As we scramble to fill out our yearly brackets, it’s important to keep injuries in mind. For example, did you know that 3-seed Iowa State has two injured starters? One may return in time for the first round, but the other has been ruled out for the entire tournament. And that player accounted for nearly 15% of all points scored by Iowa State over the entire season.
In this post, I attempt to statistically evaluate the injuries of each NCAA Tournament team. I gathered player statistics from ESPN and injury data from Rotowire, and examined three basic metrics to assess the “injury level” of each team.
I pulled injury data as of Monday, March 17, 2025. This year, I will be updating this article once more on Thursday morning before brackets lock. So be sure to check back before you finalize your brackets!
Click to jump ahead:
Minutes Based Metric
First, we can look at how many total season minutes are accounted for by currently injured players. To do so, we can simply sum the minutes played by currently injured players this season (before injury) and divide by the total number of minutes played by the team. A higher percentage indicates that players that normally play a lot of minutes have been injured. Teams with high percentages may struggle to adjust lineups in the tournament to compensate, as they are not used to playing without these injured players.
I’ll pause here to note that there are two injury “types” in my analysis: Game Time Decision (GTD) and Out. My charts give a breakdown of these injury types, but it’s entirely possible some of these GTD designated players could return in time for their tournament games.
The following chart shows the results of my minutes-based analysis:
It looks like Texas Tech (3), Iowa State (3), and Duke (1) have injuries to key players that may affect their tournament play.
Points Based Metric
Although minutes are a useful yardstick to see how injured a team is, we may be more interested in the productivity of each injured player. In other words, how much did each injured player score this season when not injured? To look at this, we can simply sum the total points scored by currently injured players and divide by the total points scored by the team this season.
A higher percentage indicates that players that normally score a lot of points have been injured. Teams with high percentages may struggle to find scoring power in the tournament.
My minutes and points based approaches haven’t always agreed in past years, but this year it’s clear: no matter how you cut it, Texas Tech (3), Iowa State (3), and Duke (1) are suffering injuries to key players.
Composite Injury Score
Okay, so let’s put our two metrics together to get a better idea of the full picture. To do so, I created a simple Composite Injury Score by normalizing each metric, and taking the average of the result. This score is constructed to be between 0 and 100, with 100 being the worst possible score (i.e. “Most Injured”).
A chart summarizing the Composite Injury Score can be found below. This chart breaks down which portion of the score comes from the Minutes-based metric, and which portion comes from the Points-based metric.
Overall, we can conclude that:
Texas Tech, Iowa State, and Duke are highly impacted by injuries going into the tournament. These are all higher seeds that may be primed for an opening weekend upset.
Full Data
You can find the my full data for all teams in a searchable table below. You can also download this data for your own uses.
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