College basketball teams are playing bigger than ever — and winning doing it

The possibility seemed nonsensical. Last spring, Michigan signed three of the best big men in the transfer portal — two centers and a power forward. Aday Mara is 7-foot-3. Morez Johnson Jr. and Yaxel Lendeborg are 6-foot-9.

Coach Dusty May’s philosophy has always been “you take good players and then you figure it out.” But start all three?

A year ago, May had played two 7-footers together in Danny Wolf and Vladislav Goldin and even paired them in the pick-and-roll, but this? What about the spacing? What about the matchups?

Through three months of the season, the bigs are making May look brilliant. Michigan is on track to be a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament and contending for a Big Ten title. The jumbo starting lineup is outscoring opponents by 31.6 points per 100 possessions, according to CBB Analytics, and holding opponents to a ridiculously low 39.6 effective field-goal percentage. For comparison, the Division I average is 51.3 percent.

“When I look on the court for us,” May said, “the court looks small.”

NOPE 😤 pic.twitter.com/UhC0HYdyRA

— Michigan Men’s Basketball (@umichbball) February 3, 2026

Not long ago, the geometry of the basketball court had coaches thinking smaller. The small-ball four became a staple for many teams in college hoops, with coaches moving a big wing to the power forward spot to get more shooting and skill on the floor. But players like Lendeborg and Florida’s 6-foot-9 Thomas Haugh are part of a new breed, the “big-ball three,” traditional bigs who are skilled enough to play on the perimeter and shrink the floor on the defensive end while giving their team a major advantage on the offensive glass.

The small-ball four has not gone away entirely, but more teams are trying to size up, and this season is likely the tallest in the history of the sport. Ken Pomeroy tracks the average height of every team in college hoops — calculated by who actually plays in the games — and this season’s average (6-foot-5.4 inches) is the highest ever in his database, which goes back to the 2006-07 season.

Pomeroy believes the increase is because of the skill of big players, which makes it easier to play more of them together. That starts at the youth levels, where the tall kids are no longer just tied to the blocks but encouraged to learn how to dribble, pass and shoot, and everyone wants to shoot 3-pointers.

That could also explain why the gap between the height of the average center and point guard has steadily been shrinking.

A 6-7 player in 1995 was probably a center on his high school team; today, he could be a guard. In the NBA, being tall is part of the job description. There are only four players currently under 6-foot in the league. The Houston Rockets opened the season with a startling lineup that featured a 6-7 point guard alongside four 6-11 teammates. In college basketball, small guards can still survive and thrive. But it appears there’s starting to be a correlation between size and success. You can maybe get away with playing one smaller player, but the ideal build?

We likely saw it a year ago in Durham.

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When Jon Scheyer inherited Duke from Mike Krzyzewski, the program was coming off a Final Four and mostly rolling but there had been slippage in one area: defense.

Over Coach K’s final two seasons, Duke ranked 79th and 49th in adjusted defensive efficiency. Scheyer believed the key to building elite offenses and defenses was versatility.

“It’s hard to do that without size, right?” Scheyer said.

In Scheyer’s first year, Duke was the tallest team in college basketball and its defense jumped to 16th-best in the country. His second team was smaller — 33rd in height — but a year ago, Scheyer leaned all the way in, emboldened by conversations he’d had with Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzula and Utah Jazz coach Will Hardy about the value of length.

Scheyer had the ideal recruiting class, the ultimate versatile forward in 6-foot-9 Cooper Flagg, who could defend every position and protect the rim, and on the other end had the skill to play point guard or score with his back to the basket. Next to Flagg would be 7-foot-2 Khaman Maluach, an elite rim protector, and on the wing Scheyer had landed Kon Knueppel, a 6-7 wing who had the build and strength of an upperclassman. Scheyer went to work in the spring of 2024 looking for big, versatile players who could play in a switch-heavy defense that would really unleash the powers of Flagg.

