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This Thursday night, Illinois and Alabama will take the court on opposite coasts but with similar approaches. Both teams will try to advance to the Elite Eight by relying on two of the nation’s best offenses – and defenses that rank below schools like Marist, Utah Valley and George Mason.

It used to be that an elite defense was a requirement for success in college basketball. But this year, more teams have ridden their offenses to strong results. Four teams (Illinois, Alabama, Baylor and Kentucky) earned top-four seeds in the NCAA Tournament with offenses ranked among the nation’s top 10 and defenses outside the top 68. While Baylor and Kentucky have been eliminated, Illinois (first in the nation in adjusted offensive efficiency, 92nd on defense) and Alabama (fourth, 101st) have reached the Sweet 16. And their success is part of an overall trend toward more scoring in college basketball.

The reasons behind this shift, though, are layered and somewhat counterintuitive. College basketball is in the midst of a dramatic change. Rosters have gotten older for a pair of reasons: The NCAA granted players an extra year of eligibility due to the COVID season and players earned the right to profit off their name, image and likeness (NIL), which has enticed some to stay in school longer. At the same time, the transfer portal has created a system of annual free agency, with teams going through massive roster overhauls each offseason.

In other words, college basketball may be older, but teams are also less cohesive. And coaches say those factors have helped offense and hurt defense. Mike Rhoades saw it firsthand in his initial season as Penn State’s head coach. Not only was he new to Happy Valley, but so were nine of his top 11 players, including transfers from six different schools.

“When you’re a junior and a senior, you’re a better defensive player than when you’re a freshman or a sophomore,” Rhoades said. “We have all these transfers, and they are like freshmen and sophomores learning a new defensive system. The offensive side of the ball is a little bit easier for guys in the sense that they just have experience under their belt and most guys are being recruited out of the portal because of their offense, not their defense.”

Coaches often say that it takes longer to build a great defense than a great offense. There’s more cohesiveness needed on defense – players have to be constantly aware of where they are in relation to their teammates, move in concert with each other and communicate quickly and effectively. Building those habits takes a lot of time. There are exceptions – Iowa State has the nation’s best defense, despite three key newcomers – but on the whole, togetherness is crucial on defense.

That’s less of an issue on offense. Many college teams are utilizing the NBA’s pace-and-space concepts, rather than some of the more structured offenses of the past (Flex, Princeton, etc.). These modern systems may differ slightly by school, but they employ a lot of similar concepts – ball screens, dribble handoffs and four- or five-out spacing. This makes it easier for transfers to step into a new system. And they do so with advanced offensive skills, often honed through several seasons of skill development at the college level.

“If I needed shooting [I used to] go recruit high school shooters,” Rhoades said. “Now I can go recruit college players with two, three, four years of experience under their belt as shooters. It translates easier. And that’s statistically true.”

Also statistically true? Scoring is up in men’s college basketball. According to KenPom, teams are averaging 105.2 points per 100 possessions, marking the fourth straight season that points have risen and the highest number since KenPom started tracking such stats in 1996-97. Typically, there would be a corresponding increase in tempo – more possessions mean more points. But the national average of 68.5 possessions per game is the third-lowest since 2015-16, meaning this change is all about increased efficiency.

In the first round of the NCAA Tournament, Texas A&M, a No. 9 seed that ranked only 11th in the SEC in offensive efficiency this season, posted 58 points. At halftime. Not long ago, 58 points would have been enough to win a tournament game, if not more. In 2011, Connecticut beat Butler, 53-41, to win the national championship. In 2019, Virginia held its first three opponents below 58 on its way to a title. In the 2021 tournament, teams scored 58 or fewer points 30 times.

We are witnessing a growing gulf between offense and defense among top teams, with offense at the forefront. This season, teams that earned a top-six NCAA seed had an average gap of 15.1 places between their ranks in adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency, the widest split over the past decade. From 2014 to 2019, the gap was 5.5; from 2021 until this year, it was 8.4. And a decade ago, in 2014, the gap was 6.3 in favor of defense. That year, all four No. 1 seeds – Arizona, Florida, Virginia and Wichita State – ranked higher in adjusted defensive efficiency than adjusted offensive efficiency.

Among teams to earn a top-four seed since 2014, this season’s tournament featured three of the eight biggest differentials in favor of offensive rank over defensive rank:

San Francisco coach Chris Gerlufsen is in his second year at the program’s helm. He is into analytics and was intrigued when he heard those numbers.

“It’s interesting, because when I first came to San Francisco as an assistant for Todd Golden, and we were trying to quantify and break down all the analytic numbers to put ourselves in a position to be an NCAA Tournament team, one of the things we kind of hung our hat on was we had to be a top-50 defensive team if we wanted to have any chance of being an NCAA tournament team,” Gerlufsen said. “That’s kind of what the numbers had said up to that point.

“So to hear what you say now … it even probably translated to Florida’s team this year, because they were way better offensively than they were defensively. So how the pendulum has swung is super interesting.”

Sure enough, Florida – coached by Todd Golden – ranked 12th in adjusted offensive efficiency and 95th in defense this season.

Gerlufsen has observed some of the same changes that Rhoades detected.

“From an offensive standpoint, the game is a lot older now,” he said. “We’ve tried to stay as old as we can through the transfer portal, because I think it’s a lot easier to win when you’re older.

“The more I think about it, the offensive side of the ball is a little bit easier to transition to than the defensive side of the ball when you have big roster transitions.”

There’s one other impact of this shift towards scoring, and it should ultimately be good for the game.

As Gerlufsen sais, “As an offensive-minded guy, it makes watching the games more enjoyable.”

And if teams like Illinois and Alabama keep advancing, it will convince coaches that relying on offense makes games more winnable too.

(Photo of Mark Sears: Andy Lyons/Getty Images)