The first NCAA men’s basketball tournament was organized by the National Association of Basketball Coaches in 1939. The championship game – won by Oregon – was attended by 5,000 spectators and the tournament ran a deficit of $2,531.
Times change. March Madness is now a billion-dollar dream machine that thrives on images of greatness. Stories of past dynasties and teams for the ages are reverentially told with the promise of more to come. But in reality, men’s college basketball dynasties are a thing of the past. And we may not see a truly great men’s college basketball team again.
The standard for greatness in college basketball was set by the UCLA Bruins who won 10 championships in 12 years (1964 through 1975) under coach John Wooden. Three of these championships came with Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) at center and three more with Bill Walton in the pivot. Alcindor’s Bruins won 47 consecutive games. Walton’s won 88 in a row. During their 88-game winning streak, UCLA outscored their opponents by an average of 23.4 points per game.
Alcindor’s Bruins also took part in what many historians believe was the most important college basketball game ever played. On 20 January 1968, UCLA faced off against the Houston Cougars in The Astrodome in what was advertised as “The Game of the Century”. It was the first college basketball game ever broadcast nationwide in primetime. Both teams entered the contest undefeated. Houston (led by Elvin Hayes) won a 71-69 thriller. Each team then won out for the remainder of the regular season before meeting again in the NCAA semi-finals. This time, it was no contest. UCLA exacted revenge with a 101-69 blowout.
Six teams in addition to UCLA have won back-to-back championships. San Francisco (led by Bill Russell and KC Jones) were the most celebrated of the six, winning 60 games in a row en route to national titles in 1955 and 1956. Other back-to-back winners include Oklahoma A&M (1945 and 1946), Kentucky (1948-1949), Cincinnati (1961-1962), Duke (1991-1992), and Florida (2006-2007).
Ohio State won the NCAA championship in 1960 but lost in the finals to Cincinnati in each of the following two seasons. Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek and Mel Nowell played on all three of those Ohio State teams, as did a scrappy guard named Bobby Knight (yes, that Bobby Knight).
UNLV (led by Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon and Greg Anthony) won the national title in 1990 while in the midst of a 45-game winning streak. But they lost to Duke in the championship game the following year.
Two teams widely considered “great” came up short in championship games. In 1983, Houston (led by Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler) lost to North Carolina State on a buzzer-beating dunk by Lorenzo Charles off a missed 30-foot jump shot by Dereck Whittenburg. Two years later, Georgetown featured five players (led by Patrick Ewing) who would be selected in the first or second round of the next two NBA drafts. But the Hoyas were upset in the tournament finale by a 10-loss Villanova team who shot 78.6% from the floor and missed only one field goal attempt in the second half.
All told, seven undefeated teams have won the NCAA men’s basketball championship: San Francisco (1956), North Carolina (1957), UCLA (1964, 1967, 1972, 1973) and Indiana (1976). Since the Hoosier’s title run 48 years ago, six teams have entered the tournament undefeated and failed to win it all.
Indeed, in recent years, the tournament has become a crapshoot. In 2023, not one of the 10 top-ranked teams made the Final Four. The last time a team entered March Madness ranked No 1 in the polls and won the championship was 2012. Further to that point, the No 1 team in the country has won the NCAA men’s tournament only twice in the past 21 years.
Now we come to the reasons why.
First and foremost, men’s college basketball teams no longer have the talent necessary to be great. Here, a bit of history is in order.
There was a time when the NBA wouldn’t allow players to turn pro until four years after their class had graduated from high school. This was in part because, in its early years, the NBA relied on colleges to develop stars with drawing power. And young athletes weren’t deemed physically mature enough to play pro ball. College freshman weren’t even allowed to play varsity basketball until the 1972-1973 season.
In 1969, the Denver Rockets of the fledgling American Basketball Association signed a college sophomore named Spencer Haywood. Two years later, the United States Supreme Court ruled in litigation brought by Haywood that the NBA had to allow high school graduates to enter the draft without the requisite four-year waiting period provided the graduate could show “economic hardship.”
That opened the door for Moses Malone (1974) followed by Darryl Dawkins and Bill Willoughby (1975) to go directly from high school to the pros. But 14 more years passed before another player (Shawn Kemp) bypassed college to play in the pros.
Then the dam broke.
