This year's NCAA tournament lost more star scorers to injury than any recent one

Going into this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament, one statistic stands out from the routine churn of injury reports that accompanies every March: in the last 20 tournaments, only six players averaging 18 or more points per game have missed the opening round to injury. Four of them are missing this year's opener alone, according to CBS Sports's tracking of the field [s1].

Who's out

The list of season-ending or tournament-ending injuries across the field is unusually long for a single March. Texas Tech's JT Toppin and BYU's Richie Saunders are both out for the season with knee injuries [s1]. Clemson's Carter Welling is also out for the season with a knee injury [s1], and Michigan's L.J. Cason is out for the season with a torn ACL [s1]. Villanova starter Matt Hodge is out for the season with a leg injury [s1], and North Carolina freshman Caleb Wilson is out for the tournament with a broken right thumb [s1].

Several more players entered the tournament banged up rather than sidelined outright. Louisville's Mikel Brown Jr. was ruled out of the team's game against South Florida with a back injury [s1]. Duke was without Patrick Ngongba (foot injury) against Siena, with his status for a potential second-round game unclear, and without Caleb Foster, who is out a minimum of two weeks with a broken foot [s1]. Penn's Ethan Roberts was held out against Illinois with concussion symptoms [s1]. Kentucky was dealing with two separate issues — Jaland Lowe out for the season, and Jayden Quaintance's status unclear with a knee injury [s1]. Gonzaga's Braden Huff was out for the opening weekend with a knee injury, while Wisconsin's Nolan Winter (ankle) and Purdue's Trey Kaufman-Renn (shoulder) were both expected to play through their injuries [s1].

Why the comparison matters

The "18-plus points per game" threshold CBS Sports used is a proxy for a team's most important offensive player — the kind of injury that reliably reshapes a bracket rather than merely thinning a rotation. Measured against that bar, four such players missing the tournament's very first games is, by the count of the last 20 tournaments, an outlier year rather than a typical one [s1].

What the comparison does not do is establish a cause. A single unusually injury-heavy tournament is consistent with several explanations — a compressed conference-tournament schedule colliding badly with the NCAA field, ordinary statistical variance across a 68-team, single-elimination sample, or something structural about training loads across the season — and the CBS Sports tracking on which this figure is based does not attribute the spike to any one of them [s1]. Sports medicine researchers who study lower-body injury clustering in college basketball have generally been cautious about drawing conclusions from a single season's numbers, since year-to-year injury counts in any individual tournament are small enough that one unusual year does not, on its own, indicate a trend.

What to watch

For readers following the bracket, the practical takeaway is that some of this year's highest-seeded teams are entering the tournament without their most productive scorers, which matters for understanding results that might otherwise look like upsets. For anyone interested in the broader injury-prevention question, this year's tournament is a data point worth tracking rather than a verdict — one unusually bad March for star players' knees and feet, layered on top of the individual medical realities involved.

Sources

• Tracking key injuries in the NCAA Tournament and the impact on each team ahead of Big Dance — CBS Sports, 2026-03-19