UConn Built Arguably the Most Dominant Men’s Champ in Modern History. Then They Did It Again.
Somehow, the 2024 Huskies found a way to improve on historic greatness.
In a clash of NCAA tournament titans, only one could rise above all others in the nation — and in the end, UConn did to Purdue what it has done to every other tourney opponent, gradually steamrolling the Boilermakers (despite 37 points and 10 rebounds from Zach Edey) to seal a 75-60 win and a national championship.
It’s been the same story for two years running now. Last April, I looked at whether the 2023 Huskies were the most dominant champ in recent men’s NCAA history. While other title-winners had better scoring margins (either adjusted for schedule strength or not), that UConn team could hang its hat on a remarkable fact: It was the first champ of the 64-team bracket era to win all of its games by 13 or more points.
Such a feat seemed tough to replicate, seeing as how (prior to 2023) it hadn’t happened for any champ since Indiana in 1981.1 And besides, only two teams in the modern era had been back-to-back champs at all: Duke in 1991/1992 and Florida in 2006/2007.
For their part, UConn was trying to do it with a roster that ranked 149th in Ken Pomeroy’s “continuity” stat, returning just 42.6% of minutes and 36.6% of points from the previous season. Gone were leading scorers Adama Sanogo — who exploded for 19.7 PPG and 9.8 RPG in the ‘23 tourney — and Jordan Hawkins. The Huskies were not preseason favorites to repeat, sitting 6th in the initial AP poll.
And yet, against all of that, coach Dan Hurley’s team was plainly better this year than they were last year. They won more games, had a superior scoring margin and — most remarkably — had an even more dominant NCAA tournament run.
This year’s Huskies boasted the best scoring margin (+23.3 PPG) of any champion since the bracket expanded to 64 teams in 1985, pulling ahead of 1996 Kentucky (+21.5) by nearly 2 full points per contest. (2023 UConn ranks fifth, at +20.0.) Furthermore, the closest win of the tournament for UConn this year was a 14-point victory over Alabama in the national semifinal, meaning the 2024 Huskies also broke the 2023 Huskies’ record for the most consistently dominant title run in modern NCAA history.
So we shouldn’t take what coach Hurley and his team have done here for granted. Based on UConn’s performance a year ago — largely driven by a different group of players — this year’s Huskies had an incredibly high standard to live up to. Not only did they meet that challenge, but they actually surpassed it, setting a brand-new standard for tourney dominance. One shudders to think what next year’s Huskies might do for another encore.
Filed under: College basketball
Today’s teams need to sustain their performance over at least one more game than those Hoosiers did, by the way.