With every team but SMU–which is on probation–already with a loss, college basketball will mark 40 years since the last unbeaten national champion.
March 29—a little more than two months from now—will mark 40 years since the Indiana Hoosiers, under legendary coach Bob Knight, completed a 32-0 season by beating the Michigan Wolverines 86-68 in the final of the NCAA tournament at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.
The fact the Hoosiers became just the seventh team to win the NCAA title without a loss wasn’t the headline coming out of Philly that March night in America’s bicentennial year.
Instead, the novelty of beating Big Ten Conference foe Michigan to capture the title was what garnered the most attention.
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It was the first time two schools from the same conference had reached the Final Four and it came in just the second year the NCAA began extending invitations to teams that had not captured a conference title.
On the way to their perfect 32-0 mark, the Hoosiers—led by Scott May, who captured the Naismith Award and the Associated Press Player of the Year honor—had perhaps their biggest scare against the Wolverines on Feb. 7, 1976, at Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Ind.
Indiana survived with a 72-67 win, but had to go to overtime to get it. The Hoosiers had also been forced to overtime by Kentucky in a mid-December neutral-site game at Louisville’s Freedom Hall and survived a 66-64 win at Ohio State to open Big Ten Play in early January.
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But the unbeaten season just wasn’t that big a deal at the time. The Hoosiers were the seventh team to win the tournament without a loss, but the previous six instances all occurred within 20 years of Indiana turning the trick.
Bill Russell’s San Francisco squad was the first unbeaten national champion, going 29-0 in 1956. North Carolina turned the trick the very next season by going 32-0.
John Wooden led four different UCLA squads to unbeaten seasons, including putting together the only back-to-back perfect seasons of the NCAA tournament era in 1972 and 1973. The Bruins had previously raised the trophy without a loss in 1964 and 1967.
Heck, Indiana wasn’t the only team to arrive in Philadelphia for the Final Four in 1976 sporting a perfect record. Rutgers had gone 28-0 during the regular season and posted wins over Princeton, Connecticut and VMI to win the tournament’s East Regional.
The Final Four was unkind to the Scarlet Knights, however, who were blasted 86-70 by Michigan in the semifinal before taking a 106-92 drubbing at the hands of UCLA in the third-place game, which was held annually at the Final Four through the 1981 tournament, to finish 31-2.
Playing Field Already Leveling
But a number of factors were already leveling things out in college basketball even as the Hoosiers cut down the nets at The Spectrum.
Freshman became eligible to play varsity basketball in 1972 after being prohibited from doing so by the NCAA since the 1950s—prior to that, many conferences imposed freshmen ineligibility rules.
And in 1973, the NCAA split into three divisions—the same that are in play today, Divisions I, II and III—and scholarship limits were put into place.
During the heyday of the Wooden era at UCLA, it was only half in jest that pundits would claim that the second-best team in the country was the Bruins’ second unit. But with limits on scholarships, talent began to inexorably trickle to other schools that might not have had a chance at premium players in the past.
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In a sport such as basketball, where one or two players can tilt the balance of power, it was a huge development.
It’s already a certainty there won’t be an undefeated national champion in 2016. Although SMU remains perfect at 17-0, the Mustangs are under an NCAA-imposed postseason ban this season and cannot play in the tournament.
Oklahoma went down to Kansas in triple-overtime, 109-106, on Jan. 5, ending any chance that a school could make a run to the Final Four in Houston this April without a loss.
Shockers, Wildcats Fall Short
That comes after two straight years in which a team entered the tournament unbeaten. In 2014, Wichita State was 34-0 after knocking off Indiana State to win the Missouri Valley Conference tournament.
But the Shockers, after cruising past Cal Poly in the second round, were eliminated by eighth-seeded Kentucky—a team laden with freshmen that would eventually reach the national final—in the third round and finished 35-1.
Those same Wildcats were in the position of the hunted last season. Armed with junior Willie Cauley-Stein, a cadre of sophomores from the previous year’s Final Four club and augmented by star freshmen Karl-Anthony Towns, Devin Booker and Trey Lyles, the Wildcats roared through their schedule for the most part, surviving a couple of January scares in Southeastern Conference play when Ole Miss pushed them to overtime at Rupp Arena and Texas A&M took them to two overtimes in College Station.
Kentucky’s 38th win, a two-point escape from Notre Dame in a regional final, would prove to be its last and the Wildcats fell to Wisconsin in a rematch of a national semifinal from 2014.
UNLV, Indiana State Can’t Get It Done; Alcorn State Never Even Had A Chance
Prior to the runs by Wichita State and Kentucky, there were only three teams that made it to the postseason unscathed after Indiana and Rutgers in 1976 and one of those, Alcorn State in 1978-79, didn’t get an invitation to the NCAA tournament.
Instead, Davey Whitney’s Braves—led by future NBA starter Larry Smith’s 17.6 points and 13.7 rebounds per game in just their second season at the Division I level—got to 28-0 before losing at Indiana 73-69 in the second round of the NIT.
