The free year of eligibility given to players that were on rosters during the 2021 season has caused a bit of problem with the way I used to measure experience. Previously, I would simply use the class on each team’s roster to measure each player’s experience and then minutes weight that for the current roster’s average experience. This wasn’t without its pitfalls. Most schools listed a player’s eligibility class on their rosters, but some (notably Notre Dame) listed a player’s academic class.

Unfortunately, the pandemic has introduced another methodology variant. Some teams during the 2022 season (Arizona, Dayton, and Tulane are the obvious ones, but there are many others) decided to freeze the academic class of players that were on the roster during the 2021 season. Others…did not do this.

So a solution is needed. And that solution is to measure a player’s experience by minutes played in previous seasons. I have more or less scaled this new measure to the previous measure. The new measure can be thought of as average number of full D-1 seasons played by the current roster, weighted by minutes played.

It’s not perfect. For instance, teams that are new to D-1 will have nearly zero experience which isn’t exactly helpful. But given the increasing divergence in methodology by the schools, it’s a better solution that basing the metric off of a player’s listed class.