NCAA Basketball Teams Who Will Be Overreliant on Star Players in 2015-16

Relying too much on one player in college basketball doesn't often work out very well.

Of the 18 players who averaged at least 20.0 points per game last season, only three—Tyler Harvey, Tyler Haws and Joseph Young—played for teams that made the NCAA tournament. In the past four years, not a single team has reached the Sweet 16 while boasting a player who averaged 20 ppg over the course of the season.

Even the best players need some help, but these 10 teams have star players who don't have much help at all.

The following teams are ranked in ascending order of how likely they are to lose at least 10 more games if their star player was suddenly ruled ineligible to play this season.

Honorable Dynamic Duos

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In addition to the 10 players who will be individually responsible for the success of their respective teams, here are three other schools who were seeded well in the 2015 NCAA tournament but will be relying heavily on a pair of players to get them back into the field in 2016.

Wisconsin Badgers: Nigel Hayes and Bronson Koenig

You can talk yourself into Ethan Happ and Brevin Pritzl until you're blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is that Hayes and Koenig are the only players on Wisconsin's roster who scored at least 75 points last season. They are the Batman and Robin whom head coach Bo Ryan will be riding into the sunset.

Louisville Cardinals: Damion Lee and Trey Lewis

Probably the most impactful pair of graduate transfers in college basketball history, Lee (578 points) and Lewis (555 points) both scored more in 2014-15 than the entire roster of remaining Cardinals they are joining (434 points).

Guys such as Quentin Snider and Chinanu Onuaku will have important increased roles in the absence of Terry Rozier and Montrezl Harrell, but the stud transfers are the reason Louisville still projects as a tournament team.

Arkansas Razorbacks: Anthlon Bell and Anton Beard

Whereas Wisconsin and Louisville should still make the 2016 NCAA tournament, good luck finding anyone who thinks the Razorbacks will be dancing after losing Bobby Portis, Michael Qualls, Rashad Madden and Alandise Harris.

Bell and Beard are pretty clearly their top returning players, but even a backcourt of Shabazz Napier and Ryan Boatright would be hard-pressed to carry the rest of this team to Selection Sunday.

10. Stanford: Rosco Allen

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2014-15 Stats: 7.3 ppg, 4.4 rpg, 1.2 apg

With all due respect to Rosco Allen, his name is not exactly the first that springs to mind when we start thinking about stars of college basketball.

For Stanford, though, Allen is the highest-scoring returning player. Chasson Randle, Anthony Brown and Stefan Nastic took their combined 47.8 points per game with them when they graduated, meaning that more than 66 percent of last year's scoring is gone.

Several players will need to step up their game in a big way if the Cardinal are to remain even remotely competitive in a stout conference. Last year's freshman class—particularly Michael Humphrey and Robert Cartwright—will inevitably be a critical contributor after sparsely touching the court last season.

But it's the 6'9" stretch 4 who made 36.2 percent of his three-point attempts last year who figures to have his number called time and again in 2015-16.

Allen played minimally as a freshman and appeared in just one game during the 2013-14 season because of a stress fracture in his leg, but the former 4-star recruit from Hungary could be headed for one heck of a breakout year given both his talent and opportunity.

It most likely won't be enough to carry Stanford to the NCAA tournament, though. It's not often that a team loses all three leading scorers from its NIT roster before suddenly evolving into a juggernaut.

9. Kent State: Jimmy Hall

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2014-15 Stats: 15.9 ppg, 7.7 rpg, 1.5 apg

As was the case for Rosco Allen at Stanford, Jimmy Hall is the top-scoring returning player from a Kent State roster that loses three players who averaged double figures last season.

The big difference, however, is that Hall was already the best player on his team.

Despite missing five games in February while battling mononucleosis, the Hofstra transfer led the Golden Flashes in total points scored and total rebounds.

According to KenPom.com, he was used on 31.0 percent of possessions and was responsible for 32.6 percent of the shots taken while he was on the court. According to Sports-Reference.com, he averaged 35.7 points and 17.3 rebounds per 100 possessions. Let the record show that Jahlil Okafor's numbers in those categories were 34.9 and 17.1, respectively.

And with last year's three highest-scoring guards all graduating, common sense would suggest that Kent State will be even more reliant on its star power forward.

However, it would also suggest that the Golden Flashes will struggle to win games. Kellon Thomas is the only returning player shorter than 6'7" who played more than 15 minutes in the entire 2014-15 season, and he missed more than 75 percent of the team's games last season between a number of health issues.

Unless Cornell transfer Galal Cancer makes an absolutely massive immediate impact in the backcourt, Kent State might fail to win 15 games despite getting 20 points per game from Hall.

8. Georgia State: Kevin Ware

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2014-15 Stats: 7.6 ppg, 3.1 rpg, 2.4 apg

Four guards averaged better than 3.0 points per game last season for Georgia State: Kevin Ware and three players who are no longer on the roster.

