Todd’s Take: Who Are Best Indiana Basketball And Football Players Of The 2020s?

Hoosiers On SI looks at who shined brightest on the gridiron and hardwood so far this decade.

Indiana Hoosiers guard Jalen Hood-Schifino (1) forward Trayce Jackson-Davis (23) and forward Race Thompson (25) in the second half against the Michigan Wolverines at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall. / Trevor Ruszkowski-Imagn Images

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – It’s June. Yes, there is always something going on in the world of college athletics, but June and July are two of the least active months on the calendar as schools are in summer mode and intercollegiate competition is mostly halted until August.

It’s a good time to reflect, and since we’re at roughly the midway point of the decade, it's a good time to assess what was for Indiana basketball and football in the 2020s so far.

It’s been a tumultuous decade for college sports as a whole, and Indiana is a reflection of that. The transfer portal and NIL have morphed college athletics out of recognition from what it was even in 2015.

Players come and go – and sometimes come back again. Money has become even bigger than it’s always been. The pace of change has been withering.

Still, college athletics remain as popular as ever, and plenty of fans ignore the off-field world and hone in on the fields of play and their favorite Hoosiers teams.

I have always been a fan of rankings and lists. Blame “The Book Of Lists” I read as a kid or just blame Casey Kasem.

I thought I’d compile a list of the top 16 best men’s basketball, women’s basketball and football players of the 2020s so far. Stories on my choices will publish through the middle of June.

Simple task, right?

Not at all. The days where you could assess an athlete based on four years of competition at the same school are largely gone. Very few athletes in the 2020s had a long-term association with Indiana or any other school for that matter.

That makes ranking athletes a challenge. How do you weigh a player who stuck around for four years against another player who parachuted in for one season of excellence?

The best example of this problem is comparing the careers of Trey Galloway and Kel’El Ware when choosing who was more impactful in the 2020s.

 I tried to take subjectivity out of it as much as possible by ranking players in several categories by sport and then created a formula to accurately reflect where they ranked in those categories, but no ranking system is perfect. Anomalies came up, so I did have to add a bit of subjective analysis.

Each sport also is different in how you treat the data. So let’s fly our nerd flag as I’ll explain how I determined the top 16 athletes by sport.

Football

Football is perhaps the hardest sport of all in terms of assessing players who play wildly divergent positions. How do you compare a quarterback and a right guard?

Luckily, Pro Football Focus has been using a ranking system for years that tries to achieve just that. They rank players in categories specific to a position to get a general ranking.

I leaned on PFF’s rankings for the data set I used for football rankings. I rated players based on their PFF average offensive or defensive score, their cumulative PFF offense or defense score, and their peak PFF offense or defense score.

I wanted to make sure there was an element added that took program longevity into account, so I also tracked snaps.

To be eligible, a player had to have at least one PFF season at 70 or better and average at least 25 snaps per game. Also, any player who was a consensus All-Big Ten first team member or an All-American first to third team player would get automatic entry into the top 16. Call that the Aiden Fisher Rule as Fisher somehow fell short of 70 in PFF’s 2024 defensive ranking.

A total of 46 players qualified from 2020-24. I ranked them in each category and added up the totals. Think of it as golf. The lower your number, the higher ranked you would be.

To avoid weird anomalies, I took that data and made subjective corrections. While PFF admirably has created a ranking system that makes each position close to equal, we all know that’s not how football actually works. A quarterback needs to be rated higher than some other positions on the field.

So I took the top 10 and re-ordered them as I saw fit. I made a few tweaks, but not many. I then took the next 10 and re-ordered them. Four players were eliminated to create a top 16.

Basketball

I tried to use a similar approach to basketball, but quickly found it didn’t work very well. Even with transfers, basketball has a much smaller sample size of players.

So I had to switch it up a bit. Win shares were treated like PFF rankings in football. Players were ranked by win share average, win share accumulation and peak win share by season. Added to the formula were total starts, a good reflection of career value. Finally, career points per game in the 2020s was added because at the end of the day? Basketball boils down to how many points you score.

As it was in football, All-Big Ten team honors and All-American honors were tracked but treated differently. In basketball, the total amount of honors was accumulated and ranked.

Once rankings were done in those five categories, I treated the data set differently than I did for football. With 46 players, there was enough disparity to use the accumulated rankings for football players.

Basketball didn’t work using the same method. The minimum standard to be considered for basketball was one season at 15 minutes per game or 64 career games in the 2020s. Even with that, I had to open up the minimum requirement to be considered for women’s basketball considering that only a select few players have been in Teri Moren’s rotations from 2020-25.

Rather than tally up the totals, I ordered players by the highest ranking they achieved in any one category. Any player ranked first in a category went to the top of the pile, then any players ranked second came next and so on.

This worked, because it created a healthy balance in that Galloway vs. Ware career vs. peak value conundrum.

As I did with football, I re-ordered the top 10 as necessary and the next 10. Basketball had fewer adjustments than football as it’s far easier to compare players by position in hoops.

So after that overdose of nerdiness, you know how I came to rank these players. We’ll start publishing the stories today through the middle of the month. I hope you enjoy them!

Related stories on Indiana athletics

• DEVRIES WAITS ON WAIVER DECISIONS: Like everyone else, Indiana men's basketball coach Darian DeVries is waiting on the NCAA to make decisions on waivers for Luke Goode and Anthony Leal. CLICK HERE.

• WHAT DEVRIES SAID: What Indiana men's basketball coach Darian DeVries had to say to the media on Wednesday at Huber's. CLICK HERE.

• CIGNETTI PLEADS FOR REGULATION: The uncertain landscape as far as the rules of how college football will work going forward frustrates Curt Cignetti. CLICK HERE.