Man of us have been thinking that Patrick Patterson is playing well enough for serious consideration as SEC Freshman of the Year. I thought I would take a look at the stats of the top 5 freshmen in six different offensive categories, and see what it tells us (Thanks to StatSheet.com for the data).
At this point, it looks like a very close race to me. Nick Calathes, Patrick Patterson, A.J. Ogilvy and even Jai Lucas are all right there. But how do we figure out who is leading? Well, just for fun, I created the next table, which takes the ranking of each player in each selected category and just takes an average. Lower is better, and the position isn't in the table above if it wasn't among the top five. Here we go:
| Player | PPG | TS% | PP40 | RPG | APG | OR | Avg |
| Patterson | 9 | 21 | 23 | 8 | 32 | 3 | 16.00 |
| Calathes | 6 | 24 | 10 | 20 | 1 | 13 | 12.33 |
| Lucas | 38 | 3 | 49 | 66 | 17 | 4 | 29.50 |
| Ogilvy | 18 | 28 | 6 | 28 | 54 | 59 | 32.17 |
So it looks to me at this point that Nick Calathes is in the lead by my admittedly arbitrary measurement, with Patrick Patterson breathing down his neck. Jai Lucas is a rather surprising third, and A.J. Ogilvy bringing up the rear. I doubt if this is very meaningful as a true measure of standing, but it should serve as a good conversation starter.
Comments below if you have them.