A couple days ago, I had a fleeting thought about the best college basketball players ever and was interested in seeing where several names that came to mind landed on a list of the 100 best players. After some searching around, I realized that there weren’t already a bunch of lists on the internet.

We knew immediately that we weren’t qualified to take it on a list so large of the top players that have ever suited up for a NCAA D1 Men’s program whether for four years or one and done. Collectively, Interbasket has a moderate knowledge of college hoops, but we knew that NCAA basketball has been around for nearly 100 years, so there were large gaps in how we could evaluate what makes for an exceptional college player. On the other hand, if you were to ask us to name our top 100 NBA players, we’d feel a lot more comfortable.

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Creating the Impossible

That said, we were up to the task. The more we thought about it, the more we realized that there were factors that translated between the best in the pro game to greats in the college game — championships, awards, consistency, scoring, deep tournament runs, and dominance to name a few. What’s different is that when evaluating great NBA players, championship titles tend to be weigh heaviest when it comes down to whom belongs over whom on a list. While winning a NCAA championship is an important factor, dominating offensively has a larger influence when it comes down to the college legends. We’ll talk a little more about that in a little bit.

If we’re not experts then how did I come up with a list so large?  Simple, we took the lists that do exist, smushed them together in an Excel spreadsheet and spent a couple hours of light addition and calculations along with a several hours researching players that were outside our generation/knowledge base (and we learned a lot about dominant players like Austin Carr, Hank Luisetti, and Scott May) to ultimately come to a subjective-objective consensus from #1 to #100.

Here are the lists/articles we utilized as reference points for putting our list together:

• NCAA.com’s Official List of Men’s Naismith Trophy Winners (2016)
• ESPN’s 25 Greatest College Players (2008)
• Sporting News’ Top 75 players in NCAA Tournament History (2012)
• Bleacher Reports’ Top 100 Men’s College Basketball Players of All-Time (2011)
• Wikipedia’s List of U.S. men’s college basketball national player of the year awards
• College Hoopedia: All-Time Top 100 Players: Why Are So Few Contemporary Players on List? (2010)
• Grantland’s The 50 Greatest College Basketball Players of All Time (2011)

Yes, these all weren’t apples-to-apples comparisons and there were several problems with the above sources, but we’ll get to that in a bit. In a nutshell, it was a group effort that created our crowd-sourced list. Check out what we came up with and scroll down after the list to see more of how we got there, how we weighted the lists and more.

Ranking the Top 100 College Basketball Players in NCAA History

For the sake of this list, we attempted to look at all the key considerations and weigh them as well as we could – everything from individual dominance, team record during their time, awards won, years spent in college, appearances in Final Fours and NCAA championships among other things.

Honorable mentions are at bottom of this article. Discuss the 100 top college players in our forum

Are you pissed off yet? Hold on, wait until we talk about how we go to the honorific hundred.

Not only did the player ranking on their respective list matter, but we also weighted how often they showed up on the lists we looked at. The great news? Outside of the #2 and #3 spots, the top 5 players weren’t too hard to determine. The bad news is that anything after #65 or so was more an educated guess than a clear cut decision. It didn’t help that many of the existing lists were created several years ago, leaving us to figure out where contemporary players like Frank Mason III, Anthony Davis, Jimmer Fredette, Kevin Durant and Blake Griffin stood in the pantheon of the greatest- not to mention never knowing if Deandre Ayton was the college best player in the past 25 years or not.

Championships also played a factor. A player didn’t necessarily make the list if they led their team to a championship, but if they were already in consideration, they moved up because of it. Same goes with whether they led the entire NCAA in scoring or not. Again, it didn’t automatically get them on the list, but it certainly helped.

We also looked at whether players swept all the major “Player of the Year” awards – doing so allowed us to understand just how dominant the player was – at least for one year. Since this is a list of 100 players and the NCAA has been around less than 100 years, we found that to be an easy way to insert players that won every single major player of the year award: from the Naismith to the Rupp to the AP to Sporting News. That’s why you see a players like Frank Kaminsky, Lionel Simmons and Doug McDermott on the list. The media all agreed that these players dominated and they were the consensus best players that particular season. Dominance matters in college.

We shouldn’t have to say this, but what we didn’t take in consideration is whether they turned out to be great NBA players or not. We hate having to mention it, but we know we’ll get comments hating on the list because how could Wayman Tisdale and Tyler Hansbrough rank above Isiah Thomas and Stephen Curry. And where’s KOBE BRYANT? THIS LIST SUCKS!!!@!!!111

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Let’s Talk About Some of the Best Ever

There’s still a few people that question whether Michael Jordan is the best player ever to play in NBA history. Just a few. Luckily there’s even less doubt about who the #1 college player of all time is. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the modern-Lew Alcindor, is the greatest NCAA player of all time to ever suit up. Not only did every list have Alcindor ranked #1, but he passed the dominance and championship tests with flying colors. From Wikipedia:

During his college career, Alcindor was twice named Player of the Year (1967, 1969); was a three-time First Team All-American (1967–69); played on three NCAA basketball champion teams (1967, 1968 and 1969); was honored as the Most Outstanding Player in the NCAA Tournament (1967, 1968, 1969); and became the first-ever Naismith College Player of the Year in 1969.

