John Calipari and the Kentucky Wildcats didn’t win the 2015 national championship, but Calipari won in Lexington in 2012. His groups of great Kentucky teams managed to bring home at least one title when they had a window of opportunity.
Several memorably great groups of teams never did bring home a single national crown.
On Championship Monday, we look back at the five best groups of teams to never win a title.
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5 – RAY MEYER AND DEPAUL – LATE 1970s/EARLY 1980s
We considered other programs for the fifth spot — Lou Carnesecca’s Saint John’s teams of the mid-1980s; Ralph Miller’s Oregon State teams of the late ’70s and early ’80s; Eddie Sutton’s Arkansas teams of the late ’70s; John Calipari’s Memphis teams from the mid-2000s — but DePaul gets the nod.
Ray Meyer, the iconic coach of the Blue Demons, owns the unique distinction of having made Final Fours 36 years apart, in 1943 and 1979. For perspective, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski has now made the Final Four 29 years apart, in 1986 and 2015 (with 10 other Final Fours stuffed in between). Meyer is one of the greatest coaches to never win a national championship. Moreover, his 1979 team came within an eyelash of knocking off unbeaten Indiana State and — in the process — denying college basketball the Magic-Bird title game that gave the sport such a forward push.
Mark Aguirre and Terry Cummings were high-level NBA players. They populated the DePaul roster for multiple seasons when the 1970s turned into the 1980s. DePaul lost very few games in these golden days for the program, but those losses regularly occurred in March.
4 – VIRGINIA IN RALPH SAMPSON’S TIME
The early-1980s Virginia Cavaliers had one of the greatest collegiate centers the sport has ever known. Ralph Sampson memorably defeated Patrick Ewing and Georgetown in the Capital Centre in December of 1982, stating the case that he was the supreme big man at a point in time when Hakeem Olajuwon also commanded the stage in college hoops. Virginia regularly produced No. 1 NCAA tournament seeds during these years, but the Cavaliers made only one Final Four and — in that year — lost to a North Carolina team that was frankly one year away from maxing out.
Virginia’s best days as a program — even better than the renaissance occurring now under Tony Bennett — still fell well short of what they could have attained. Naturally, if the shot clock had been in place, the Cavaliers would have done better than they did. This was just one of many shot-clock casualties in the college basketball world which preceded the 1985-’86 season, when the 45-second shot clock was finally introduced.
3 – KANSAS IN THE MID-TO-LATE 1990s
The Raef LaFrentz, Paul Pierce, Jacque Vaughn Jayhawks, coached by Roy Williams, were enormously talented. It remains staggering that Arizona’s bunch of wobbly freshmen — barely able to beat the College of Charleston in Memphis on the opening weekend of the 1997 NCAA Tournament — were able to turn around and take down the seasoned Jayhawks in the South Regional semifinals on that shocking Friday night in Birmingham. Kansas’s NCAA tournament losses in 1995 (at Kemper Arena) and in 1998 (as a No. 1 seed to Rhode Island in the round of 32) improbably kept the Jayhawks not only from winning a title, but from even making a Final Four with a succession of great teams. This is one reason many people (errantly) think Roy Williams — despite seven Final Fours — is a hugely overrated coach.
The problem with that line of thinking is that Kansas — in eras beyond Williams — has simply not performed in March the way its stature and overall pedigree would suggest it should. However, it does remain that of all the unfulfilled eras in Kansas basketball history, the mid-to-late 1990s would probably top the list.
2 – MICHIGAN IN THE FAB FIVE YEARS
The Wolverines almost surely would have won a title in 1994 had the whole Fab Five returned, but that’s part of the changing landscape in the sport. The 1980s were left behind, and players didn’t stay all four years anymore. Yes, the Fab Five didn’t gain the opportunity to chase a title over a four-year period the way Ralph Sampson got to do in Charlottesville or Patrick Ewing did at Georgetown. Nevertheless, the Chris Webber timeout late in the 1993 national championship game thwarted this team’s pursuit of an achievement worthy of its talents.
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1 – HOUSTON IN THE PHI SLAMA JAMMA YEARS
Guy Lewis (pictured above, throwing his checkerboard towel) fielded a great team at Houston in the late 1960s, with Elvin Hayes — an NBA champion with the 1978 Washington Bullets — as the centerpiece. However, Lewis’s best Houston teams were the Phi Slama Jamma dunkers of the early 1980s.
Everyone remembers Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, but people forget that Benny Anders might have been the most amazing raw athlete on that team. Larry Micheaux and Michael Young were also formidably skilled. Reid Gettys and Dave Rose (the current BYU head coach) were capable role players on those squads.
The 1983 Houston team and the 1985 Georgetown Hoyas are the two foremost examples of teams that almost surely would have won national titles with a shot clock. They were just a few years too early.
Houston also wishes the double-bonus after a 10th team foul in a half had been established in 1983. The purposeful fouling strategy used by North Carolina State’s Jim Valvano in the ’83 title game in Albuquerque is what led college basketball to limit the use of the one-and-one.
