The Teams That Win in Different Ways (and Ones That Don’t)
Michigan State and Alabama can win in multiple ways. Texas’ wins come one way. As the NCAA Tournament approaches, here are five styles of play and the teams that show them.
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There are lots of ways to win a basketball game. Some coaches prize the versatility of their teams, while others focus on doing one or two things well. Telling them apart often is easy - Texas games seem more alike than different, for example - but identifying truly versatile winning teams can be hard, since you don’t always know if a team truly has multiple options or if their opponents have made that variety look easy.
I wanted to know which women’s college basketball teams have shown genuine variety in how they win, and which ones seem locked into a single identity. If you’ve been watching lots of women’s basketball this season, you probably have some ideas about this; mine were prompted mostly by watching Big Ten games.
Using data from every Division I game this season, I gathered the following stats for each winning performance: shooting efficiency, turnover rate, offensive rebounding rate, free throw rate, 3-point attempt rate, and the defensive equivalents for all but 3-point attempt rate. Then I fed those profiles into a clustering algorithm, which grouped them into five distinct styles. These are the styles that kept showing up across thousands of wins this season:
The grinder. Wins where a team shot fewer threes than its opponent typically allows. These are games won inside the arc: mid-range, post-ups, drives. Think of a team that didn’t need to shoot from deep to win. Texas is the best example.
First-chance efficiency. Wins where a team didn’t need offensive rebounds to score. They converted on their initial looks, employing good ball movement to find open shots. Green Bay and Oregon State fit the bill here.
The glass crasher. The opposite: wins where a team grabbed offensive boards at a rate well above what the opponent usually gives up. These games are physical, sometimes ugly wins where hustle on the glass made a difference. UCLA and Duke do well here.
The disruptor. Wins built on forcing turnovers at a rate above what the opponent normally commits. Full-court pressure, active hands, traps; whatever the tactic, the opponent coughed it up more than usual. UConn and Texas Tech rely on this style, but don’t sleep on Arkansas State, which leads the nation in forcing turnovers.
The perimeter attack. Wins where a team emphasized 3-point shooting more than the opponent typically faces. Sometimes they fell, sometimes enough of them did. But the intent was clear: shoot from deep, early and often. TCU is in this category, as is Richmond.
A team whose wins are spread fairly evenly across those five categories is, by any measure, versatile. In this analysis, that team would have a versatility score approaching 1. A team whose wins all cluster into one is more predictable in its style, and would get a versatility score of nearly 0. Relying on one end of the spectrum doesn’t guarantee success or failure, but more variety might make preparation harder for opponents.
While a team’s style matters, its opponents do, too. To take the competition into account, I adjusted every game stat against the opponent’s season averages before clustering. A team shooting 52% against an opponent that allows 49% is different from the same team shooting the same percentage against an opponent that allows 44%. Without this adjustment, teams playing varied schedules look versatile when they’re really just reflecting their opponents.
Since the focus here is on how teams win, I limited my analysis to those teams with at least 20 wins this season. Here’s a look at the teams showing the most variation in how they win:
The Adaptables
Among Power 4 and Big East teams with at least 20 wins, the most versatile is Michigan State. The Spartans’ wins are spread almost perfectly across all five styles, producing a near-maximum versatility score of 0.969. There is no single style that accounts for even a quarter of their wins; they’ve forced turnovers, crashed the glass, shot it from deep, and won without the 3-pointer in roughly equal measure. That doesn’t mean they can’t be beaten - just ask Illinois, which defeated the Spartans in the Big Ten Tournament - but it might make them trickier to scout.
North Carolina is right behind them. The Tar Heels also used all five styles nearly equally, with no single style accounting for more than 27% of their wins. And unlike some teams whose variety faded after adjusting for opponents, UNC barely moved. They were 1st in raw rankings and 2nd after adjustment.
Alabama is a fascinating case. Without taking opponents into consideration, the Crimson Tide looked average - 51st nationally. But once you adjust for the gauntlet of SEC opponents, they jump to 6th. Over a third of their wins came via above-average 3-point volume, but they also won frequently by rebounding and forcing turnovers. South Carolina makes a similar leap, climbing from 50th to 13th. The Gamecocks are another team that seems able to adapt its approach to each SEC opponent rather than running the same system. Oklahoma isn’t far behind, winning nearly half its games through above-average offensive rebounding but showing it can win other ways too.
