1) equal to each other, and (2) dominant over everyone else. The fact that both of these conditions have been met across three vastly different recruiting cycles suggests to me that something rather durable might be going on here.
For example, last season was nominally a "bad" (ha!) recruiting year for the blue chips, one in which national top-five prospects such as Ben Simmons and Jaylen Brown chose to upend the talent apple cart, so to speak, and sign with the likes of LSU and California, respectively. Sure enough, the number of recruiting points recorded by Duke (27.6) and UK (26.9) dipped to levels not usually seen from the Nos. 1 and 2 classes. But these were the Nos. 1 and 2 classes -- no one else nationally added anywhere near as much talent, not even in a "down" year for elite recruiting.
Conversely, this season represented something of a return to talent-acquisition normalcy: Duke and UK both earned between 35 and 37 recruiting points. Way, way back in third place (20.9) was Michigan State, which put together far and away the best recruiting class Tom Izzo has had over the past decade. In effect, recruiting for the rest of D-I outside of the Big Two has become an annual competition for a distant third-place finish.
A new normal?
Again, there are means of ascent in college basketball besides cornering the market on the top freshmen in the country. Villanova demonstrated as much last season.
Nevertheless, we're three years into a new normal where Duke and Kentucky are maintaining a balance of recruiting power with respect to one another. In one sense, it would be foolhardy to assume this state of affairs will continue indefinitely. Krzyzewski has held his present position for 36 years and, like Calipari, he will at some point move on to the next challenge.
On the other hand, Calipari's uninterrupted eight-years-and-counting run at the pinnacle of the talent game suggests there's no law saying that recruiting has to be as unpredictable as the NCAA tournament. This may be the nature of the sport for a while: Duke and Kentucky get first shot at the best talent each year, and everyone else -- including elite programs like Kansas, Arizona and Michigan State -- assembles the best team they can with, for the most part, veterans that the NBA has passed over.
As it happens you can put an outstanding team on the floor that way -- Coach K proved it as recently as 2009-10 -- but the fact that 349 programs have little or no methodological choice in the matter is directly attributable to the sport's two hegemons, Duke and Kentucky.