“It’s just hard to win in general,” said former Florida coach Billy Donovan, now the head coach of the NBA's Chicago Bulls. “I’ve always said this: If you played the NCAA Tournament over after it finished, you’d have a different national champion every year, for the most part."
Heading into this year's NCAA Tournament, one team has a chance at the first three-peat in more than 50 years: UConn.
Dan Hurley led the Huskies to their fifth national championship in 2023, retooled the roster and added No. 6 last season, becoming the first team since Donovan's Gators to go back to back.
The ride to a third straight title has been a bumpy one.
The Huskies opened the season No. 3 in the preseason AP Top 25, but went 0 for 3 at the Maui Invitational and have spent most of the season fighting injuries and inconsistencies, entering the bracket 23-10.
UConn may not be as dominant now as it was when winning NCAA Tournament games by an average of 20 points per game the past two seasons, but this is March and the Huskies have shown they can tame the madness.
"Early in the year, it (three-peating) was something that was talked about around here," said Hurley, whose team opens the NCAA Tournament against Oklahoma in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday. "With the way that we played to this point, it is not something we are talking about (now)."
Should the Huskies pull it off, they'll join rare company.
John Wooden's UCLA teams of the 1960s and '70s set the standard for college basketball excellence, winning at a rate not seen before or since.
The Bruins won consecutive titles in 1964-65 and set a mark that may never be broken, seven straight from 1967-73. UCLA had a massive advantage with those teams, first with Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), then with Bill Walton, two of the greatest centers in basketball history.
“We set records that still stand to this day,” Walton said in a 2024 interview with The Associated Press, a few months before he died in May. “He did not talk about winning and losing. He talked about effort and purpose, and we tried with everything we had to get to acknowledge that we were doing something right.”
Florida and Duke in 1991-92 were the only teams to have a chance at joining UCLA in winning at least three straight titles. Since Florida's back to back, no reigning champion had even made it to the title game the next season until UConn.
Part of it is continuity. College players have limited eligibility, so it's rare for coaches to have the same rosters coming back. Injuries also can crush a team's chances, or a bad matchup in the lose-and-go-home NCAA Tournament can quickly halt a second deep March run.
More potholes have been added over the past two decades.
The one-and-done rule, implemented in 2005, allowed players to leave for the NBA after a single college season, often stripping teams of their best players.
The transfer portal and NIL deals have made it even more difficult. The ability to transfer from a school without having to sit out a year has created a revolving door of rosters, forcing coaches to overhaul their teams nearly every year. NIL opportunities have turned into karats to lure players out of high school or from other programs.
“The hardest part to me in the college piece would be college was a place where you could kind of build a program, because you had players that basically stayed for a period of time, and I think people could identify with those teams,” Donovan said. “But now between the NIL and the transfer portal, you basically have a new team almost every year, and it’s almost like free agency.”
Hurley has been one of the best at navigating this new world of college basketball. Keeping it going has proven to be difficult this season, but UConn still has a chance at the three-peat with the NCAA Tournament starting this week.
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AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness. Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Credit: AP