Post by Commissioner on Jun 12, 2020 22:37:00 GMT -5
This is a long post--gonna be tough to read on your phone.
Those of you who know me, or just read my posts, know that I’m a sucker for history, for stats, and making up lists. So what could be a better pastime--for me, anyway--in this shelter-in-place spring than to create a list of the top 100 Titan players since WWII? I thought about publishing it some other way but I’m too lazy to figure it out, so I’ll be rolling it out in this thread over the next several weeks.
I did a list of 50 Titan greats several years ago on the other board, since lost in one of that board’s crashes. But I didn’t put too much thought into It, and I also did it for all 100+ years of Titan ball. This time out, I’ve given the list a fair bit of thought. I will note, though, that I’ve just used readily available public sources and my own memory—I didn’t try to call old players, coaches, and fans, I refused to pay for newspaper archive databases, I didn’t ask the University to let me search its files or anything.
I also decided to make it post WWII for several reasons. First, WWII is such a natural break. The basketball of the pre-war years was just so different. It’s tough enough to compare players from 1955 to players from 2015, but nearly impossible to compare players from 1915 and 2015. In the first years after WWII the game changed dramatically. In the 1930s, scores in the 30s and 40s were the norm. In 1939, 6-3 Bob Calihan was a second team consensus All-America—as a center! In 1940, players shot hooks and two-handed set shots. I think It is fair to say that the basketball of 1950 more closely resembled today’s game than it did the game of 1940. By 1947, Jumpin’ Joe Fulks had popularized the one-handed jump shot. Bob Kurland and George Mikan had shown that there were talented, coordinated giants who could dominate a game in the paint. Rules changed--notably, the key was widened in 1951. There were also big developments off the court. The AP started its first weekly poll in 1949. The first NIT was held in 1938, and the first NCAA Tournament in 1939, but WWII gave Americans bigger things to worry about. It was after the war that each blossomed in popularity and grew in size, with the NIT going from 8 to 12 teams in 1949, and the NCAA going from 8 to 16 teams in 1951. The NBA was formed from the merger of the National Basketball League (NBL) and the Basketball Association of America in 1949.
There was big doing at the U of D in those years, too. In 1948, Lloyd Brazil hired Bob Calihan to coach the Titans. This was big news in the basketball world at the time—Calihan had been an all NBL selection in the immediate three years prior, from 1946-48. Imagine today a three-time NBA all-star quitting to go coach his alma mater. Brazil and Calihan had a vision of Detroit playing as a true national team, against the biggest and best schools. In 1948 Detroit was accepted into the Missouri Valley Conference, considered one of the best, if not the best, basketball conference in the country. The University began play in the conference in 1949. Planning started on a state-of-the-art facility which would be Memorial Hall (now Calihan Hall), which opened in 1952.
So I might have started the list in 1950, by which time most of these changes had taken place, or some other year around there, but WWII offers a natural break, and it also gives us exactly 75 years of hoops. People like to do things in 25-year increments. Also, NCAA stats are readily available staring for the 1948 season, so that was helpful.
The next question is, how do you decide who are the 100 greatest Titans? Is it based on 1 year? A whole career? One game? The baseball writer/stat guru Bill James solved the problem by creating two lists, one he called “career value” (how much did a player add over his full career) and one for what he called “peak value” (the player’s best 3-4 years). But you can’t really do that with the college game, because players play just 2 or 3 or 4 seasons. Peak is career, unless we define “peak” as a single season, in which case you end up with a list of the top 100 individual seasons—which I might do next year or something, but not what I was doing here.
I never came up with a satisfactory answer to this question. Brian Humes has higher career totals than Spencer Haywood in almost every category, and probably helped the Titans win a bunch more games in his 4 years than Spencer did in his single season in Detroit. Yet any ranking that listed Humes as a greater college player than Spencer would seem absurd. On the other side, Bill Pleas was probably better in his single season in Detroit than Humes was in any season, but does that really place him above Humes’ four-years of contributions?
So I did a little ad hoc balancing. I tried to ask, “were these players roughly in the same category as players?” In that case, an extra year or two weighed as a big plus. I think Spencer Haywood was a better college player than Dave DeBusschere. But Dave was, like Spencer, an elite player, an All-American three years running. So four years of Humes can’t outweigh one of Haywood, but maybe three years of Dave does. Or compare Humes to his contemporary, Greg Wendt. (Wendt was a senior when Humes was a soph). Both were forwards, and though I tend to think Wendt was better, I consider them to be in the same general class of player. But Wendt only played two years in Detroit, so maybe in this case Humes’ longevity boosts him over Wendt. (You’ll have to read the posts as they come out to see ). I also tried just to think about the impact players had. In any case, I doubt I was terribly consistent.