Before Wichita State and Kentucky, the last team to get to the tournament with a zero in the loss column was the defending national champion UNLV Runnin’ Rebels in 1990-91.
The core of the title squad opted to return for a run at a perfect season. Larry Johnson earned Player of the Year honors, leading a star-studded cast that included former Olympian Stacey Augmon, point guard Greg Anthony, sharpshooter Anderson Hunt and the workmanlike effort of center George Ackles.
The Rebels didn’t so much run the table so much as they obliterated it. Their closest games in Big West Conference play were matching 86-74 wins against New Mexico State, a top-15 team in its own right that season.
Long Beach State tried to slow UNLV down in the quarterfinals of the conference tournament, but succeeded only in holding the Rebels to a season-low 49 points in a 49-29 loss.
Heading into the NCAA tournament, UNLV had played just one game that ended with a single-digit margin, a 112-105 win at Arkansas—a Final Four team the previous season—on Feb. 10.
The Rebels got to 34-0 while running through the West Regional, clinching a return trip to the Final Four with a 77-65 win over Seton Hall.
That earned UNLV a rematch with Duke, who had fallen 103-73 in the most lopsided national final in history a year earlier.
But after looking scared and overmatched in Denver in April 1990, the Blue Devils didn’t back down this time, upsetting UNLV 79-77 at Seattle’s Kingdome en route to their first NCAA title.
The only other team to reach the NCAAs without a loss since Indiana came from the same state, the Indiana State Sycamores led by Larry Bird in 1978-79.
Bird would have been a sophomore on that undefeated Hoosiers team of 1975-76, but dropped out of Indiana just a few weeks into his freshman year in September 1974.
Instead, Bird resurfaced in Terre Haute, near his hometown of French Lick, on the Indiana State campus in the fall of 1976 and as a senior swept the national player of the year awards while leading the Sycamores to a 29-0 regular-season record, capped by a 69-59 win over New Mexico State in the Missouri Valley Conference tournament final.
Indiana State rolled through the first two games of the Midwest Regional with a 17-points win over Virginia Tech and a 21-point drubbing of Oklahoma, but needed a last-second jumper from Bob Heaton—a swingman who averaged 7.3 points per game—to get past Arkansas to the Final Four.
At the Final Four at Salt Lake City’s Jon Huntsman Center, it was Heaton who scored the tying and go-ahead baskets down the stretch as the Sycamores came from behind to beat DePaul and reach the national final.
But Magic Johnson and Michigan State went on to capture the championship with a 75-64 win over Bird and Indiana State in a game that propelled college basketball into the national spotlight.
It became the highest-rated college basketball game in television history—a mark the game still holds—and helped propel March Madness into the enterprise it is today.
Al McGuire, who had led Marquette to a national championship in 1977 as a coach before retiring to a new career on television, told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 what the Bird-Magic matchup meant to college basketball.
“The college game was already on the launching pad,” McGuire said. “Then Bird and Magic came along and pushed the button.”
But the Sycamores finished 33-1 and Indiana remained the last unbeaten champion.
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Kentucky in 2014-15 was the exception to the rule—if you can establish a rule based on so few samples—in that the Wildcats emerged unbeaten from one of the game’s power conferences.
But even though John Calipari’s program has become synonymous with freshman star power coming to Lexington for a single season and departing for NBA cash, the 2014-15 Wildcats had an amazing core of veterans—the sophomores that included twin guards Aaron Harrison and Andrew Harrison and solid role players like center Dakari Johnson and Marcus Lee.
They were joined by Cauley-Stein and the freshmen. This team was so deep that it was able to withstand the loss of junior forward Alex Poythress to a season-ending ACL injury without missing a beat.
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But the other teams that reached the tournament without a loss came from mid-major conferences—UNLV from the Big West and Indiana State and Wichita State from the Missouri Valley.
UNLV was a major program in a mid-major conference.
Their 1991 Final Four appearance was the program’s fourth since 1977 and they were also playing with a chip on their shoulder—the delayed enforcement of NCAA sanctions that would take effect in 1991-92, a compromise that was reached by the NCAA and UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian to allow the Rebels a chance to defend their title.
Wichita State benefited greatly from the departure of the Valley’s other power program, Creighton, to the Big East Conference in 2013-14. They had a standout senior in Cleanthony Early teamed with young star guards Fred VanVleet and Ron Baker that had made a run to the Final Four the previous year before falling to Louisville in the semifinals.
Indiana State had the transcendent Bird paired with Carl Nicks, a point guard who played two full seasons and part of a third in the NBA after being drafted in the first round in 1980. But they also were playing for coach Bob King, who had to resign before the season started because of health reasons, giving the Sycamores a rallying point much like that of UNLV in 1990-91.
Could another undefeated season happen? Sure.
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