The Big East produced three teams worth noting. UConn, with 29 wins, used all five styles but leaned heavily on forcing turnovers (55% of wins). That’s versatile in range but concentrated in practice - the Huskies are 15th overall, which might surprise people expecting them to be higher. St. John’s rises from 59th in raw rankings all the way to 10th after adjustment. The conference results made them look one-dimensional when they are anything but. Villanova has an even split between efficient conversion, turnover-forcing and 3-point shooting, providing genuine versatility.
In the Big 12, Baylor and Texas Tech both used all five styles and scored above 0.81 in versatility. Iowa State is interesting: 40% efficient-conversion wins (thanks to Audi Crooks), 36% 3-point-heavy wins, and almost nothing else. Two strong plans instead of five; not the most versatile, and those two plans are very different from each other.
The Big Ten middle tier is revealing. Iowa wins through rebounding (38%) and efficient conversion (35%), a two-headed approach that still yields a solid 0.87 versatility score because neither style dominates. Ohio State leans on turnovers (43%), with efficient conversion a secondary weapon. Michigan is less varied than you might expect - over half its wins come through non-3-point grinding - and Minnesota mostly converts efficiently or rebounds.
The ACC beyond UNC has Louisville as the standout, winning 40% of its games through rebounding and 29% via turnovers, with all five styles represented. Duke is more concentrated: half its wins come from a single rebounding-heavy archetype. Syracuse and Virginia Tech are both heavily tilted toward low-3-point grinding - 46% and 61% of wins, respectively.
Lone Star Alone
And then there is Texas. The Longhorns win a lot and do it exactly one way. A staggering 98% of their wins fall into a single style: low 3-point volume, grinding efficiency. Although they shoot a more-than-respectable percentage from beyond the arc, they’ve essentially never won by shooting a lot of threes, as they rank 342nd in the nation in attempts. Generally, the teams that win without shooting threes aren’t just stingy on defense; they depend on interior offense more than teams that win in other ways rely on their dominant offensive trait.
LSU is similarly concentrated, but less so: 64% of wins in that same archetype, with just three styles represented. Vanderbilt looks versatile at first glance - it’s 11th in raw rankings - but drops to 59th after opponent adjustment. The Commodores’ SEC schedule was doing most of the work. West Virginia fell 46 spots for the same reason; its raw variety was almost entirely opponent-driven.
Does that mean if you can take away those teams’ Plan A, you’ll win? That hasn’t worked for most opponents this season, because taking those teams out of what are well-practiced habits has been much easier said than done. Just ask most teams that play Texas.
Mid-majors worth knowing about
Charleston is the most versatile non-P4 team in the country. Its wins are spread across all five styles with no dominant one - potentially a tough scouting assignment for a first-round opponent. Louisiana Tech climbs 30 spots after opponent adjustment to 5th nationally, winning most often by forcing turnovers but with real variety beyond that. Princeton, with a 0.85 score and four styles represented, is the kind of Ivy League team that could present problems on the NCAA Tournament’s first weekend. Literally the only teams to beat Princeton this year: Maryland and Columbia!
On the other end, McNeese wins 85% of its games one way, and UC Davis is the mirror image at 87% in a single archetype. If an opponent takes away their primary approach, the data says there’s not much fallback.
This analysis doesn’t capture everything. If, for example, a key player was injured during the season, this approach doesn’t account for changes in the team’s style as a result. It only uses box score data, not play-by-play data that might provide a more fine-grained look.
More importantly, versatility isn’t directly tied to success (defined as winning percentage). The statistical relationship actually is slightly negative, suggesting that having different ways to win may be more useful in specific contexts. Those might include NCAA tournament matchups, and for games involving mid-major opponents that power-conference fans haven’t seen much, knowing whether a team has options in how it can win can help fill in some of the blanks.
Full methodology here.
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Great post.
One point, though. If you can win one way, and do so consistently, you don't need to win other ways -- even though you conceivably could if you needed to. That, to me, would be UConn.
Love this analysis but there was too much data to make the chart work really well.