So how did I make the list? First, I created a list of candidates. I started with the 12 Titans who gained All-America recognition of some kind. Then I added in all those who made an All-Conference team (including All-Defense and All-Freshman) during the Titans’ years in the MVC and MCC/Horizon. I added in all Titan career 1000 point scorers. Then I added anyone on any of the Titan top-10 career lists in a positive stat category. And then I just went through the roster year by year and added a few more. That gave me a list of about 150 players, and then I whittled it down. I put players in groups of about 8-12, and then looked to see: Did I think anyone should move up or down a group? That left me with manageable groups to do head-to-head comparisons. And as I started doing all the little write-ups, players continued to move up and down the list—some by many spots. I am sure that if I wrote this up a week or a month from now, the order of several players would be different. There’s no scientific formula here. I was also surprised by how many times I found myself thinking “A was better than B, B better than C, C better than A. Hmm, that can't be right.” Often, I think, that realization was a result of that longevity factor vs. "best" factor, and hard to pin down notions of "impact," "eye test," "leadership," etc..
As for criteria, stats were, of course, key. The “eye test” where I or people I’ve talked with saw players play mattered. I looked at honors—was the player an all-conference selection? That’s sort of an “eye test” of what observers at the time thought. It tells us the opinion of people who were paying reasonably close attention at the time, and should be respected. Of course, that may penalize players from all the years the Titans played as an independent, but that can’t really be helped.
I judged players only on their UD years. If they transferred in or out, years at another school don’t count. If they played in the NBA, doesn’t count. Except, well, maybe those things count a little, not for their own value, but because it helps me know how good a player was. For example, the Titans had a player named Sam Fortino in 1947. That was his only season with UD, and he led the squad in scoring. I am way too young to have seen Fortino play. We were an independent in those days, so there are no possible all-conference recognitions. There are few stats from the era besides scoring. But I know that Fortino—a grad student attending the UD’s School of Dentistry—had been the leading scorer as an undergrad for Michigan State in both 1945 and 1946. He doesn’t get credit per se for those MSU years as I considered these rankings, but they do indicate that he was a really good college player. Similarly if a guy made the NBA after leaving Detroit, his NBA career doesn’t directly figure in, but it is an indicator that he was probably good in college, maybe a bit better than his stats would indicate.
I looked at how the team did during the player’s time, individual game heroics, squad recognition team awards, and leadership indicia such as being named team captain. The Varsity News and Tower Yearbook were often valuable for getting a sense of how people at the time viewed a particular player, and of course less partisan news sources, when available.
I tried to judge players within their own time. A 38% shooting percentage was pretty darn good in 1953. No credit for rules changes, i.e. Terry Duerod doesn’t get extra points because, "man, if only they’d had a three point line... ." They didn’t, and he doesn’t. (He was pretty good anyway). I made some effort, though, to consider stats in the context of their time and how the team played. For example, with the low shooting percentages of the 1950s and early 1960s, and Calihan’s fast playing style and tendency to ride his starters, Titan starters from that era could put up some huge rebounding numbers. I tried not to overrate that. Judging players within their time also required some looking at schedules. Detroit played tougher schedules in the 1950s and 1960s, and the MCC/Horizon was, relatively speaking, better in the late 1980s and early 1990s than today. I tried to consider that when looking at a player’s numbers. I tried to be fair to players from every decade, as the game changed.
As for the particular rankings, as stated above, I’m sure there would be changes if I re-ranked them next month or next week or tomorrow. I’ll probably be making changes as I slowly post them in this thread. So don’t take exact rankings too seriously. But feel free to comment and debate. That’s what this project is for.
It was easiest to rank players at the top, which makes sense—that’s the narrow portion of the bell curve. There are few players in the Haywood/DeBusschere class, only a few more in the Rashad Phillips/Willie Green class, but a whole bunch in the Ramsey Nichols/Roy Simms/Michael Jackson class. So as we move down the rankings, the precise order gets more and more, well, arbitrary.
Also, you might be surprised by some guys who make the list, thinking “they were OK, but top 100?” But if you think about it, you actually don’t have to have been that great. Sure, our list won’t compare to UCLA’s or Michigan’s in any case, but their lists probably aren’t as great as you think, either. Anybody who was a 2 or 3 year starter probably got some consideration for this list. Think about it: the 100 players on this list totaled just over 300 seasons as Titans. Divide that by 75 years of basketball, and that means that, on average, a Titan team in this era had 4 players on the active roster who made this list. Of course, some might have been freshmen or sophs still coming off the bench, but you get the picture. Consider, for example, the 2015 Titans, who finished just 15-18. But that team featured three players who at some point earned all-conference honors (Juwan Howard, Paris Bass, and Jaleel Hogan) plus an eventual 1000 point scorer in Anton Wilson, and a former all-freshman team member in Jarod Williams. Five candidates right there, from a very average team.