No other player on this list won three NCAA championships of the 190+ players in consideration and experts in that era seriously wondered if basketball would survive after Alcindor’s tremendous skills, athleticism and talent.

For the number two spot, we flip-flopped several times; replacing Oscar Robertson with Bill Walton, then flipped them again. And again. When I had Walton at #2, I found myself leaning on titles. When Oscar was second to Alcindor, dominance played a larger role. We had to remind ourselves that on-court impact and numbers were just as important, if not more, in college play, so Oscar stayed at #2. It certainly helped that three of the lists also had Oscar at #2. We’re open to discussions.

After the third spot, we looked at how many times each player appeared on the lists and where they ranked. The more they appeared on the lists, the higher we tended to place them. Then we used their rankings on those lists to juggle and move them around. For the most part that worked, but there were players like Christian Laettner that appeared on multiple lists but wasn’t necessarily ranked as high on them so trying to find a place for players like Laettner and Chamberlain wasn’t as easy because you’re really sweating the small things.

Reading About Dominance vs Watching Domination

Trying to gauge dominance is easy in some ways, not so easy in others. Sometimes you have to watch the player to see whether they scored a lot because they chucked up bad shots, or were they just that much better? For example, I remember watching players like Tim Duncan, Jay Williams and Chris Webber and thinking “Wow, he’s a man among boys” and it was no doubt that these players were special and going to have no problem on the next level. That said, we were able to make calls on players we grew up watching, but can only read articles, rely on stats and look at awards for players in pre-1990s.

There are obvious generational biases. For players from the earlier decades (from 1920’s-1960’s), we can only rely on what little information is out there for the lesser-known players like Art Heyman, Bob Kurland, Ed Macauley, Alex Groza and Stan Modzelewski. The generational problem doesn’t stop there but also is problematic for contemporary stars.

Many of the top players from the 2000’s tend not to spend much time in college before declaring themselves for the NBA. So even though Davis, Durant, Ben Simmons, Trae Young, and Carmelo Anthony were fabulous in their Freshman years, we didn’t get the pleasure of seeing how their college careers would have evolved and how far up they could have gone on a list like this. Because of this, the current great players that played one college season were collected at the bottom of the list.

Conclusion: With All These Factors…

With so many on-court factors, changes in the game (three point line, replays), generational differences, competitional differences between conferences, and different ways of looking at intangible impact (dominance, on-court impact, cultural influence), there’s no way to ever come up with an accurate list that everyone will agree on. Or that even half the people can agree on.

But you’re not here to get in the weeds, you’re here to disagree with our list. We did our best to lean on the experts that did all the work before us while injecting our knowledge when necessary so that we could be as objective with the data as we possibly could. And that’s the list you have in front of you. No matter how objective we tried to be, this stinks of (necessary) subjectivity.

The list is a living one, meaning that we’re going to be tweaking it based on any new research or information we come across, as well as any comments that come our way. Honestly, we’d love to hear your opinions in the comments below or post your thoughts in the forum thread.

Honorable Mention (alphabetical by first name):  Adam Morrison, Alfredrick Hughes, Allen Iverson, Andy Phillip, Bailey Howell, Bill Cartwright, Billy McGill, Bob Lanier, Bob McAdoo, Charles “Cotton” Nash, Charlie Scott, Chet Jaworski, Dale Ellis, Daren Queenan, Darnell Valentine, Dave Stallworth, David Rivers, Dereck Whittenburg, Derrick Coleman, Don Schlundt, Earl Monroe, Eric Floyd, Fennis Dembo, Frank Ramsey, Fred Hetzel, Freeman Williams, Gerry McNamara, Gordon Hayward, Hank Gathers, Howard Porter, Jason Kidd, Jerome Lane, Jim Jackson, Jim McMillian, John Moir, John Pierce, John Wooden, Johnny Neumann, Juan Dixon, Julius Erving, Keith Wilkes, Kenyon Martin, Kermit Washington, Kevin O’Shea, Khalid El-Amin, Len Bias, Lennie Rosenbluth, Luke Harangody, Marcus Camby, Marvin Barnes, Michael Graham, Mike Gminski, Mike Maloy, Mike O’Koren, Mookie Blaylock, Nick Collison, Otis Birdsong, Paul Silas, Pervis Ellison, Phillip Hutcheson, Raef LaFrentz, Ralph Beard, Ray Allen, Reggie Williams, Rex Chapman, Richard Hamilton, Ron Lee, Scott Skiles, Si Green, Sidney Wicks, Spencer Haywood, Stacey Augmon, Terry Cummings, Terry Dischinger, Tom McMillen, Tom Stith, Tony Delk, Tony Lavelli, Travis Grant, Walter Berry, Xavier McDaniel