

In 2017, the Wall Street Journal covered the popularity of the name in the sport and then in May 2021, the ESPN Daily podcast had an entire episode dedicated to the mystery of whether Rose was truly the first Jalen. I ran the numbers for every current DI men's basketball player - all 5,637 of them, including players who are injured or who are redshirting this season - and found that the "Jalen" generation has officially taken over.Īs the story goes, former Michigan star Jalen Rose was believed by many to be the first person ever to be named Jalen. While Michael is annually one of the most popular names among boys born in the U.S., we speculated that there could have also been a correlation between arguably the best player to ever play the sport - former national champion at North Carolina and Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordan - and the rise of so many college players who are named either Michael or Jordan, a little over 20 years after the prime of Jordan's career. In sequential order, the two most popular first names were as follows: Jordan, Michael. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.At the start of the decade, analyzed the name of every single DI men's college basketball player and found that the most common names in the sport sounded a lot like the 1990s. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.


