Northwestern went 15-19 (5-15 in Big Ten) this season, totaling the most losses since its lowly 8-23 season in 2020. Here are three statistics that defined the ’Cats’ season:
No individual defensive talent
EvanMiya.com — one of the best college basketball statistical platforms — has a statistic called Bayesian player rating (BPR), an advanced metric that estimates how much a player impacts their team’s performance. Though Evan Miyakawa does not publish the exact formula for how he calculates BPR, he has explained the general Bayesian methodology:
every player starts with a box-score-based estimate of ability, with play-by-play-adjusted plus-minus data, using a Bayesian regression framework. As more data is collected, the model places greater weight on observed on-court impact, evaluating a player’s performance in the context of the nine other players on the floor during each possession.
A sub-section of EvanMiya.com’s BPR is DBPR, a player’s defensive Bayesian player rating. Per the site, “DBPR is interpreted as the number of defensive points per 100 possessions better than (below) D1 average expected to be allowed by the player’s team if the player were on the court with 9 other average players.”
In simple terms, it estimates how many fewer (or more) points the other team would score per 100 possessions because of that player.
This year, EvanMiya.com’s DBPR statistic really illuminated how outclassed Northwestern was on the defensive end this season. Northwestern’s best defensive player, per EvanMiya.com’s DBPR, was Arrinten Page, who had a rating of 2.02. Page’s DBPR was the lowest of all Northwestern DBPR single-season leaders since the 2019-20 season — the last time Northwestern lost more than 15 games in Big Ten play. Furthermore, Page’s 2.02 DBPR ranked 292nd in all of college basketball and 44th in the Big Ten. Michigan, the country’s best team, rostered SIX players with higher DBPRs than Northwestern’s best defender.
With all the talent in the Big Ten, it was hard for the ’Cats to be competitive without a single defensive ace. When drawing up the X’s and O’s, Collins was forced to devote extra attention to the Yaxel Lendenborgs and Braden Smiths of the conference, but oftentimes didn’t have the defensive talent to prevent big games from the conference’s best players. Think back to Tariq Francis’ 30-point game against the ‘Cats or Bennett Stirtz’s 36-piece; Northwestern simply didn’t have the defensive juice to quell these players, as visualized by the ‘Cats’ shortcomings in the EvanMiya.com DBPR metric.
The rebounding quandry
Northwestern was a horrible rebounding team this year, as shown by the simplest rebounding statistics.
Per BartTorvik, the ‘Cats finished the season 259th in offensive rebounding percentage and 330th in defensive rebounding percentage in all of Division I college basketball. In the Big Ten, Northwestern was the 14th-best offensive rebounding team, while finishing dead last in defensive rebounding. The unit finished the season with an average of 30.5 rebounds per game, the WORST in Chris Collins’ tenure as a head coach in Evanston. Yikes!
Though the ‘Cats have never dominated the boards during the Collins era, they have typically managed to be a middle-of-the-road rebounding team. This year, the wheels fell off entirely. The ‘Cats were out-rebounded in 24 of their 34 games, struggling to get to the ball with just one rotational player taller than 6-foot-10 (Page).
Just as painful is seeing how well Northwestern did in games where it out-rebounded its opponents. The ‘Cats were 8-2 when they won the battle on the boards, with their only two losses coming against Minnesota (67-66 score) and Wisconsin (85-73 score). Had the ‘Cats figured out a consistent way to get to the ball off the glass, they might have been able to string some more wins together.
Northwestern was unlucky?
The most well-known statistical website for college basketball is KenPom.com. Though KenPom is famed for its Net Rating, which measures the combined offensive and defensive efficiency of every team in college basketball, it also offers a variety of other statistics useful for measuring a team’s performance.
One of these is the “Luck” metric, which measures how a team’s actual winning percentage compares to what KenPom would predict based on its efficiency margins. Teams that win more close games than expected have positive luck, while those that lose more than expected have negative luck, suggesting outcomes influenced by randomness rather than underlying quality.
This season, Northwestern ranked 344th of 365 Division I college basketball teams in KenPom’s Luck metric and 17th in all of the Big Ten (Washington was the only team with a worse Luck rating).
There are many different ways to interpret this statistic. Many people use it as the metric’s name suggests, saying that Northwestern’s low luck rating implies they were unlucky. Others don’t like KenPom’s luck metric because they feel that it lacks the context of what actually happened in a team’s close losses. I think the best analysis is that no matter how you slice it — misfortune, poor late-game decision-making, etc. — Northwestern left fruit on the table in the 2025-26 season.
The ‘Cats lost seven games by a margin of five points or less. There was the Rutgers overtime loss where a Martinelli turnover with eight seconds remaining squandered the ’Cats’ 67-66 lead at the end of regulation. There was the Ohio State loss, in which the ‘Cats blew a nine-point second-half lead. Or of course, Northwestern’s agonizing late-season defeat to Purdue, where the ‘Cats held a 66-65 lead with just over a minute remaining. A handful of games could’ve swung purple had the outcome on just a few late-game possessions been different, whether that be the fault of Collins and company or a couple unlucky sequences.
When all was said and done, despite playing seven games in conference against teams with lower KenPom Net Ratings, Northwestern won just five games in Big Ten play. Collins’ squad finished 15th in the Big Ten, despite ranking 12th in KenPom’s Net Rating. The ‘Cats were better than their record, but sometimes that’s just the way the basketball bounces.