Two of those three departed guards did pretty much everything for the Panthers last season. R.J. Hunter and Ryan Harrow combined to score 48.7 percent of the team's points while also serving as the team leaders in assists. To say that Georgia State's offense will look a little different next season would be a gigantic understatement.

Ware will be the one familiar face, though, and he played quite well in the games that Harrow missed toward the end of last year. A 4-star recruit in the class of 2011, he should be one of the most talented players in the entire Sun Belt conference.

But unless Samford transfer Isaiah Williams makes a huge impact, Ware is pretty much the beginning and the end of head coach Ron Hunter's backcourt attack. Considering he is a career 31.5 percent three-point shooter, that isn't the best news in the world.

Ware is a great defender and slasher, but if he needs to score 15 points per game for the Panthers to win, they might not win very many games.

7. Oklahoma State: Phil Forte

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2014-15 Stats: 15.0 ppg, 2.1 rpg, 1.7 apg

Head coach Travis Ford scored a pretty big win when Eastern Illinois transfer Chris Olivier elected to bring his talents to Stillwater. The power forward averaged 22.1 points, 9.0 rebounds and 2.4 blocks per 40 minutes with the Panthers. Adding Jawun Evans and Igor Ibaka in this year's recruiting class certainly won't hurt either.

But the Cowboys have a ton of holes to fill.

The best-case scenario might be that those three incoming players perfectly replace the outgoing Le'Bryan Nash, Anthony Hickey and Michael Cobbins to keep Oklahoma State from slipping into a battle with Texas Tech and TCU for the honor of best team in the Big 12's basement.

There are quite a few other scenarios, though, in which Phil Forte jacks up close to a dozen three-point attempts per game because it's the only way the team has any hope of averaging one point per possession.

Forte is a great shooter, but he definitely wore down toward the end of last season. He shot just 29.1 percent from beyond the arc in his final 12 games.

"I will say, sometimes I've been a little more tired," he told John Helsley of the Oklahoman last February. "I'm playing more minutes than I did last year. The way I've been guarded is different than last year; everything came a little easier, especially when you have the talent we had last year."

Things got undeniably tougher for Forte when Marcus Smart and Markel Brown left, and losing Nash and Hickey as teammates isn't going to make his life any easier in 2015-16. He'll lead the team in scoring, but leading the Cowboys to the tournament will require at least a few surprising upsets in a very strong conference.

6. Northern Iowa: Wes Washpun

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2014-15 Stats: 7.6 ppg, 2.5 rpg, 2.6 apg

In case it wasn't abundantly clear from the previous three players, a surefire way to be considered for this list is to be the only returning player who finished in the top four on the team in scoring last season.

Such is the case with Wes Washpun, who ranked third on the Panthers in scoring despite averaging just 5.1 field-goal attempts per game. Of course, no one on Northern Iowa's extremely slow-paced but efficient offense shot a ton, but the point is there's a lot of room for an increased workload.

This rings especially true with Northern Iowa losing each of its three primary targets from last year. According to KenPom.com, Nate Buss (28.6 percent), Deon Mitchell (25.4 percent) and Seth Tuttle (25.0 percent) were responsible for most of the shooting while they were on the floor. No other player who averaged at least five minutes per game took more than 20.6 percent of shots available to him.

Long story short, it's tough to imagine a 2015-16 season with Washpun scoring fewer than 10 points per game. He'll set up Paul Jesperson and Matt Bohannon for plenty of three-point attempts, but Washpun should be the primary scoring threat on a team that isn't much of one. To return to the NCAA tournament, the Panthers will need to be one of the stingiest defenses in the country for a second straight year.

5. Eastern Michigan: Ray Lee

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2014-15 Stats: 16.7 ppg, 1.9 rpg, 1.5 apg

Some teams have dynamic duos, but Eastern Michigan had a transcendent trio last year. Ray Lee, Mike Talley and Karrington Ward each averaged at least 28.0 minutes per game while no other Eagle averaged so much as 17 per contest. They each had legitimate three-point range and averaged at least 12.5 points per game.

But Lee was the best and most heavily used of the trio and is the only one who didn't graduate.

As a result, he has to be considered one of the early favorites to lead the nation in scoring, but there's no telling where the rest of the team's scoring will come from. Jodan Price shot just 27.6 percent from the field last season, and he may well rank second on the team in field-goal attempts this year.

However, Lee wasn't quite a candidate for the No. 1 spot on this list because a one-man show just might work in the MAC. Prior to last season, this had consistently been one of the slower-paced and least offensively efficient conferences in the country. In 2011-12, EMU averaged 53.0 points per game and won the MAC West division.

Lee may score 33 percent of Eastern Michigan's points next season, but that may also be enough points for a conference title.

4. Seton Hall: Isaiah Whitehead

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2014-15 Stats: 12.0 ppg, 3.9 rpg, 3.5 apg

Isaiah Whitehead was supposed to be a star for Seton Hall last season, but he was woefully inefficient, averaging just 1.07 points per field-goal attempt while committing 3.3 turnovers per game.

