Was UConn The Most Dominant Men's Champ In Modern History?

By one measure, the Huskies could actually make a case.

Raise your hand if, before the men’s NCAA Tournament, you picked Connecticut to be the team raising the trophy at Monday night’s title game. (If more than 2 percent of you are claiming this, we have some fibbers in our midst!) No, fourth-seeded UConn was not the easiest champ to see coming, even if metrics like Ken Pomeroy’s ratings gave them a far better shot than we’d expect from their positioning along the selection committee’s S-curve.

But once they rolled out the basketballs and started playing NCAA tourney games this March, it’s hard to think of a performance more dominant than the one the Huskies put on. Their seldom-in-doubt 76-59 victory over San Diego State in the title game was merely the exclamation point on a tournament run that has a real case to be the greatest in modern history.

By now, you’ve probably seen the stat about UConn’s +20.0 points per game margin being the fourth-best for any champ since the 64-team bracket era began in 1985, trailing only Kentucky in 1996 (+21.5), Villanova in 2016 (+20.7) and North Carolina in 2009 (+20.2). (The 2023 Huskies also sixth if we include all historical champs, like UCLA and its +21.3 margin in 1968.) That puts UConn in very good company, though it doesn’t quite make them the best in tournament history.

However, that’s just based on the teams’ average dominance across the entire tourney. Consider that both Kentucky and Villanova faced some comparatively slim margins along their paths to the top: After blowing the doors off the Midwest region by an average of 28.3 points per game, both of UK’s Final Four opponents kept their scores within single-digits against the Wildcats, including a “mere” 9-point title-game edge over a Syracuse team they were favored to beat by 14. Meanwhile, ‘Nova beat Kansas by just 5 to advance to the Final Four, and required arguably the greatest buzzer-beater in college basketball history to win the title game by 3 over UNC.

By contrast, none of UConn’s opponents could keep the final margin closer than 13 points against the Huskies this year. (Even UNC in 2009 saw one of their wins decided by 12 points.) Only three men’s NCAA Tournament champs in history enjoyed a run with as wide a margin in their closest result — Ohio State in 1960 (+17), UCLA in 1967 (+15) and Indiana in 1981 (+13) — as UConn in 2023, and all of those tournaments were staged before the 64-team field forced teams to face more opponents along the road to the title.

That’s not to say UConn’s case for historic dominance is totally airtight. While they were never really challenged, they also never faced an opponent seeded better than No. 3 — Gonzaga, who (in all fairness) the Huskies demolished by 28 points in the biggest Elite 8 blowout since 1992 — and beat the same seed number twice in the Final Four (No. 5) that they had to play in the second round of the tourney.

But we can’t chalk up Connecticut’s unstoppable run to simply playing a weak schedule. (Where were all those supposedly stronger teams hiding, anyway?) At this level, it’s hard to beat every team you play by at least a baker’s dozen, regardless of what seeds they were ranked at. The truth is that nobody from this year’s crop of contenders really compared to the Huskies, and the result was one of the most overwhelming title runs this sport has ever seen.