The No. 1 team in the AP poll is 27-2 and riding the nation’s sixth-longest active win streak. Said team also sits atop KenPom’s rankings and has done so continuously for the last 60 days. So what do we do as a college basketball commentariat? We sit around and talk about how there are no great teams this year. Forgive us. It’s what we do most years.

Houston may indeed turn out to be not great. As always, that will be for March and April to decide. What we can say without fear of contradiction in February, however, is that the Cougars are the greatest shot volume team we’ve seen in college basketball in the last five years.

Teams that take care of the ball and rebound their misses attempt a higher volume of shots than do opponents engaged in one or neither of these pursuits. To say as much feels unnecessary. It’s mere common sense, but for whatever reason we rarely watch games or discuss teams with this in mind. Happily, we can make helpful comparisons between numbers of attempts across varying tempos and free throw rates with our trusty shot volume index.

Named for Svi Mykhailiuk in the best traditions of PECOTA, SCHOENE, KUBIAK, and VUKOTA, a shot volume index can be thought of as the number of attempts a team would record from the field in 100 possessions of (rather implausibly) zero-free-throw basketball. This season Houston looks really good on this measure.

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