Where Does This UConn Team Rank Among the Most Dominant of All Time?
Spoiler alert - not as high as you might think.
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past five months, you’ve probably heard that this UConn Huskies basketball team is kind of good. They enter tonight’s National Championship game having won their past 11 tournament games by double-digits, an unprecedented feat. They cruised through the regular season and Big East tournament, compiling a 31-3 record and losing only in regular season matchups at Kansas (where road teams go to die), at pesky Seton Hall, and at top 15-Creighton. A win tonight would make them the first team to win back-to-back championships since 2006-2007 Florida, and they would join Duke (‘91-’92), UCLA (‘67-’73, ‘64-’65), Cincinnati (‘51-’52), San Francisco (‘55-’56), Kentucky (‘48-’49), and Oklahoma A&M (‘45-’46), as the only other programs to win consecutive National Championships. As you can see, repeat championships are not common, and they have become increasingly rare in recent decades. With the transfer portal and NIL giving players more opportunities and freedom, early exits to the NBA draft being more appealing, an increase in parity across the sport, and expansions to the tournament field, this sort of continued tournament dominance is extraordinarily difficult nowadays. Many have called this 2024 UConn team one of the most dominant of all time. The eye-test makes this tough to argue, but what do the numbers say?
I looked back at all teams/seasons dating back to the 1966-67 season, when UCLA was beginning its era of domination and Jim Boeheim had just graduated from the Syracuse program he would later coach at for nearly 50 years. Using winning percentage, margin of victory, strength of schedule, and SRS (simple rating system) from College Basketball Reference, I developed a dominance score for each team. This was calculated by adding together standardized values of each of these stats. Each team’s statistics were standardized within their respective season to reflect their degree of superiority (or lack thereof) relative to their competition to reflect their dominance in that current season. What this gives us is an indication of how much better these teams were than the average team in that season.
It’s no surprise that many of the UCLA teams of the late ‘60’s and ‘70’s were among the most dominant. That 1996 Kentucky team was incredible, and the 2015 Kentucky team was STACKED with 9 (!!) future NBA players. This year’s UConn Huskies, however, may be the victim of some recency bias. Based on Dominance Score, they rank just 30th all time, and even behind recent stellar squads such as 2015 Duke, 2012 Kentucky, 2018 Villanova, and 2019 Gonzaga. Of these 35 teams, less than half (just 14) actually won the National Championship, a testament to the difficulty of a 6-round single elimination tournament against quality opponents.
Just for fun, these are the worst teams over that time span.
So can UConn finish their mission and rise on the list of most dominant teams? We will find out tonight. For what its worth, here is what my model says:
Line: UConn -1.7, Win Probability: UConn - 50.9%
Enjoy the game tonight, folks!