College Basketball Perfect Season Rare

It happens every year. A few college basketball teams make it into the new year still undefeated, and the chatter begins. Will this be the year that the first team since the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers posts a perfect season?

Such is life in a sport where the slate of games seems to grow longer each year. It's a fact that makes an already difficult task all but unreachable. When you play 30 games over three months, fatigue sets in, ankles twist, shots stop falling and the odds, on occasion, work against you.

Since college basketball began its year-ending NCAA Championship Tournament in 1939, only 20 teams have reached the end of the regular season undefeated. Of those, 11 lost in the postseason and two simply didn't play in the postseason.

That's not to say that some teams haven't come close. Eleven teams have lost their first game either in a conference tournament or in the NIT or NCAA tournaments. In 1990, the University of Nevada Las Vegas had just one loss and defeated Duke in a landslide to win the national championship. The Runnin' Rebels then went 30-0 during the 1991 regular season only to fall in the 1991 NCAA Tournament to Duke, the eventual national champions.

UNLV was not alone. Two other teams lost in the tournament after winning all of their regular season games. Plus, North Carolina State was barred from tournament play in 1973, and Kentucky finished 25-0 in 1953 but refused to play in the tournament.

More than two dozen teams lost just once during the regular season. Most recently, Memphis finished 33-2 after losing to Tennessee in the regular and to Kansas in the national championship game. In 2005, Illinois lost to Ohio State by a single point on a buzzer-beater during the regular season and lost to North Carolina in the NCAA championship game to finish 37-2. In 2004, St. Joseph's lost in their conference tournament to enter the NCAA Tournament at 27-1. Perhaps the most notable incidence occurred in 1966, when Texas Western, now known as the University of Texas at El Paso, faced Kentucky in the national championship game. Both teams entered the game with one loss. Texas Western, a team featured in the film Glory Road, won that game. The team's only loss was in a 74-72 game at Seattle immediately before the start of the NCAA Tournament.

As of this writing, Kentucky stands as the only team from the 2009-2010 season that still has a shot at a perfect season. The Wildcats won their first 17 games, but even that wasn't easily accomplished. On Nov. 16, the Wildcats defeated Miami of Ohio 72-70 on John Wall's buzzer-beating jump shot from 15 feet away. Nine days later, on Nov. 25, Kentucky needed overtime to move past Stanford in a 73-65 game. In that one, Wall hit a fade-away jumper to tie it 61-61 in regulation and a pair of free throws to tie it again with 2.4 seconds to play in regulation.

If the Wildcats finish the task, Wall might deserve his own party. But don't break out the streamers just yet. Kentucky defeated Auburn by only 5 points on Jan. 16, and the team had 13 conference games remaining before the March 11 start of the four-day Southeastern Conference Tournament, which precludes the NCAA Tournament.

Arguably, it is more difficult to complete a perfect season in college basketball than in college football or, for that matter, pro football. After all, it was only four years before Indiana State's incredible feat that the Miami Dolphins went 17-0 in 1972 to win the Super Bowl. Since then, six NFL teams have finished with just one loss. Three of them, the 1976 Oakland Raiders, the 1984 San Francisco 49ers and the 1985 Chicago Bears, won the Super Bowl. The most recent one-loss NFL team was the 2007 New England Patriots team squad that went 16-0 in the regular season but finished 18-1 after losing the Super Bowl on a last-second touchdown. As well, the Indianapolis Colts, still alive as of this writing in the 2010 playoffs, went 14-0 before losing two games with their starters largely out of the lineup.

Also worth noting is that four of the seven perfect seasons in college basketball belong to the UCLA Bruins, which won back-to-back NCAA championships with a pair of 30-0 perfect seasons in 1972 and 1973. Those were in the Bill Walton years, and some still consider Walton the greatest college basketball player in the sport's long history. The Bruins also won with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1967 and in 1964. The other perfect seasons belong to the 1956 San Francisco Dons and the 1957 North Carolina Tar Heels.

In college football, more than two dozen teams have finished with a perfect season. Twenty schools have posted a perfect season since 1980, and a few schools have done so twice in that span. In college football, the feat is so common that teams often win all of their games and still do not win national championships. For example, Boise State went 13-0 in 2006 and 14-0 in 2009, but the team did not make it into the Bowl Championship Series game that decides the national championship. Thus, Florida won it all in 2006 and Alabama won it all in 2009. Of note: Alabama also was undefeated.

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