The Indiana Hoosiers were one of the top offensive teams last season and with the talent they bring back, they could very well be the top offensive team this season. Other teams like Florida and N.C. State also appear to have dominant offenses heading into 12-13. But all these teams were already strong on offense last season. Today, I ask a different question: Which teams will improve the most at putting the ball in the basket?

Utah

Not surprisingly, some of the biggest offensive improvements will be by teams that struggled massively last season. Utah clearly falls in that category. Last season, Utah had players like Chris Hines who couldn’t shoot and players like Kareem Story that struggled to hold onto the ball. But as with many of the teams on this list, Utah adds five transfers who should provide a quick fix to some of the team’s offensive woes. Glen Dean of Eastern Washington, Dallin Bachynski of Southern Utah, Jarred DuBois of Loyola Marymount, and JUCO transfer Renan Lenz may not be household names, but they’ve run college level offenses before. And LSU transfer Aaron Dotson was once a Top 100 recruit. Utah’s previous lineup obviously wasn’t capable of competing in the Pac-12 (even in a down year for the conference), but starting over with a team of freshmen would have been a disaster waiting to happen. The veteran additions should help bring the offense back to a respectable level. Utah also adds Top 100 freshman Jordan Loveridge. Loveridge was Mr. Basketball in his state last year and a double-double machine in high school. And ultimately, if Utah is going to improve further and reach the NCAA tournament level of play, they need to add more players like Loveridge.

UCLA

This looks like a return-to-glory season for the Bruins. Whenever you add two Top-5 recruits, in Shabazz Muhammad and Kyle Anderson, your offense is going to be substantially better. And UCLA adds two more elite recruits in Tony Parker and Jordan Adams. In fact, the Bruins now have more former Top 100 high school recruits than any other team in the country:

The big question is the point-guard spot. Anyone who watched North Carolina two years ago is reasonably speculative about Larry Drew’s ability to lead a high powered offense. It was clear that North Carolina only became an elite team two years ago when Drew left the team. But several factors point towards a resurgent season for Drew. First, transfers between BCS programs have done remarkably well in recent years. If both Roy Williams and Ben Howland saw something in Drew and scouts had him ranked so high out of high school, that suggests his potential remains high. And having one year to sit out and learn Ben Howland’s system likely improved his game. Drew may also benefit from a more half-court based offensive attack. Drew was never comfortable in North Carolina’s transition-based offense.

Most importantly, Drew won’t have to do it alone. Kyle Anderson may not be a traditional point guard, but he’s a terrific passer for a big man, and his ability to run high-low sets and dish no-look passes in the paint, should make feeding Josh Smith substantially easier than last season. And as long as he is eligible, Shabazz Muhammad will be a great emergency option whenever the offense breaks down. As long as Drew doesn’t try to be Superman, UCLA has enough options to have an elite offense once again.

USC

Last season was a nightmare for Kevin O’Neil with injuries and player departures devastating the USC program. Almost any new class of players would mean a significant offensive improvement for the Trojans, but the incoming recruiting class includes plenty of instant impact players. I said it above, but I’ll say it again. D1 transfers moving from one BCS school to another have performed remarkably well in recent seasons. And USC adds three former BCS players in Tennessee’s Renaldo Woolridge as well as Wake Forest’s Ari Stewart and JT Terrell. But the best transfer addition might be UC Irvine’s Eric Wise. Wise was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades in the Big West, passing the ball and rebounding at a high level for his size, and he was remarkably efficient for a high volume shooter. Those four players immediately give the Trojans some credibility on offense, and the return of Jio Fontan from injury will also help substantially. The news that Maurice Jones is academically ineligible and leaving USC this fall tempers expectations somewhat, but USC should still be substantially more effective on offense than in 2012.

UC Davis

Occasionally, we talk about “addition by subtraction.” Here were the UC Davis starters last season and their efficiency ratings:

Three of those players are leaving, and two are returning. Since UC Davis is on the “most improved offense” list, I’ll give you one guess as to who is leaving and who is coming back.

SE Louisiana

Want a truly terrible offensive team that should take a big leap forward? Look no further than SE Louisiana. Adding three JC transfers (including one who used to play for Providence) should help the team’s depth immediately. But SE Louisiana might have the most important position flip of any team in the country. Last year senior PG Brandon Fortenberry was injured forcing DeShawn Patterson to be the lead ball-handler for the team. And sadly for Lions fans, Patterson struggled immensely. While Fortenberry had an ORtg over 105 for the last three seasons, Patterson put up a 77 ORtg last season. And SE Louisiana became the 3rd worst offensive team in the nation. Now SE Louisiana immediately upgrades the most important position on the court. That’s because Fortenberry was granted a medical redshirt and given a 5th year of eligibility. With Fortenberry returning and replacing Patterson in the lineup, SE Louisiana should be substantially better. SE Louisiana won’t be the Southland favorite, or a legitimate threat to most BCS teams, but with Lamar losing a bunch of seniors to graduation, and several teams defecting from the league this off-season, SE Louisiana should be able to return to a winning record in the Southland Conference.

