Sports Reference Blog

If you've visited the Awards Page on our College Basketball site recently, you've probably noticed a lot of new awards listed.

This is because we've added a full history of conference awards for the Power 5 Conferences (plus the Big East) and also 2018-19 conference awards for every other conference.

These awards are comprised of these general categories:

• All-Conference: These are broken out into 1st, 2nd and 3rd teams when applicable, but we did not add honorable mentions.
• All-Conference Tournament: The most outstanding players in each conference tournament (generally a five-man team)
• All-Defense: The most outstanding defenders in each conference
• All-Freshman: This one is a little tricky, as some conferences label this All-Rookie, others All-Newcomer and others All-Freshman. When a conference chose more than one of these, we made the editorial decision to use only the one that considered only freshmen, as that felt more within the spirit of the award.
• Defensive Player of the Year: The most outstanding defensive player in the conference.
• Most Improved Player: The player deemed to have improved the most from the previous season.
• Rookie of the Year: Like the All-Freshman teams, when a conference has more than one out of Rookie, Freshman and Newcomer of the Year awards, we defaulted to the player who was a freshman. We're glad grad transfers have freedom of movement, but it's not quite as impressive or notable when they come in and dominate as when it's done by a frosh.
• Sixth-Man of the Year: The best reserve in the league.
• Tournament MVP: The best player in the conference tournament.
• Player of the Year: This one is not new (as we've had it for years), but just pointing out that it's also there.

One of the great things about this feature is that each award comes with a table of sortable stats. So, for instance, you can go to the Big East Defensive Player of the Year table and sort it by PPG to see that Allen Iverson (twice), Donyell Marshall and Alonzo Mourning are the only players to win the award while averaging 20+ PPG.

This info has also been added to player pages under "Awards" in the "Appearances on Leaderboards, Awards, and Honors" section of the page, and also in the "bling" we print towards the top of the player pages, which hopefully convey quickly how decorated a given player was. Check out the example of Patrick Ewing, screenshotted below.

While we currently only have data going back beyond 2018-19 for the major conferences (ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC), we hope to add full histories for the other conferences in the future. We'd also like to point out that while this is relatively easily done for the still active conferences, it will be a bit more challenging for defunct conferences. So if you happen to have awards handy for important defunct conferences such as the Big 8, SWC, Metro, Great Midwest, etc, we'd love it if you could share it. Please reach out to us here with any questions, comments or corrections.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 24th, 2019 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Announcement, Awards, CBB at Sports Reference, Data, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.