The final product was a team with the shortest player, Caleb Foster, listed at 6-5, and an average height just barely shy of 6-foot-8. It was the tallest team ever in the KenPom database, and likely the tallest of all time.

“We’ve had some really big teams, and we’ve had some smaller teams, and there’s always a trade-off: with speed, with skill, all that,” Scheyer said. “But if you can have both, we’re going to opt to have both.”

The Blue Devils were a pick-and-roll’s nightmare defensively, simply able to switch just about every ball screen. Those Blue Devils ended up losing in the Final Four, blowing a 14-point lead to Houston, but will go down as one of the best teams not to win a title this century. Scheyer is at it again this season, with the second-tallest team in college hoops, which ranks fourth in adjusted defensive efficiency.

The tallest is Illinois, one of the breakout teams of this season, which has won 11 straight games, including two recent road wins against top-five teams. Its current rotation is all players 6-6 or taller. The Illini are tied for the Big Ten lead with Michigan.

Duke was part of a Final Four last season that showcased where the sport is going, with four teams that all featured big frontlines, and the two teams that played for the national title — Florida and Houston — elite on the offensive glass.

Houston was the outlier, ranking 243rd in average height, but that’s in part because Kelvin Sampson prioritizes wingspan over standing height. Center Jojo Tugler, for instance, is only 6-foot-8 but has a 7-foot-6 wingspan. The Cougars, like Duke, could blow up pick-and-rolls, but in a different way, using their bigs in what most call a hedge — Sampson said they get to the line of scrimmage — and then using their length to take away a guard’s vision. The pressure often leads to turnovers. On the offensive end, to use another football term, Houston blitzes the basket once a shot goes in the air. The Coogs have finished in the top 11 in offensive rebounding rate for six straight seasons.

“You feel like they’re oozing bigs and offensive rebounding,” Iowa State coach T.J. Otzelberger said.

Some coaches used to shy away from prioritizing offensive rebounding in fear of putting their transition defense at a disadvantage, but NBA and college teams have figured out that the analytics suggest it should be a priority.

That line of thinking helped Todd Golden build a national champion. Before going to Florida, Golden coached at San Francisco for six years — the final three as the head coach — and watched Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s dominate the league.

“Both teams were really good defensively, really good on the glass and were always really efficient from 2, and that was a big driving force for us when we got here at Florida,” Golden said. “We wanted to be able to kind of install a similar system where if we were able to recruit well in the front court, our hope was to really raise our floor and limit our volatility.”

At San Francisco, Golden had tried to win by maximizing the 3-point line. His teams attempted a lot of 3s while minimizing 3-point attempts for the opponent. He mostly carried that strategy over his first season at Florida in 2022-23, but those Gators struggled to make 3s (31.4 percent) and got crushed on the glass.

“We just did not provide ourselves much margin for error that year,” Golden said. “We played small and we couldn’t really shoot, so that was a bad combination.”

That next year Golden brought in four players 6-10 or taller — two transfers and two true freshmen — and Florida went from 320th in offensive rebounding rate to eighth, and its adjusted offensive efficiency jumped from 139th to 12th.

The next offseason Golden targeted another elite rebounder in the portal in Rueben Chinyelu, giving Florida the deepest front court in the country. Last year’s Gators could shoot the 3 and get back a lot of their misses, a combination that took them to second in adjusted offensive efficiency and won a national title.

With his entire frontcourt back this season, Golden made a similar decision as May at Michigan, starting three bigs together. The Gators started slow but are now the favorite to win the SEC, overcoming the fact that they’ve been a bad 3-point shooting team (28.9 percent) by crushing on the glass, ranking second nationally in both offensive and defensive rebounding rate.