Arkansas

Arkansas’s offensive resurgence is expected based on a wide variety of factors. First, Marshawn Powell missed all of last season due to injury, and his return should give the offense a huge lift. The team should also expect a significant sophomore year leap from a host of freshmen that saw major minutes last season. Rising sophomores BJ Young, Ky Madden, and Hunter Mickelson were all Top 100 recruits out of high school, meaning all three are quite likely to become breakout stars this season. (Young was already Arkansas’ best offensive option last season.) Arkansas also adds three JUCO players and Fred Gulley, a transfer from Oklahoma St. who will be eligible in December. That returning, maturing, and incoming talent all points towards a more successful offense in 2013. But there is even more reason to be excited at Arkansas and that has to do with having Mike Anderson as the head coach on the sideline. Thanks to his Nolan Richardson mentored “40 minutes of hell” defense, Mike Anderson’s teams get a lot of transition baskets. And that means his teams typically have a very efficient offense. With so many transfers last year, key injuries, and so many young players, the “40 minutes of hell” attack was on training wheels last year. But Mike Anderson’s style-of-play will bring the offense along this year, and Arkansas will likely be a factor in the SEC race.

Butler

Even without Chrishawn Hopkins, Butler is an extremely dangerous team this season because the Bulldogs have four efficient stars on the team. Andrew Smith was clearly a star for Butler last season. And ever since he broke out in the 2011 NCAA tournament, Khyle Marshall has been an incredibly efficient offensive player too. (Marshall has shown flashes of incredible athleticism, but he needs to put it together and be a consistent player on both ends of the court to stay in the lineup.) But Butler’s additions are what make my jaw drop. Top 100 recruit Kellen Dunham is a lethal shooter who has the size to play against major college teams. And Rotnei Clarke is easily one of the top transfers the A10 will ever get. (Three year starters and big time scorers with 40% plus perimeter shooting are very hard to find, and Clarke might even be good enough to play the point-guard position too.) In basketball, the hard thing to find is star players, not role players. If you have a handful of stars, other players can find a niche. And on paper, Butler certainly has a lineup of efficient stars. Butler also benefits from some addition-by-subtraction on offense. Butler fans may have rightfully saluted Ronald Nored for his defensive contributions to the team’s back-to-back Final Four runs, but in four years Nored was never a skilled offensive player.

Others

There are numerous other teams with raised offensive expectations. Canisius adds a slew of transfers and should be able to climb out of the MAAC cellar in Jim Baron’s first year. Arizona reloads with one of the top recruiting classes in the country. Former Indiana and UAB coach Mike Davis takes over a Texas Southern team poised to dominate the SWAC this year. Texas Southern returns a number of key offensive players and adds transfer Ray Penn from Oklahoma St. Once Dundrecous Nelson becomes eligible at Jackson St., Jackson St. will also make a big offensive improvement in the SWAC. Rutgers flips Kansas St. transfer Wally Judge for Gilvydas Biruta, and looks like a legitimate NCAA team this year. And while I’m not a big believer in Junior-led teams that become Senior-led teams, because fewer players develop late in their careers, the top five players are back for Oklahoma and the Sooners should be a factor for an NCAA bid. Davidson and Northern Iowa also return the vast majority of their rotation. But I could go on-and-on based on this criteria. The list of teams with a high percentage of returning minutes is long.

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The Pac-12 has been suffering through a long dark period. The Big Ten has been dominant (at least in the pre-conference schedule) for the last few years. Should we expect a change this year? Is the Pac-12’s slump over? Is the Big Ten’s boom about to come to an end? Let’s take a quick look at some basic roster data and see if we can uncover any trends.

Part of predicting the season is noting the number of elite high school prospects on each roster. Not only are these players more likely to play well as freshmen, but they are also more likely to breakout later in their career. Recall, for example, Michael Snaer of Florida St. Snaer was a former Top 20 recruit, and while it took him three seasons, he broke out in a big way in 2011-12. After adding up the numbers…

- The Big East has the most former RSCI Top 100 prospects on rosters heading into the season with 58.

- But the Big East has more teams, and the Big East has only 3.9 elite recruits per team. The ACC has the most former Top 100 recruits per team with 4.6 per team.

- But James McAdoo is the only former Top 10 prospect in the ACC this season. That seems like an unprecedented lack of super-elite talent for the conference. If you want super elite talent, you probably want to watch the SEC, assuming everyone is declared academically eligible. John Calipari never lets us down on the recruiting trail.