In 1995, Kevin Garnett was chosen by the Minnesota Timberwolves with the No 5 pick in the NBA draft. In 1996, Kobe Bryant (the No 13 pick) and Jermaine O’Neal (No 17) followed in Garnett’s footsteps. The exodus continued thereafter with a total of 41 players being drafted directly out of high school (most notably, LeBron James who was selected by the Cleveland Cavaliers with the No 1 pick in the 2003 draft).
In July 2005, the NBA and NBA Players Association amended their collective bargaining agreement to preclude players from being drafted directly out of high school. Now, to enter the draft, a player must be at least 19 years old and have been out of high school for at least one year. But some of today’s best high school graduates now choose to play in a developmental league for a year rather than attend college. And those who do attend college often do so on a “one-and-done” basis.
College freshmen are at an age when they can be expected to become physically stronger, improve their skills, and augment their understanding of the game with each year on campus. But many college coaches, desperate to compete for talent, now tell recruits, “Come here for a year. We’ll develop your skills as quickly as we can and showcase you for the pros.”
“One and done” deprives a college team of what would otherwise have been the most productive three years of a player’s college career. It gives coaches less time to mold players into a cohesive unit. And many of today’s college players are less willing to bend to a coach’s philosophy than in the past. Not only can the player turn pro; the transfer portal (which was introduced at the start of the 2018-2019 season) means that a player can pack up and go to another school if he’s unhappy with his coach’s directives.
Would UCLA have fashioned a dynasty if Alcindor and Walton had turned pro after one year? What about Walt Hazzard, Keith Erickson, and Gail Goodrich (who carried the first two UCLA championship teams) and other UCLA greats like Lucius Allen, Henry Bibby, Curtis Rowe, Sidney Wicks, Dave Meyers, Richard Washington, Jamaal Wilkes, and Marques Johnson, all of whom played before “one-and-done,” stayed the course for a full college career, and contributed to the Bruins’ dynasty
That’s a rhetorical question.
Consider Kentucky under coach John Calipari, who was an early proponent of recruiting on a “one-and-done” basis. Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist were freshmen at Kentucky during the 2011-2012 season and turned pro after one year. Julius Randle (2013-2014) and Karl-Anthony Towns (2014-2015) followed suit. All four were All-Americans as freshmen. Imagine if, instead of going one-and-done, they’d stayed in college and played together with a line-up that included Willie Cauley-Stein (who entered Kentucky in 2012 and stayed for three seasons).
Foreign-born stars like Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, and Victor Wembanyama might have attended college in the United States had they been young years ago. Imagine the impact that they would have had if each of them had played four years of college basketball.
And there’s another statistic regarding the talent drain in men’s college basketball that bears notice. Only one of the top five picks in the 2023 NBA draft went to college. That was Brandon Miller who turned pro after one year at Alabama.
The recent addition of NIL money (allowing a college athlete to benefit financially from the sale of his name, image, and likeness for commercial purposes) offers some compensation to college stars who were previously exploited as unpaid labor and modest incentive for them to remain on campus. But that NIL money is minimal compared to what an elite college player can earn on and off the court as a pro.
Meanwhile, consider the fact that the best-known college basketball player in the United States right now is a woman – Iowa star Caitlin Clark. And it is in the women’s game where the great NCAA teams, such as undefeated South Carolina, reside now because good players can make more in NIL money at college than they can from heading for the WNBA, where the maximum salary is $235,000 (the rookie minimum in the NBA is $1.1m).
No men’s college basketball team came close to greatness during the current season. By the second week of January, there were no remaining undefeated teams. On two occasions (including this past weekend), four of the five top-ranked teams lost in a single 48-hour period. Only one team – Purdue – was ranked in the top five of the Associated Press poll during the entire season. And Purdue lost to Northwestern, Nebraska, Ohio State, and Wisconsin (who have a combined 47 losses this year).
So here we are with March Madness about to begin. The four No 1 regional seeds (Connecticut, Houston, Purdue, and North Carolina) have 18 losses between them. And three of the four No 1 seeds lost the most recent game they played.
For the record; I think the last great college basketball team was Duke’s 1991-1992 NCAA championship squad led by Grant Hill and Christian Laettner.
Will there ever be another great men’s college basketball team?
In the foreseeable future, probably not.
Thomas Hauser’s most recent book – a memoir titled My Mother and Me – will be published this month by Admission Press. In 2019, he was selected for boxing’s highest honor - induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
