The program a player represented is the base, and scoring is the other pillar: four players who each passed the same career points threshold as students. Because so many modern players leave early, a big college scoring total is itself a signal about what kind of career a player had.
Four players who each played a single college season before moving on. It is a career shape rather than a statistic, it belongs almost entirely to the recent decades of the sport, and it is one of the few groups where knowing what a player did NOT do is the clue.
The national player-of-the-year honours, by the body that voted them. One award per season means a group of four winners is usually four different years, and often four different decades.
Yes — surnames that are also something else entirely, shared with presidents or with common nouns. They cut clean across programs and eras, which is why they hide behind three perfectly sensible basketball groups until those are gone.
No. A college career is the whole subject here, so a player remembered for what he did at school can anchor a group without having had a long professional career at all.
