College basketball's best free throw shooting teams this century

There isn’t much of a better equalizer in measuring college basketball teams than the free throw. That one shot is the exact same for every single team in the sport. Yet some teams excel from the charity stripe while others make the “free” part look ironic.

So we decided to rank teams by their free-throw shooting performance this century.

And the winner was Villanova.

RELATED: The best 3-point shooting college basketball teams this century

How did we get there? 

Looking solely at free throw percentage or free throws made per game would be insufficient. How do you decide whether a team that went 5-for-5 is better than a team that went 8-for-10? Instead, we created a quick and dirty free throw index — a measurement of how teams perform compared to the field in both categories. (If you want to see the exact formula we used and a more in-depth explanation of it, scroll to the bottom of this article.)

In the 18 years we looked at, Villanova had the highest free-throw percentage (74.41 percent), and the 13th-most made free throws per game (16.59). No other team in Division I can beat that.

The full rankings are below, but first, a few takeaways from the data:

• Not counting the 2018-19 season, there have been 3,948,821 free throws shot by Division I teams this century. Of those, 2,738,488 were made.
• Since 2001, the average Division I team shoots 20.7 free throws per game and makes 14.3. But those numbers are actually trending down. In 2001, teams shot an average of 22.4 and made 15.4. In 2018, they’re shooting 19.6 and making 14.
• As a result, a slightly non-surprising trend follows: Free throw percentage has increased nearly every year. Last season saw the highest mark this century, with teams making 71.3 percent of their free throws. 
• The best free-throw shooting performance this century came from Wisconsin in 2011. That year, the Badgers were 436-for-533 from the line, good for 81.8 percent. That Wisconsin team went 25-9 on the season, earning a 4-seed in the NCAA tournament, where they lost in the Sweet 16 to national championship runner-up Butler.
• Besides Wisconsin, only six teams have shot at least 80 percent from the line on a season this century:

• The worst showing this century came from Prairie View in 2012. The Panthers were 340-for-629 — 54.1 percent. They went 14-18 on the season.
• No one has shot more free throws in a season than Kentucky did in 2014. The Wildcats went to the line 1,146 times that year — almost 500 times more than the average of 653. Yet they only made 68.2 percent of their shots. That’s 365 points left on the court. To be fair, Kentucky played 40 games that season — way higher than the average of 32 since 2001. If you wanted the team that went to the free throw line the most often, that’d be Nevada in 2002. The Wolfpack shot 31.7 free throws per game that year — the most this century.

Here are the full rankings (includes all teams that were part of Division I between 2001 and 2018):

Here’s the formula we used for that free-throw index:

There are three steps to it:

1. On the top left of the formula: Compare a team's free throws made per game to the range of free throws made per game among all schools.

2. On the top right of the formula: Compare a team's free throw percentage to the range of free throw percentages among all schools.

3. Combine those two numbers and take the average, giving us the free throw index. Generally speaking, a free throw index of 1 would be a team that is the best in both categories, while one of zero would be a team that is the worst in each category.