Teams With Roster Turnover Are Struggling In 2024-25

Revisiting modern roster construction strategies to see which approaches are succeeding this season

During the offseason, I conducted a study to find the most reliable strategy for building rosters in the modern portal era. I won’t rehash the full article, but I’ll quickly recap the main conclusions:

This offseason, we saw more roster turnover than ever before. Six high-major teams have entirely new rosters with zero returning players. Many of these teams were forced into roster changes because they hired new head coaches. Still, even teams with coaching continuity, like Illinois, Memphis, and Kansas State, have primarily new faces.

More than a month into the season, it’s time to quickly revisit some of these roster-building practices and see if teams with returning talent are performing better than teams with new talent.

Big Picture: Teams With Newcomers Are Not Meeting Expectations

Before discussing specific teams, let’s first examine how teams with at-large aspirations are performing relative to preseason expectations. To define expectations for a team, I use their preseason roster talent score, which measures the quality of the individual players, and their preseason team ranking at EvanMiya.com, which accounts for other factors like team history and coaching changes.

I will define a team performing better than expected based on preseason roster talent as one that has 1) a better current team ranking at EvanMiya.com than the preseason team ranking and 2) at least a 10-spot improvement in current team ranking compared to the preseason roster talent ranking. The same applies to teams performing below expectations: a worse team ranking compared to the preseason and at least a 10-spot drop in current team ranking compared to the preseason roster talent ranking.

In the table below, I have divided all preseason top 75 teams based on teams with returners playing at least 50% of the team’s minutes this season and teams who fall below this mark. The difference in performance is stark: 39% of the teams who are primarily reliant on returning players are exceeding expectations this year, while only 14% of the teams with predominantly newcomers are doing a lot better than expected. By contrast, over 50% of the newcomer-reliant teams are failing expectations, compared to just 14% for teams with a majority of their minutes coming from returning players.

Simply put, teams who can’t rely heavily on returning players are struggling to meet expectations this season based on their perceived roster talent.

Start From Scratch: Teams Who Return Minimum Players

Let’s look at the high majors who have opted to build their rosters around almost entirely newcomers. The table below shows the high majors this season with the lowest percentage of minutes played by returning players. Every team has returning players constituting less than 25% of their team’s minutes so far this year:

Of the teams on this list, which are mostly comprised of new players, only four (Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois, and Arizona State) are exceeding expectations based on preseason roster talent, while nine (Louisville, USC, Cal, Vanderbilt, Arkansas, TCU, Washington, Kansas State, and Oklahoma State) are performing worse than expected.

Kentucky’s impressive start to the year with a brand new roster and a new head coach, Mark Pope, has undoubtedly been one of the year's biggest storylines. However, their success is an outlier compared to other high majors. The disappointing nature of many of these other teams further demonstrates how remarkable Kentucky’s immediate team chemistry has been.

Roster Continuity: Teams With Mostly Returning Players

Turning to teams that have retained a lot of returning talent, the table below shows the high majors this season with the highest percentage of minutes played by returning players. Every team has returning players constituting at least 60% of their team’s minutes so far this year:

Very few returner-heavy teams are struggling, as just Purdue, Notre Dame, and North Carolina are performing worse than expected. Meanwhile, 7 teams (Marquette, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Auburn, Florida, Penn State, and Pittsburgh) are thriving relative to their preseason roster talent.

I will revisit these trends again when the transfer portal season is upon us!