The 2020-21 NCAA Season in Amazing & Weird Stats
Revisiting the 2020-21 NCAA season by looking at the weirdest and most impressive stats of the season.
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With the WNBA season approaching, we wanted to take one last look at the most recent NCAA women’s basketball season to honor it in the best way we know how: the weirdest, coolest, and most random stats we could find! We will break these stats down into two main categories: Historic & Weird.
Historic
Triple-Doubles
Despite fewer total games played, there were still a total of 15 triple-doubles this season. Part of the decrease compared to last season can also be attributed to the lack of a Sabrina Ionescu, but the Big Ten picked up a bit of the slack and accounted for five triple-doubles themselves.
That puts the Big Ten in a tie for the seventh-most by a single conference in a season, including tied for third among conferences that didn’t have the benefit of Ionescu. It is also a Big Ten record for most triple-doubles in a season.
Among those five triple-doubles, three came from Indiana’s Grace Berger, tied for 12th all-time in a single season. It is the most by a Big Ten player since 2014 when Alyssa Thomas had four for Maryland and Samantha Logic had three for Iowa.
Two of Berger’s triple-doubles came against Penn State, making her the fifth player ever to record multiple triple-doubles against the same team in the same season. One of the other five triple-doubles out of the Big Ten came from Iowa’s Caitlin Clark in just her sixth collegiate game, which is the sixth-fastest in Division I history.
Speaking of triple-doubles early in a career, Aliyah Boston set an NCAA record in 2019-20 by recording a triple-double in her collegiate debut. This year, Boston recorded her second triple-double of her career, including her second with blocks. In NCAA history, only three players have ever recorded more triple-doubles with blocks: Louella Tomlinson (7), Brittney Griner (5), and Amanda Zahui B. (3).
Records
With fewer games played this season for many teams, not a lot of counting stats saw their records challenged, but there were still some historic levels of output this season. We might as well return to young stars, so let’s start out with Dyaisha Fair.
Fair lit it up in her freshman season at Buffalo in 2019-20, and this year she picked it up and averaged 24.2 points per game. On January 30, Fair surpassed 1,000 career points in just her 44th career game. That is both a Buffalo program record and is tied for the 13th-fastest by a player in Division I history, tied with the legendary Jackie Stiles.
From beyond the arc, there were four games where a player didn’t miss a three on at least seven attempts. Since 1988, only the 2017-18 season had more such games with five. Two of this season’s four games came from Seton Hall guard Victoria Keenan. Previously, only one player in Division I history (Stacy Frese, Iowa State) had two such games in their entire career, let alone in the same season.
Looking at team stats, Maryland averaged 90.8 points per game, which is tied for the 13th-highest scoring average of all-time and is the second-highest scoring average since 1999-2000.
Milwaukee put up historic numbers from the free-throw stripe, with an 83.8% free-throw percentage on the season. That is a Division I record, the previous high was 83.2% by Idaho State in 2007-08. Iowa State also made a run at the record, finishing with an 82.7% free-throw percentage which slots in at No. 3 all-time.
Baylor got back to their roots and tallied a rebound margin of +18.6, which is the second-highest in Division I history. That number is sandwiched between the 2016-17 Baylor team and the 2017-18 Baylor team.
FGCU and their Raining 3s offense averaged 11.8 three-pointers made per game, which is the seventh-highest of all-time. The Eagles now occupy five of the top 11 slots on the all-time list. As a reminder, FGCU has only existed as an institution since 1997 and has only been in Division I since 2007.
Weird
Extremes
When it comes to fitting into a role, some players put up some pretty unique box scores throughout the course of the season. Vanderbilt’s Brylee Bartram is a three-point shooter and she knows it, making 24 treys and not a single two-pointer.
In fact, this streak goes back to the 17th game of her career while she was a freshman for Florida, which was the first and last time she made a two-pointer in her career. That means she has made 44 threes since her last two-point bucket.
On the flip side of Bartram are the players who know their game is around the basket and never step out for a three. These players are more widely known because they put up gaudy efficiency numbers. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the leader of the pack is an Iowa forward, with Monika Czinano making an incredible 254 two-pointers without even attempting a single three.
Some players also take pride in smart defense without fouling, apparently none more than Brooke Panfili of Sacramento State, who committed zero fouls in over 163 minutes of play. That’s the equivalent of staying on the court for four consecutive games, and then some, without ever committing a foul.
To put that in even more context, only six other players who played that many minutes even gave up five or fewer fouls. The most minutes played by a player who meets those criteria? That would be our friend Brylee Bartram again.
Trillions
For those of you that aren’t familiar, a Trillion is a game in which a player checks in and records nothing but minutes. This leads to a box score with a number in the minutes played column followed by 12 zeros, hence the name Trillion. According to our database, there were a whopping 2,467 such games this season.
Certainly, some of these are errors in inputting stats where a player was accidentally entered into the game for a few seconds before the mistake was noticed, but we pulled a few of our favorites that we could confirm actually happened.
The title for longest Trillion of the season goes to Northwestern State’s Claudia Vidal. Vidal played 14 minutes and 55 seconds without a single other stat, the longest Trillion by more than three minutes.
For reference, two players scored 20-plus points in less time on the court than Vidal. One of those two? The aforementioned Victoria Keenan’s first of two 7-for-7 games from behind the arc in which she played exactly 14 minutes.
The player with the most Trillions in the 2020-21 season (limited to players who played at least one full minute) was FGCU’s Sheahen Dowling who recorded seven Trillions, meaning 30.4% of her 23 games were Trillions.
Pareto
Pareto efficient games are another way to look at unique performances, although in a bit more useful way than when looking at Trillions. The short explanation of Pareto games is that the player’s specific combination of points, rebounds, and assists hasn’t been surpassed. For a more detailed explanation and deep dive, feel free to check out our pieces on NCAA and WNBA Pareto games.
We’ve updated the list of Pareto games from our analysis of NCAA games going back to the 2015-16 season, and three new Pareto games popped up throughout the course of the 2020-21 season. The first Pareto game of the 2020-21 season came when Naz Hillmon dropped 50 points in addition to totaling 16 rebounds against Ohio State on January 21.
This marks the only Pareto game in our database where the player had no stats in one of the three categories. It beat out Kristine Anigwe’s 50/0/14 game, which had been the only such Pareto game. The second Pareto game of the season came when Charlotte’s Octavia Jett-Wilson went for 42 points, 14 rebounds, and six assists against Old Dominion on February 10.
Just two weeks later, Cincinnati guard IImar’I Thomas put the Bearcats on her back with 51 points, 12 rebounds, and four assists for the third and final Pareto game of the season. That effort came in a game where she scored or assisted on 59 of the team’s 76 points.
This surely doesn’t cover everything that happened throughout the NCAA season, so if you think we missed anything, reply to this post or tweet us @herhoopstats to let us know. As we move into WNBA season, make sure to send your favorite weird and amazing statistics to us to include in our 2021 WNBA season in review.
Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. All stats in this piece are via herhoopstats.com and all records data is from the 2020-21 NCAA D-I Record Books. If you like our work, be sure to check out our stats site, our podcast, and our social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.