When Syracuse won its lone national title in 2003, it did so by leaning heavily not just on future NBA Hall of Famer Carmelo Anthony but also fellow freshman Gerry McNamara. Nine years later, John Calipari proved age was just a number by starting three freshmen and bringing Kentucky its eighth championship.
And three years after that, Mike Kryzewski matched that feat with the youthful trio of Tyus Jones, Jahlil Okafor and Justise Winslow—not to mention an out-of-nowhere Grayson Allen during the Final
Four—to claim the last of his five NCAA titles at Duke.
Since Arizona won it all in 1997, with Mike Bibby running the point fresh out of high school, those are the three examples of a team getting more than half its scoring from freshmen and cutting down the nets. Many others have tried but come up short, including several Wildcat teams during the Sean Miller era.
But here we are, on the doorstep of the 2026 NCAA Tournament, and one of the top contenders to win the national title regularly trots out three first-year college players. Brayden Burries, Ivan Kharchenkov and Koa Peat have combined to make 99 starts for Arizona, which at 32-2 is tied for the best record in the country and is the No. 2 overall seed.
Those three, along with Dwayne Aristode and Sidi Gueye, have produced 49.9 percent of the scoring this season. They had 54 of the 79 points in the Big 12 title game win over Houston.
UA freshmen only combined to score 9.6 percent the points during the previous four seasons under Tommy Lloyd, who didn’t start a freshman until the 115th game of his career as a head coach and that guy (Carter Bryant) ended up being a lottery pick.
When Lloyd decided to go heavy on freshmen this season it wasn’t by necessity. Arizona brought back three senior starters from last year’s Sweet 16 team and also had a healthy Motiejus Krivas ready to protect the rim. And all that experience actually emboldened Lloyd to try the youth movement, not just by playing freshmen a lot but starting them.
“It’s almost easier to make that decision knowing you have the veterans coming off the bench,” Lloyd said, referring to seniors Tobe Awaka and Anthony Dell’Orso, who combined to start 64 games in 2024-25. “You’re able to hedge your bet, so to speak. I felt great about that from day one.”
It didn’t hurt that the freshmen the Wildcats were turning to didn’t exactly scream newbie. Burries and Peat were 5-star prospects, both won state titles in high school (Peat won four) and Peat has four gold medals from playing for Team USA including one in last summer’s FIBA U19 World Cup where Lloyd was his coach.
And then there’s Kharchenkov, who had been playing professionally in Germany since he was 16 before coming to Tucson.
“I think those freshmen might be as mature as anybody in the whole group,” Lloyd said. “I think they’re just wired that way.”
The freshman class throughout college basketball this season has been as good as ever, and consequently the 2026 NBA Draft is expected to be one of the deepest in recent memory. ESPN’s latest mock draft has current college freshmen occupying the top 10 picks and 15 in the first round, including Burries and Peat.
The NCAA Tournament is going to be littered with big-name freshmen. Of the 167 Division I frosh who have played at least 700 minutes, 36 are in the Big Dance. Arizona is one of three schools, along with Duke and Virginia, to have three on this list, but only the Wildcats have all three as full-time starters.
Duke made the Final Four last season with three freshmen starters, each of whom were lottery picks. But champion Florida only got 119 of 3,391 points (3.5 percent) from freshmen, and none of that came in the Final Four.
UConn’s back-to-back national titles in 2023 and 2024 each featured only one freshmen starter, while Kansas in 2022 and Baylor in 2021 got next to no meaningful contributions from freshmen.
At Arizona, go-to freshmen and deep runs have produced only near misses.
During the Miller era, almost every team had at least one go-to freshman, with nine of his 12 teams getting at least a quarter of the scoring from them. The peak was the COVID-shortened 2019-20 season when Josh Green, Nico Mannion and Zeke Nnaji combined for 94 starts and scored 56.6 percent of the points. But that team lost 11 regular season games and were projected to be a No. 7 seed in the NCAA tourney had the world not come to a halt.
Miller’s first Elite Eight team, in 2010-11, was sophomore-heavy, and the back-to-back regional finalists in 2013-14 and 2014-15 had one-and-done stars Aaron Gordon and Stanley Johnson, respectively. His last Sweet 16 team, in 2016-17, started two freshmen, though for some reason Lauri Markkanen only took nine shots with none in the final 11 minutes.
Lute Olson only five six of his 24 teams get more than a quarter of the scoring from freshmen, the most being the 1999-2000 squad that featured Gilbert Arenas, Jason Gardner and Luke Walton. They would make up the corps of Arizona’s last Final Four team a year later, but as freshmen they got bounced by Wisconsin in the second round as a No. 1 seed.
Three of Olson’s youngest teams were knocked out in the first round, including his final team in 2007-08 that sported Chase Budinger, Jordan Hill and Nic Wise as freshmen. Bibby was the only freshman to start on a Final Four team.
This is uncharted territory for Lloyd, who during his 20-plus seasons as an assistant at Gonzaga only saw 12 Bulldog freshmen average 20 minutes a game, and only one (Jalen Suggs) on a team that made the Final Four. But with the pedigree of the youngsters he brought in during the offseason and the veterans he retained he felt this was how he could finally have the kind of team he’s been building toward at Arizona.
“You have an idea of what you want the identity your team could be, that you think suits your team, and so you’re kind of trying to, I guess, create an opportunity for that to happen,” he said. “That’s what we did with that. We want to be a physical, defensive-oriented, strong rebounding team that can run a good offense, and so those are the reasons we kind of made those decisions.”
