If you are looking for a reason to be excited about the next college basketball season, here is a pretty simple one. The Big Ten and ACC Freshman-of-the-Year (FOY) award winners are coming back and both should play on championship caliber teams. Both Ohio St.’s Jared Sullinger and North Carolina’s Harrison Barnes elected to stay in school instead of entering the 2011 NBA Draft.

It may seem unusual for these players not to declare for the draft, but you do not need to look very far in the historical record to find previous ACC and Big Ten FOY winners who made the same decision. And plenty of the FOY end up sticking around for four years. Here are the FOY award winners for the last 15 years from both conferences. (The Big Ten list includes more players because the Media and Coaches votes have not always coincided.) 

Even though it is not unusual for the top freshman to stick around, it is unusual for someone with Jared Sullinger’s numbers to stick around. His 120.9 ORtg is the best in the last 15 years for Big Ten FOY. And only a few players had higher usage rates. See Eric Gordon, Kris Humphries, and Michael Redd. It also is quite striking how much aggressiveness predicts stardom in the NBA. Gordon, Humphries, and Redd’s high usage rates allowed all three to become quality scorers at some point in their NBA career. Players with lower shot volumes tend to find themselves on the NBA bubble.

One award winner with better efficiency stats than Jared Sullinger was Chris Paul. His two years at Wake Forest were the model of consistency. Looking at the ACC numbers, it is remarkable how Chris Duhon won the award despite a very low usage rate in 2001. But it was more remarkable that Ed Nelson won the award despite a low usage rate and poor ORtg in 2002. 2001 and 2002 in the ACC were very much like 2010 in the Big Ten where there were no obvious high usage, quality scorers who were candidates for the award.

Interestingly two of these ACC winners left their teams without going to the NBA. Ed Nelson transferred to Connecticut and Sylven Landesberg went to play in Israel. The other early exits took a more traditional path.

Perhaps the most interesting stat in the tables is this: Of the 22 Freshman-of-the-Year award winners who stuck around, only 12 were more efficient in their second year with the team. With a larger target on their back, (or simply a larger sample size), year two improvements tend to be a 50 / 50 proposition.

In fact, I might bet on something similar this year. I’d expect Barnes to be more efficient. His numbers were brought down by some poor November and December games, but he clearly figured things out late in the season. And I’d expect Sullinger to still be solid, but to fail to duplicate last year’s incredible efficiency. (Without Jon Diebler providing the lethal three point threat, Sullinger is bound to face more double teams this year.)  Regardless of where they rank historically, both are star players on loaded teams, and both should shine again in 2012.