Finally, I am very conscious that most of the players listed here are still alive and well, and others have friends and loved ones who have survived them. If any of them, or their family or friends, stumble across this, I apologize in advance for errors, perceived slights (they were certainly not intentional), or simply poor judgments. The exercise is intended to be fun and a source of discussion for people who love the Titans, and love reminiscing, or maybe learning some Titan history. And if you spot errors anywhere along the list, please private message me to get them corrected.
I'll post the first few names over the weekend. And I'll keep a list right here without commentary, and update regularly.
The Top 100 -- for a capsule review of each player, read down through the thread.
*All-American
^NBA
Those of you who know me, or just read my posts, know that I’m a sucker for history, for stats, and making up lists. So what could be a better pastime--for me, anyway--in this shelter-in-place spring than to create a list of the top 100 Titan players since WWII? I thought about publishing it some other way but I’m too lazy to figure it out, so I’ll be rolling it out in this thread over the next several weeks.
I did a list of 50 Titan greats several years ago on the other board, since lost in one of that board’s crashes. But I didn’t put too much thought into It, and I also did it for all 100+ years of Titan ball. This time out, I’ve given the list a fair bit of thought. I will note, though, that I’ve just used readily available public sources and my own memory—I didn’t try to call old players, coaches, and fans, I refused to pay for newspaper archive databases, I didn’t ask the University to let me search its files or anything.
I also decided to make it post WWII for several reasons. First, WWII is such a natural break. The basketball of the pre-war years was just so different. It’s tough enough to compare players from 1955 to players from 2015, but nearly impossible to compare players from 1915 and 2015. In the first years after WWII the game changed dramatically. In the 1930s, scores in the 30s and 40s were the norm. In 1939, 6-3 Bob Calihan was a second team consensus All-America—as a center! In 1940, players shot hooks and two-handed set shots. I think It is fair to say that the basketball of 1950 more closely resembled today’s game than it did the game of 1940. By 1947, Jumpin’ Joe Fulks had popularized the one-handed jump shot. Bob Kurland and George Mikan had shown that there were talented, coordinated giants who could dominate a game in the paint. Rules changed--notably, the key was widened in 1951. There were also big developments off the court. The AP started its first weekly poll in 1949. The first NIT was held in 1938, and the first NCAA Tournament in 1939, but WWII gave Americans bigger things to worry about. It was after the war that each blossomed in popularity and grew in size, with the NIT going from 8 to 12 teams in 1949, and the NCAA going from 8 to 16 teams in 1951. The NBA was formed from the merger of the National Basketball League (NBL) and the Basketball Association of America in 1949.
There was big doing at the U of D in those years, too. In 1948, Lloyd Brazil hired Bob Calihan to coach the Titans. This was big news in the basketball world at the time—Calihan had been an all NBL selection in the immediate three years prior, from 1946-48. Imagine today a three-time NBA all-star quitting to go coach his alma mater. Brazil and Calihan had a vision of Detroit playing as a true national team, against the biggest and best schools. In 1948 Detroit was accepted into the Missouri Valley Conference, considered one of the best, if not the best, basketball conference in the country. The University began play in the conference in 1949. Planning started on a state-of-the-art facility which would be Memorial Hall (now Calihan Hall), which opened in 1952.
So I might have started the list in 1950, by which time most of these changes had taken place, or some other year around there, but WWII offers a natural break, and it also gives us exactly 75 years of hoops. People like to do things in 25-year increments. Also, NCAA stats are readily available staring for the 1948 season, so that was helpful.
The next question is, how do you decide who are the 100 greatest Titans? Is it based on 1 year? A whole career? One game? The baseball writer/stat guru Bill James solved the problem by creating two lists, one he called “career value” (how much did a player add over his full career) and one for what he called “peak value” (the player’s best 3-4 years). But you can’t really do that with the college game, because players play just 2 or 3 or 4 seasons. Peak is career, unless we define “peak” as a single season, in which case you end up with a list of the top 100 individual seasons—which I might do next year or something, but not what I was doing here.
I never came up with a satisfactory answer to this question. Brian Humes has higher career totals than Spencer Haywood in almost every category, and probably helped the Titans win a bunch more games in his 4 years than Spencer did in his single season in Detroit. Yet any ranking that listed Humes as a greater college player than Spencer would seem absurd. On the other side, Bill Pleas was probably better in his single season in Detroit than Humes was in any season, but does that really place him above Humes’ four-years of contributions?
