ACC, Pac-12 and SEC player ratings, through Jan. 1

Quick — who’s having the better season so far: North Carolina State’s Lorenzo Brown or North Carolina’s Harrison Barnes? What about Vanderbilt’s John Jenkins or Florida’s Patric Young? Or Oregon State’s Jared Cunningham vs. Washington’s Tony Wroten?

If all you do is look up the scoring averages of each player, you’ll come up with an oversimplified — and probably wrong — answer for each comparison. That’s the limitation of using scoring averages as a measure of a player’s productivity. And that’s where the Total Impact Quotient can reveal far more relevant information by estimating the total points that a player contributes on offense and defense. You can find out more details about the TIQ system if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, based on the TIQ, the answers are the opposite of what you might think: Brown bests Barnes, Young passes Jenkins, and Wroten makes his mark ahead of Cunningham. Read more about these players and find out why less frequent scorers can be clearly more productive on the court.

For now, let’s get to the stats. Here’s the average TIQ per 40 minutes for each of the three conferences.

ACC = 22.7 points
Pac 12 = 21.5 points
SEC = 22.9 points

In comparison to Dec. 4, the ACC has jumped up by 1.5 points, a noteworthy improvement. The Pac-12 remains nearly identical, while the SEC dipped by 0.6 points. That’s not terribly surprising, with the bottom teams in the SEC bringing down the cream of the crop, like Kentucky, Florida and Alabama.

Let’s take a look at the top 10 most productive players for each conference, ranked by TIQ per 40 minutes. Here are the conference averages.

These statistics are for games played through Sunday Jan. 1.

ACC

Pac-12

SEC

Here are some of the top players from each conference based on percent minutes played. Players who log at least 80 percent of the possible minutes are basically playing more than 30 minutes per game and remaining very productive throughout that playing time. We’re calling those Heavy Usage players. For guys who play 60 to 80 percent of the game, we’re calling them Major Contributors. And we’ll use the designation “In the Rotation” for players logging 40 to 60 percent of his team’s minutes.

In some cases, a player hasn’t logged a high percentage of his team’s possible minutes because of injury or suspension. That should change throughout the season if the player continues to put up big minutes.

ACC

Pac-12

SEC

And here’s the full TIQ player ratings for the ACC, Pac-12 and SEC. The TIQ listings are sorted by team and Real TIQ per Game.

ACC

Pac-12

SEC