- The SEC, however, is only welcoming ten Top 100 freshmen this year as a whole. Even the Big Ten, the land of typically poor recruiting, is welcoming more Top 100 freshmen than the SEC this season. And yes, the slumping Pac-12 brings in quite a few elite recruits this year.

The next table isn’t really roster data, but it does reflect some of my preliminary projections about playing time.

- The ACC is going to be the youngest conference in the nation this year, according to my projections.

- The Big East has a startlingly low number of key seniors on rosters this year.

- As usual, the MWC and A10 have more mature rosters. They lose fewer players to the NBA and that helps the top MWC and A10 teams compete, even without a plethora of blue chip talent.

The Pac-12 is getting older in a hurry, thanks in no small part to an influx of transfers. Note that your transfer numbers may vary slightly. I’m excluding transfer walk-ons and a few JUCOs who seem unlikely to play in the next table.

The transfer table doesn’t mean the Pac-12 has suddenly become the conference of transfers. This is all a natural consequence of recent league history. The Pac-12 teams have struggled the last few years making those teams particularly attractive places for transfers to matriculate. If you want to transfer and PLAY in an elite league, you would have chosen the Pac-12 too.  On the other hand, the Big Ten has been on an upswing and few coaches have needed to dip into the JUCO ranks as a quick fix. Deverell Biggs of Nebraska is currently the only incoming JUCO player projected for the Big Ten this year.

Overall, the Pac-12 was a depleted league, but it is adding a number of impact freshmen and key transfers this year. The days of the league failing to field a Top 25 team are over. As for the Big Ten, the jury is still out. The teams at the top still have plenty of talent, but programs like Purdue could be in for a bit of a slip without an influx of can’t miss players coming in.

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A few years ago I read how D1 programs were firing their head coaches at an alarming rate. In response, I wrote this piece which showed that coaching turnover has always been rampant at all levels of D1.

A few days ago John Gasaway emailed me and asked me a similar question about transfers. The perception seems to be that players today are much more impatient and much more likely to change programs. John wanted to know if this was really true or whether this perception was simply a product of the increased information at our fingertips.

It certainly seems like there are a large number of transfers. So far this year I have 432 players who have left their schools with eligibility left. 432 is larger than the number on Jeff Goodman’s summer transfer list, but remember that Goodman had a separate mid-year transfer list and there were a few mid-year transfers that occurred after his December list was revealed.

But it turns out that 432 is not a particular large or a particularly stunning number. Last year I hand-coded all the D1 rosters in order to predict the season for ESPN the magazine. And based on my hand-coding, 814 players left D1 programs with eligibility left. Part of the problem is that Goodman’s list does a fantastic job picking up players transferring out of high level programs, but getting information on players transferring out of small conferences can be virtually impossible. Thus for comparison purposes, it is probably more interesting to examine whether there are more players transferring out of major programs than has occurred in the past. For simplicity, I decided to pull out the 75 programs that will compete in the Power Six leagues next year and see how their transfer patterns have looked historically:

Players leaving with eligibility left (excluding NBA draft early entrants)
2004: 174
2005: 197
2006: 185
2007: 192
2008: 160
2009: 137
2010: 203
2011: 165
2012: 113 (through April 30^th)

I don’t believe that 2012 will be a historically low year for transfers. Instead, these numbers suggest to me that we don’t have the final number for 2012 yet. There will be more transfers throughout the summer. Many of these will happen for academic reasons or because of players doing foolish things (getting arrested), but I am confident that there will be more than 113 players leaving the Power Six conference teams by the time the summer is over.

On the other hand, keep in mind that only eight of the Power Six schools changed head coaches this year, the lowest rate of Power 6 coaching changes since 2009. And with so little coaching turnover, 2012 may well turn out to be more like 2009.

Also, keep in mind that I am measuring the number of players leaving these 75 schools with eligibility left. Technically, that isn’t the same thing as measuring the number of transfers. I happen to think it is the right comparison. That’s because we don’t know where many of the players on Goodman’s transfer list are going. Some of them might transfer to other D1 programs. Some of them might go to junior college. Some of them might decide to take a pro contract overseas. And some of them might stop playing basketball completely. We just don’t know. In my opinion, the only list we can construct for comparative historical purposes is a list of who isn’t coming back despite eligibility left.

But if you wanted a true list of transfers, you would almost certainly have to remove a few players from my historical table. For example, what do we make of Jai Lucas? Lucas played three years of college basketball. While he was a mid-semester transfer, he didn’t play basketball at all in 2008-09. Unless there is some weird NCAA rule I don’t understand (seems likely), I view Lucas as a player who left with eligibility left and he appears in the above table. Of course no one really thought Lucas was going to graduate from Texas and use the graduate school transfer rule last summer. At that point he had decided to play overseas. So I can understand arguments for excluding him. If you want to try to remove the Jai Lucas type players and produce a more accurate historical list of transfers, I am happy to share my data. Simply send me an email DLHanner@gmail.com.