Scouting Reports

TOP 20

1 Duke
2 Illinois
3 Kentucky
4 Kansas
5 Maryland
6 UCLA
7 Florida
8 St. Joseph's
9 Missouri
10 Iowa
11 Memphis
12 Stanford
13 Virginia
14 USC
15 Kent State
16 Oklahoma State
17 Temple
18 Georgetown
19 Arizona
20 W. Kentucky

A WORD ABOUT OUR REPORT CARDS

Winning isn't everything or the only thing, especially in college basketball, in which schools' conduct still counts for something. In that spirit each scouting report includes a report card, which indicates the school's graduation rate (using the NCAA's latest study, of players who entered school in the four seasons up to and including 1994-95; to qualify as a graduate, a player had to get his degree within six years), its average number of wins over the last 10 years and its NCAA tournament record during that span. The report card also! shows how many top recruits the school got in the last 10 years and how many players it has in the NBA—a measure of how well it develops its players—as well as the number of players who transferred, which indicates how stable the program is. (The Transfers category includes scholarship players who left school for any reason other than to go to the NBA; note also that in the NCAA's statistics on graduation rates, all players who leave early are counted as nongraduates, even if they earn a I degree at another school.)

Finally, the report card includes an examination of behavior—of the coaching staff and the players—which was factored in by SI's panel of editors in assessing an overall grade.