Let's talk about jump balls

All we are saying is give Braden Huff a chance

The possession arrow was introduced in men’s college basketball for the 1982 season. Since then, there is usually only one jump ball a game - the opening tip. Occasionally, the lack of jump balls gets lamented when there is a tie up. This used to be Dick Vitale’s main cause before he switched to raising money for cancer research. It’s true that it’s arbitrary to give possession based on alternating teams. But it’s also arbitrary (and more time consuming) to give possession to the tallest player.

Our friend Dan McQuade did a defense of the jump ball at Defector last spring, which also served as a useful history of how the possession arrow came to be. It even includes a mention of the 1988 season, where the possession arrow was replaced with the seemingly sensible rule that the defense was rewarded with possession in the case of a tie-up. In practice, though, the rule was confusing. What if a defender poked the ball away from a dribbler, scooped it up, and then was tied up a second later? The team originally with possession would get the ball as they became the defense as soon as the defender gained possession.

Maybe we are fortunate the game at least starts with a jump ball. My sense is that neither coaches nor officials really care about it. Certainly, Doug Shows did his best to sabotage the opening jump forever by becoming the first ref to toss the jump from outside the center circle in a South Florida/Florida Atlantic game two years ago.

All ten players assume that Shows couldn’t be serious and wait a couple seconds for him to do the real jump ball. But that was it! That’s how they started the game. (Here’s another view.) It appears that Shows didn’t lose any assignments over this and actually worked a game in the Elite Eight in that year’s tournament. Even officiating supervisors don’t care about the jump ball.

The last time I wrote about jump balls was 20 years ago, honoring Ben Gillery, the only known designated jump baller in human history. Gillery would win the opening tip and often be immediately subbed out for the remainder of the game. I’m not surprised nobody has followed up on John Thompson’s gambit from the mid 1980’s. But on the other hand, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to trot out a rotation player to win the jump ball if the starter is especially poor at that skill.

Much like the two-for-one at the end of the half, it’s not worth all that much, but it’s some low-hanging analytical fruit. If your backup big is better than your starter at winning the tip, and he’s going to play 15 minutes anyway, why not just start him and sub him out at the first dead ball? You’ve slightly improved your chance of getting an extra possession in the game.

But how could we possibly identify such opportunities? Well, we could develop a rating system to measure the skill of all jump ballers in the country. And that is what I have done. We take all of a player’s jump balls during his career and out comes a rating that accounts for winning percentage and quality of opponent (jump baller, not team). We add a naive prior to account for the fact that past results are not a perfect predictor of future performance (especially for guys with few jumps). Here’s the full list of the 624 players who have taken at least one jump this season as of Tuesday morning.

What are some takeaways? After getting knee-deep into the data, I could talk about it FOR DAYS. But here are a few that “jump” out:

• On Thanksgiving, while you were looking forward to a nice meal, spending time with family, or watching a dumb football game, I was geeked up for Miami-BYU which featured what were the first and third-ranked jump ballers - Ernest Udeh and Keiba Keita - battling it out to start the game. Udeh won the jump easily, as we would expect the GOAT to do.¹ Keita for his part has already lost five jumps this season and fallen to #5, but three losses were to the players currently ranked #1, #4, and #13.

• Udeh and Oklahoma’s Mohamed Wague are the best jumpers of our generation. Wague is 18-2 after winning the jump against Marquette on Friday (in a one-point win, no less). Wague has started just 19 games in his four-year career, but he should be a fixture in OU’s starting lineup this season. We can only dream of an Oklahoma/Miami tussle in an 8/9 tournament game to settle who’s the best jumper of the 2026 season.

• Circle this Saturday on the calendar as Wague will take on Arizona State’s Massamba Diop, who’s 0-for-8 in his jumping career. You can derive a probability of winning by taking a player’s rating and dividing it by the sum of the two players in the matchup. For Wague vs Diop, this method makes Wague a 93% favorite. That seems high, given - if roster measurements are to be trusted - Wague is giving up three inches in this matchup. But Wague has won 90% of his jumps and Diop has won 0%, so maybe it makes sense. I’m excited to see what happens in this David vs. Goliath battle, even though in this case Goliath is shorter than David. The world of jump balls is complicated.

• Of course, it’s possible this matchup doesn’t occur. Bobby Hurley has two other 6-11 players in the starting lineup. He could turn to either to try and change his team’s jump ball luck. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned through a few days of sifting through this data, it’s that like Doug Shows, coaches also don’t really care about jump balls. They’ll just continue to roll out the same dudes, regardless of their track record.²

• Let’s continue with some baseless criticism of coaching decisions. Gonzaga’s Graham Ike takes all of the jump balls for the Zags and it turns out he’s not very good. He’s gone a mere 50-64 against D-I foes including his time at Wyoming. And a lot of these games are not against top-notch jumpers. Mark Few has another option and he doesn’t even need to change his starting lineup. Braden Huff is listed as an inch taller than Ike and while nobody is going to call him a plus-athlete (the wingspans and reaches of both players are tightly guarded secrets to date), it’s risk-free to give him a chance.

• Jump Baller U. might be Wisconsin. Steven Crowl finished his career as the 5th-ranked jumper last season, going 105-43 over his last four years in Madison. Meanwhile, Nolan Winter spent the last two seasons watching Crowl from outside the jump circle. Winter’s only jump prior to this season was in a 2024 Big Ten tournament game when Zach Edey fouled out Wisconsin’s front line and Winter was pressed into duty. He would foul out, too, but not before winning the overtime tip against Edey in a one-point win. Winter has won all seven of his jumps this season, which includes a victory over the aforementioned Keita. Next up for Winter is Northwestern’s Arrinten Page on Wednesday. We give Winter an 80% chance of staying undefeated.

• Then there’s the oddball cases, like Merrimack’s Bryan Etumnu, who went a staggering 30-2 in 2024 but followed that up with a mediocre 15-19 in 2025, and after transferring to Wright State this season, is not taking jump balls at all despite starting every game so far.

• Or Sam Sherry, who was an elite jump baller at Elon, going 44-9. But despite starting every game last year during his senior season, he was wrongly relegated to just one jump as 7-4 Matthew Von Komen took the rest of them, going a disappointing 20-12.

• Or North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson, who’s leading the country in dunks by a mile, but has lost six of his seven jumps this season. It’s not all about length and leaping ability. There’s an art to it (or something).

• It’s not even about DNA as the Ivišić twins of Illinois prove. One of them is elite (Zvonimir, 17-6 lifetime) and one is not (Tomislav, 14-19).

So welcome to the exciting world of jump balls. We’ll keep these ratings updated daily.

UPDATE: In our previous dispatch, we called out Air Force as the only team in the country with the potential to go winless. Well, they promptly eked out a win over Alabama State, then won fairly easily over SIUE and IU Indy. So I’m pleased to report there will be no winless teams this season. However, the Falcons then lost badly to Northern Colorado and South Dakota. And they still have the second-highest chance to go winless in league play (Sorry, Mississippi Valley State).

1. We have five years of jump ball data at the moment, and the true GOAT in that sample is Memphis’s Jalen Duren who went a staggering 26-3 in his lone college season. Udeh is merely the GOTS - Greatest of This Season.

2. I have actually watched Diop’s jump ball attempts and after some initial efforts where he appeared to not know how the game started given how comically late he reacted to the official’s toss, he’s starting to get the hang of it. He actually won the tip in the Maui championship game, but a USC player ultimately gained possession. So maybe sticking with him is the way to go.