What could a Johni Broome encore look like?

Few players who had seasons like Broome come back to college. The ones who did, though, show that he has a monster ceiling in 2024-25.

C Johni Broome (Grayson Belanger/Auburn Tigers)

A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with several friends of the newsletter who work at the Opelika-Auburn News. It was high school Player of the Year awards season for the newspaper, and decisions had to be made about who would take home the honors in what is a loaded local area for athletes.

At one point, it was brought up that the vast majority of these young players don’t drop off during the course of their high school careers. If they were dominant as underclassmen, they’re likely to be just as good — if not better — when they’re older.

While college sports are rapidly approaching semi-professional or full-blown professional status, the fact that the athletes themselves are quite young in the grand scheme of things is often forgotten.

In the NFL, NBA or MLB, it’s understood that an elite player isn’t going to be that way forever. There are plenty of factors that go into how a career develops, but the ultimate equalizer is age. Only a very select few have been able to play at top-tier levels deep into their careers. And that thought process is baked into contract negotiations and trade talks.

But, in college sports, players haven’t hit what most experts would consider their athletic prime. That’s estimated to be between 27 and 31 in the NBA. For the NFL, it depends on position — older for quarterbacks and linemen, younger for running backs and defensive backs — but players in their late 20s are believed to be around their peak. The same goes for players in MLB.

Even with COVID waivers recently allowing college athletes to play more years than ever before, they aren’t finished products just yet. And, while there are always exceptions to the rule, you often see elite players continue to play well or even improve when they stay in school. That’s what turns players into campus legends.

This brings us to the topic of Johni Broome.

When Broome announced he would return to Auburn for his final season of college basketball two months ago, I wrote about how rare it was for players of his caliber to come back for another season.

In basketball, you can jump to the NBA Draft rather quickly — provided you meet the minimum age requirement, which usually is one year out of high school. NBA teams covet youth in the draft process, because they know the younger the player, the longer it will take for them to reach their peak. They can control the bulk of their high-level basketball development that way.

That Broome return newsletter was written from a mostly Auburn viewpoint. Auburn hadn’t had an All-American come back for another season since Chris Porter and Doc Robinson in 1999. The Tigers have only had two repeat All-Americans in school history: John Mengelt and Chuck Person.

Just having the chance to be in those groups of players is extremely rare.

But Broome is an extremely rare player. In fact, when you look at several advanced statistics, you can make the argument that Broome is already one of the most impactful players to ever play basketball at Auburn.

And, when you compare him to other players who have made similar impacts in college basketball, the potential for his encore campaign looks quite high.