John Gasaway, ESPN Insider 5y

How Duke's freshmen compare to the Fab Five

Men's College Basketball, Duke Blue Devils, Michigan Wolverines

With Zion Williamson already the most talked about player in the nation and Duke rocketing to the top of the AP poll in Week 2, the comparisons have already begun. The Blue Devils are being held up alongside the gold standard for elite recruiting classes: Michigan's "Fab Five" freshmen of 1991-92.

In the fall of 1991, Wolverine head coach Steve Fisher welcomed an incoming class consisting of Juwan Howard, Chris Webber, Jimmy King, Jalen Rose and Ray Jackson. Michigan promptly reached both the 1992 and 1993 national title games, losing first to Duke and then to North Carolina.

So who's better: Duke now or Michigan then? Webber has certainly made his choice known. "I don't know who's on that [Duke] team, and I'm not dogging them," he was quoted as saying last week. "What I'm saying is that until you do it, I don't really care about all the other stuff."

For his part, Rose agrees. Last week he told Stephen A. Smith that Williamson wouldn't even be able to crack the starting lineup for the Fab Five.

Then again, Vegas begs to differ, sort of. Leaving aside how serious the "odds" can really be on any purely hypothetical matchup, this week Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook made Duke a 7.5-point "favorite" over Webber, Rose and company's freshman edition.

Speaking of hypothetical, no, we can't really compare a 3-0 team head-to-head with a group that went to back-to-back Final Fours more than a quarter of a century ago. But let's at least look at the information we have and consider what it might take to tip this question one way or the other.

We can start with where both sets of players were ranked coming out of high school.

^ Back to Top ^