If he puts up numbers like those again this year, the Pirates will be lucky to win a single game in the Big East.

They went 16-15 last season, but it would have been so much worse were it not for Sterling Gibbs. He shot 43.6 percent from three-point range and led the team in points, assists and steals. But he'll be suiting up for Connecticut this year, and Brandon Mobley won't be back either, leaving Whitehead to steer an extremely young ship.

The addition of Massachusetts transfer Derrick Gordon should help, but he'll be much more of a veteran leader than a scoring sensation. Angel Delgado is an excellent rebounder, but he doesn't have much of a scoring gene. Whitehead will be the one in charge of putting points on the board, but he'll need to develop a Gibbs level of efficiency in order for that to be a promising endeavor.

3. Mississippi State: Malik Newman

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2014-15 Stats: N/A (incoming freshman)

Malik Newman is the only freshmen on our list, and that's largely because he is one of just two 5-star freshmen playing for a team that hasn't been to the NCAA tournament in the past six years—Perry Dozier (South Carolina) is the other.

Newman is going to be one of the highest-scoring freshmen in the country, but that isn't always a good thing for the team represented.

Eight freshmen averaged at least 15.5 points per game last season: D'Angelo Russell (Ohio State), Rashad Vaughn (UNLV), Jahlil Okafor (Duke), Eric Paschall (Fordham), Melo Trimble (Maryland), Jordan Howard (Central Arkansas), James Blackmon Jr. (Indiana) and DeSean Murray (Presbyterian). Four of those eight teams missed the NCAA tournament, and two of the four teams that went dancing did so as a double-digit seed.

The year before last, 13 freshmen averaged at least 15.5 points per game, but only four made the tournament—two of which (Jabari Parker and Andrew Wiggins) were foregone conclusions to score a million points for a title contender.

In other words, if you're banking on one freshman to completely turn things around for your program, you're probably asking too much.

Trimble was something of a first-year needle in a haystack, leading the Terrapins to the Big Dance for the first time in four years. Newman will be an incredible talent, but Vaughn was also pretty darn good for a UNLV team that couldn't even string together four straight wins at any point last season. Expect a ton of points for a team that hovers around .500.

2. Ole Miss: Stefan Moody

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2014-15 Stats: 16.6 ppg, 3.4 rpg, 2.4 apg

Six players averaged better than 4.0 points per game last season for Ole Miss. Four of those six players are no longer on the roster, including primary ball-handler Jarvis Summers and three-point assassin LaDarius "Snoop" White.

Stefan Moody was already the best player for Ole Miss, but now he's basically all that Andy Kennedy has left—and that's assuming he's even healthy.

Moody had surgery in mid-June to repair a stress fracture in his left tibia that will likely keep him off the court until at least September. Plenty of players have recovered from much more devastating injuries to return to action as good as new in one offseason, though, so we're not worried about his status.

The JUCO transfer ranked fourth in the SEC in scoring average last season and is the only returning player in the conference who averaged at least 15.0 points per game in 2014-15.

And he put up those numbers without even shooting very well. There were 19 SEC players who averaged at least 12.1 points per game, and at 38.8 percent, Moody was the only one who shot worse than 41.3 percent from the field. What's bizarre is that he led the conference in free-throw percentage, so he obviously has a good shooting stroke.

Will he right the ship and become a more efficient scorer? Will it even matter for a team that lost so many key players from a roster that just barely made it into the tournament field last season?

1. Providence: Kris Dunn

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2014-15 Stats: 15.6 ppg, 5.5 rpg, 7.5 apg

Kris Dunn might be the best player in the entire country.

He might also have the worst supporting cast.

With LaDontae Henton and Carson Desrosiers graduating and Tyler Harris and Paschal Chukwu transferring, it's basically Ben Bentil-or-bust when Dunn decides to take a break from doing all of the work.

ESPN Insider Jeff Goodman projects a Providence starting five of Dunn, Bentil, Jalen Lindsey, Junior Lomomba and Rodney Bullock.

Bentil, Lindsey and Lomomba combined to average 11.9 points, 7.6 rebounds and 1.2 assists last season. Bullock has yet to play a collegiate game but was a 3-star recruit in the class of 2013 before a suspension kept him from playing in 2013-14 and a torn ACL kept him from playing last year.

At least Kemba Walker had Alex Oriakhi and a freshman class of Jeremy Lamb, Shabazz Napier and Roscoe Smith when he "single-handedly" carried Connecticut to the 2011 national championship. Dunn just has a whole bunch of question marks at best and gaping holes at worst.

Last year, East Tennessee State's Jalen Riley led the nation in both percentage of possessions used (37.3) and percentage of shots taken (38.5). Dunn already ranked 39th in possessions used at 30.2 percent.

Would it really be a surprise if he became the first player in KenPom.com history to reach 39.0 percent? Providence won't even sniff the tournament field if he doesn't.

Stats courtesy of KenPom.com and Sports-Reference.com unless noted otherwise. Recruiting information courtesy of 247Sports. Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.