So I did a little ad hoc balancing. I tried to ask, “were these players roughly in the same category as players?” In that case, an extra year or two weighed as a big plus. I think Spencer Haywood was a better college player than Dave DeBusschere. But Dave was, like Spencer, an elite player, an All-American three years running. So four years of Humes can’t outweigh one of Haywood, but maybe three years of Dave does. Or compare Humes to his contemporary, Greg Wendt. (Wendt was a senior when Humes was a soph). Both were forwards, and though I tend to think Wendt was better, I consider them to be in the same general class of player. But Wendt only played two years in Detroit, so maybe in this case Humes’ longevity boosts him over Wendt. (You’ll have to read the posts as they come out to see ). I also tried just to think about the impact players had. In any case, I doubt I was terribly consistent.
So how did I make the list? First, I created a list of candidates. I started with the 12 Titans who gained All-America recognition of some kind. Then I added in all those who made an All-Conference team (including All-Defense and All-Freshman) during the Titans’ years in the MVC and MCC/Horizon. I added in all Titan career 1000 point scorers. Then I added anyone on any of the Titan top-10 career lists in a positive stat category. And then I just went through the roster year by year and added a few more. That gave me a list of about 150 players, and then I whittled it down. I put players in groups of about 8-12, and then looked to see: Did I think anyone should move up or down a group? That left me with manageable groups to do head-to-head comparisons. And as I started doing all the little write-ups, players continued to move up and down the list—some by many spots. I am sure that if I wrote this up a week or a month from now, the order of several players would be different. There’s no scientific formula here. I was also surprised by how many times I found myself thinking “A was better than B, B better than C, C better than A. Hmm, that can't be right.” Often, I think, that realization was a result of that longevity factor vs. "best" factor, and hard to pin down notions of "impact," "eye test," "leadership," etc..
As for criteria, stats were, of course, key. The “eye test” where I or people I’ve talked with saw players play mattered. I looked at honors—was the player an all-conference selection? That’s sort of an “eye test” of what observers at the time thought. It tells us the opinion of people who were paying reasonably close attention at the time, and should be respected. Of course, that may penalize players from all the years the Titans played as an independent, but that can’t really be helped.
I judged players only on their UD years. If they transferred in or out, years at another school don’t count. If they played in the NBA, doesn’t count. Except, well, maybe those things count a little, not for their own value, but because it helps me know how good a player was. For example, the Titans had a player named Sam Fortino in 1947. That was his only season with UD, and he led the squad in scoring. I am way too young to have seen Fortino play. We were an independent in those days, so there are no possible all-conference recognitions. There are few stats from the era besides scoring. But I know that Fortino—a grad student attending the UD’s School of Dentistry—had been the leading scorer as an undergrad for Michigan State in both 1945 and 1946. He doesn’t get credit per se for those MSU years as I considered these rankings, but they do indicate that he was a really good college player. Similarly if a guy made the NBA after leaving Detroit, his NBA career doesn’t directly figure in, but it is an indicator that he was probably good in college, maybe a bit better than his stats would indicate.
I looked at how the team did during the player’s time, individual game heroics, squad recognition team awards, and leadership indicia such as being named team captain. The Varsity News and Tower Yearbook were often valuable for getting a sense of how people at the time viewed a particular player, and of course less partisan news sources, when available.
I tried to judge players within their own time. A 38% shooting percentage was pretty darn good in 1953. No credit for rules changes, i.e. Terry Duerod doesn’t get extra points because, "man, if only they’d had a three point line... ." They didn’t, and he doesn’t. (He was pretty good anyway). I made some effort, though, to consider stats in the context of their time and how the team played. For example, with the low shooting percentages of the 1950s and early 1960s, and Calihan’s fast playing style and tendency to ride his starters, Titan starters from that era could put up some huge rebounding numbers. I tried not to overrate that. Judging players within their time also required some looking at schedules. Detroit played tougher schedules in the 1950s and 1960s, and the MCC/Horizon was, relatively speaking, better in the late 1980s and early 1990s than today. I tried to consider that when looking at a player’s numbers. I tried to be fair to players from every decade, as the game changed.
As for the particular rankings, as stated above, I’m sure there would be changes if I re-ranked them next month or next week or tomorrow. I’ll probably be making changes as I slowly post them in this thread. So don’t take exact rankings too seriously. But feel free to comment and debate. That’s what this project is for.