“A big thing that we look at is our 2-point field percentage against our opponents, and I feel like when we have a big delta there, we’re on the right track,” Golden said. (Florida makes 58.4 percent of its 2s and holds opponents to 45.3 percent inside the arc.) “There’s going to be some other variables like taking care of the ball, fouling, which is something that we haven’t done well enough this year, but if you’re doing a good job in those areas, you’re gonna always give yourself a chance.”

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In June of 2023, the NCAA rules committee changed the block/charge call to favor the offense. For a help defender to draw a charge, he must be set when the offensive player plants his foot to go airborne. Since that change, when it’s a close call, officials have often favored the offense and coaches have changed the way they teach help defense. Instead of trying to take a charge, going vertical has become the best defense at the rim.

And thus an obvious outcome: It pays to be bigger at the rim. Block rate has shot up, and non-steal turnover percentage, which includes charges, has been at record lows, according to Pomeroy’s data.

Michigan has the ultimate rim protector this year in Mara, who spends most of his time in the paint while the rest of the Wolverines play a switch-heavy system, not just switching ball screens but also actions away from the ball. That helps keep Michigan’s other bigger players near the basket as well.

The Wolverines proved how beneficial it can be earlier this season against Gonzaga, giving Mark Few the worst loss of his career — 101-61 — and only loss this season.

Few has long been a proponent of big is better, building his offenses around post-ups, and no one has been better on that end of the floor this century. Few is in his 27th season as the head coach, and Gonzaga has ranked in the top 10 of adjusted offensive efficiency 15 times, including a run of finishing No. 1 in four out of five years from 2019 to 2023, when his teams were tall and could score inside.

“I know that everybody’s into the 3(-pointer) thing, but we love being incredibly efficient from 2,” Few said.

This season Gonzaga leads college basketball with 47.1 paint points per game, per CBB Analytics. Until a recent injury to Braden Huff, Few was starting two centers in Graham Ike (6-9) and Huff (6-10), who thrive with their back to the basket and also are elite rollers.

The NBA sees the post-up as an inefficient shot, and its frequency has decreased in that league, but Gonzaga’s success shows that it can be part of an uber-efficient offense.

“Trust me, I was lecturing my guys at USA about it the whole time,” Few said, referring to his time as an assistant coach for USA Basketball. “Trying to get more post-ups, whether it’s (Joel) Embiid or A.D. (Anthony Davis). I don’t think it’s done. I think it’ll come back there (to the NBA). I really do, especially if we continue to get better players. I mean, look at (Nikola) Jokic, man, he’s unstoppable.”

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The main reason coaches went small in the past was to get more skill on the floor. That’s no longer necessary. Michigan, which often has three bigs on the floor, ranks ninth in adjusted offense this year. Illinois is on pace to have the most efficient offense ever. Illinois is also proof that a coach no longer has to sacrifice shooting for size. The Illini attempt over half their shots from 3-point range.

Scoring and efficiency are at record highs this season. The frequency of 3-pointers is also at an all-time high, which directly correlates to 2-point percentages being at record highs as well, because quality 3-point shooting stretches the defense and creates better 2-point chances.

The teams that can combat this are — shocker — big. The three high-major teams with the best 2-point defenses — Michigan, Arizona and North Carolina — all rank inside the top seven in average height, and UNC has basically stolen its rival’s strategy.

The Heels can go 6-10, 6-10, 7-foot up front, with Jarin Stevenson, who primarily played power forward last year at Alabama, starting 14 games this season at small forward. UNC, not coincidentally, has gone from 104th in 2-point defense to fifth.

“It obviously helps us out defensively,” UNC coach Hubert Davis said. “Size bothers. Size matters.”

Davis is reminded every day how much it matters by a picture hanging in his office from his New York Knicks days. In the picture, Davis, who is 6-5, is boxing out Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman.

“My box out technique is fantastic — it’s perfect — and … there’s no way that I got the rebound. There’s just no chance,” Davis said, laughing. “Obviously it helps to have that kind of size out there on the floor.”

— Brendan Marks contributed reporting to this story.