Is UConn-Purdue the Best NCAA Men’s Final Ever? (*On Paper)
Is UConn-Purdue the Best NCAA Men’s Final Ever? (*On Paper)
It's hard to find an NCAA championship game between a better pair of teams.
Note: Just before we get started, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who reached out with condolences after my cat, Bertie, passed away last week. It meant so much to hear from each of you… I’m hoping it will be therapeutic to return to writing again this week.
For a brief time on Saturday, it looked like maybe there was a chance at least one of the two upstarts in the men’s Final Four — NC State or Alabama — would stop the UConn-Purdue collision course this entire NCAA tournament has seemingly been building toward. But the pair of 9½-point favorites rolled on, with the Huskies and Boilermakers winning by a combined margin of 17 in their second halves to set up Monday night’s championship between two squads that are as dominant as any in modern tourney history.
Heading into the Final Four, I noted that Connecticut tore through the regional phase of the tournament with the fourth-best adjusted margin of victory of any semifinalist since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985 — and Purdue, at No. 18, wasn’t far off either. Now, UConn sits second in that metric among finalists over that span, trailing only Villanova from 2016 — those Wildcats beat Buddy Hield and Oklahoma by 44 (!) to leapfrog everybody in the pre-championship ranking — while Purdue remains 18th:
Just looking at the combined SRS ratings of UConn (+26.3) and Purdue (+25.3) across the entire season, only one other final since ‘85 — the 2001 championship between Duke (+32.2) and Arizona (+26.9) — featured a pair of teams better than both the Huskies and Boilermakers. (That was a notably star-studded final, too, with three All-America selections, three more honorable mentions and nine future NBA players across both the Blue Devils and Wildcats’ rosters.)
The 2001 final also stands out as the only one with multiple entries ahead of 2024 on the list above. And that mainly owed to the schedule adjustments: not even that final (nor any other since 1985) featured a pair of teams who’d won their previous five games by an average of at least 19.5 points per game, the way both UConn (+25.0) and Purdue (+19.6) have.
Doing this exercise for pre-1985 tourneys is a bit apples-to-oranges because more rounds means more weak opponents for modern teams to run up big margins against in the early going. But to find another situation where both finalists even won by 19+ PPG in the lead-up to the title game, we need to go back to the 1960 final between Ohio State (+19.3) and California (+19.0).
So not only are UConn and Purdue the two best teams in the country this year, but — no matter how you slice it — this is one of the best men’s title-game matchups (on paper) in history. We’ll just have to see whether that translates to the type of tight, back-and-forth game that this tournament has often been lacking over the past few weeks.
Filed under: College basketball