It was easiest to rank players at the top, which makes sense—that’s the narrow portion of the bell curve. There are few players in the Haywood/DeBusschere class, only a few more in the Rashad Phillips/Willie Green class, but a whole bunch in the Ramsey Nichols/Roy Simms/Michael Jackson class. So as we move down the rankings, the precise order gets more and more, well, arbitrary.
Also, you might be surprised by some guys who make the list, thinking “they were OK, but top 100?” But if you think about it, you actually don’t have to have been that great. Sure, our list won’t compare to UCLA’s or Michigan’s in any case, but their lists probably aren’t as great as you think, either. Anybody who was a 2 or 3 year starter probably got some consideration for this list. Think about it: the 100 players on this list totaled just over 300 seasons as Titans. Divide that by 75 years of basketball, and that means that, on average, a Titan team in this era had 4 players on the active roster who made this list. Of course, some might have been freshmen or sophs still coming off the bench, but you get the picture. Consider, for example, the 2015 Titans, who finished just 15-18. But that team featured three players who at some point earned all-conference honors (Juwan Howard, Paris Bass, and Jaleel Hogan) plus an eventual 1000 point scorer in Anton Wilson, and a former all-freshman team member in Jarod Williams. Five candidates right there, from a very average team.
Finally, I am very conscious that most of the players listed here are still alive and well, and others have friends and loved ones who have survived them. If any of them, or their family or friends, stumble across this, I apologize in advance for errors, perceived slights (they were certainly not intentional), or simply poor judgments. The exercise is intended to be fun and a source of discussion for people who love the Titans, and love reminiscing, or maybe learning some Titan history. And if you spot errors anywhere along the list, please private message me to get them corrected.
I'll post the first few names over the weekend. And I'll keep a list right here without commentary, and update regularly.
The Top 100 -- for a capsule review of each player, read down through the thread.
Page 1 1. Dave DeBusschere*^ 2. Spencer Haywood*^ 3. John Long*^ 4. Terry Tyler*^ 5. Bill Ebben*^ 6. Rashad Phillips* 7. Guy Sparrow*^ 8. Norm Swanson*^ 9. Dorie Murrey*^ 10. Terry Duerod*^ 11. Ray McCallum*^ 12. Willie Green*^ 13. Archie Tullos Page 2 14. Dick Dzik 15. Joe Kopicki^ 16. Charlie North 17. Jermaine Jackson^ 18. Tony Tolbert 19. Antoine Davis* (Active) 20. Frank Russell^ 21. Earl Cureton^ 22. Lee Knorek^ 23. Keith Gray 24. Derrick Hayes Page 3 25. Dennis Boyd^ | 26. Wilbert McCormick 27. Bruce Rodwan 28. Dwayne Kelley 29. Jerry Davis 30. Lou Hyatt 31. Owen Wells^ Page 4 32. Brendan McNamara 33. Brandon Cotton 34. John Kirwan 35. Terrell Riggs 36. Kevin McAdoo 37. Eli Holman 38. Brian Humes 39. Ryvon Covile Page 5 40. Doug Chappell 41. Desmond Ferguson^ 42. Brian Alexander 43. Greg Wendt 44. Juwan Howard, Jr. 45. Don Haase 46. Larry Salci 47. Al Cech 48. Ray Albee 49. Ralph Goldstein 50. Gerald Smith | 51. Nick Minnerath Page 6 52. Walter Poff 53. Jon Goode 54. Carl Pickett 55. Arthur Stolkey^ 56. Darian McKinney 57. Terry Page 58. Josh McFolley 59. Bill Wood 60. Chase Simon 61. Michael Jackson Page 7 62. Michael Lovelace 63. Jerry Swartzfager 64. Paris Bass^ 65. Tom Richardson 66. Greg Grays 67. Jim Boyce Page 8 68. Mike Walsh 69. Jim Jackson 70. Chuck Kemen 71. Jason Calliste 72. Terry Thomas^ 73. Bill Pleas 74. Jaleel Hogan 75. Elijah Warren | 76. James Thues 77. Larry Moore Page 9 78. Larry Hughes 79. Tom "Cookie" Marsh 80. Chris Jenkins 81. Ralph Brisker 82. Corey Allen 83. Sam Fortino Page 10 84. Kameron Chatman 85. Marvin Owens Page 11 86. Gino Sovran^ 87. Ramsey Nichols 88. Roy Simms 89. Warren Hintz 90. Daryl Johnson 91. Shawn Williams Page 12 92. Doug Anderson 93. John Schramm 94. Dave Niles 95. Anton Wilson 96. Torvoris Baker Page 13 97. Woody Payne 98. Darius Belin 99. Riley Dotson 100. Frank Chickowski |
*All-American
^NBA