Was this the best freshman class in recent Big East history?

I was traveling for my daughters’ gymnastics meets this weekend, so wasn’t able to fully dive in on Sunday when the All Big East teams were announced. I did manage to shot off a quick Tweet that although I do believe Adrien Stevens was one of the best freshman this season, and one of the best we’ve seen at Marquette, I did not necessarily get up in arms about his exclusion from the All-Conference Freshman Team.

I’m sure you know better than me but I have to at least question this. 8/2.5/1.5 is normally all-freshman?

— greg ward (@gward1202) March 8, 2026

But as Greg notes in the reply, that begs the question, what stats are “normal” for a freshman to make the squad? So I had to take a closer look.

Using stats from Sports Reference, the average on the All Freshman team averaged 9.6 points, 4.0 rebounds, 1.8 assists and 0.9 steals a game. Adrien is a tad below that average with his stat line, but still ahead of noted Marquette players like Royce Parham, Kam Jones and Deonte Burton.

But if you know anything about me, you know I NEVER cite per game stats anymore. I honestly don’t even have a clue what they look like for players I spend multiple hours I day analyzing. And one of the biggest reasons is that box score stats only give you a very limited view of what impact a player had on the team, particularly on defense, which is almost impossible to measure.

Instead I like to use advanced metrics like BPR and RAPM, which take into account who is on the floor with and against a given player, and add the box score and plus minus impact to lots of fancy calculations, which allows us to compare impact in a much more accurate (though obviously not perfect) way.

Doing so, we find that Adrien Stevens posted a 3.10 BPR on Evan Miya’s site this season, which is 5th best for a freshman in the Big East, .01 ahead of Providence’s Stefan Vaaks, but close enough to where I can see how coaches who had to game plan against Vaaks’ offensive firepower could favor him over Stevens (even if those same coaches then abused Vaaks’ inability to guard a traffic cone on the other end of the floor).

Looking at just past Marquette players, Stevens posted the 5th highest BPR since 2014, and the 2nd best under Shaka. Whether he got rewarded or not, there is no denying Adrien’s impressive campaign and bright future. He’s a key component of the exciting core MU has found the last 3 months with Nigel and Royce.

Just how good was this freshman team?

In pulling all these numbers, I came across another hypothesis, this may have been the best group of freshmen we’ve seen since the Big East Reformation in the 2014 season.

Using BPR, which dates through the full period, I plugged in the BPR’s for every player that’s been selected and then bucketed them by the season they were chose. This season tied for the highest average BPR (4.58) and had the 2nd highest BPR for the lowest selection (3.09), only trailing 2017. At minimum, this was a top-2 freshman team from a BPR perspective.

So now we have to poke around the details a bit more to break the tie. Here are the stats for the 2017 squad.

And here they are for the 2026 squad.

The 2026 squad is a smidge better at the counting stats outside of rebounding but not significantly so. The 2017 team averaged a few more minutes played (67.2% v 65.6%) but again, well within the same ballpark.

Ultimately, I think the fact the 2017 team has 6 players compared to only 5 this year has me leaning towards 2017, as does the fact 4 of those 6 were on top-35, NCAA tournament teams compared to only 2 this year.

No matter which squad you prefer, the takeaway remains that this was a loaded freshman class, and one of the most impactful we’ve ever seen as a collective group. We shall see how many test the NBA waters (or the transfer portal), but there is a decent chance 4 of the 5 do return, depending on what Mullins ends up doing.

IF the Big East can retain these players, it sets up for a fantastic building block upon which the league’s comeback arc can begin.

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