NCAA Tournament: Seth Davis' 5 Greatest NCAA Champions of All Time

Seth Davis, who provides some of the best college hoops analysis in the business for CBS Sports and Sports Illustrated, knows a thing or two about outstanding basketball teams. That makes it a very encouraging sign for Kentucky when Davis says that, with a national championship this season, the Wildcats would have a chance to rank among the all-time greats.

In addition to his TV duties at this weekend’s Final Four, Davis is busy making sandwiches: he hopes to “spread the word” about healthy eating by kicking off a Subway promotion (an April buy-one, get-one-free deal on subs purchased before 9 a.m.). Fortunately, he was able to step away from the counter long enough to provide his take on this year’s tournament as well as some of the greatest moments in March Madness history.

Davis points out that this year’s Kentucky squad carries the pressure not only of being the overriding tournament favorite, but of being a symbol of the “culture of the one-and-done, which has come under scrutiny” in recent seasons. A win in Monday’s title game would, Davis argues, put Kentucky in the discussion as “one of the best, or one of the better all-time teams.”

Herein, Davis’ picks for the group the Wildcats are hoping to join on Monday night: the greatest champions in NCAA basketball history.

5. 1996 Kentucky Wildcats

Davis’ pick for the best championship team he’s seen in his own career, the 1996 Wildcats were “the culmination of Rick Pitino.”

Davis evokes the team’s frenetic style in his breathless description of Pitino’s philosophy: “up-tempo, stretch the defense, full-court pressure, three-point-line, shoot when you’re open.”

High-scoring stars such as Antoine Walker and Tony Delk teamed with standout defenders including Anthony Epps to produce an ideal personnel complement to run Pitino’s system.

Fittingly, the closest any team came to taking down that 36-2 UK squad in the postseason was a seven-point Final Four win over Marcus Camby’s UMass team—a team coached by Pitino’s Saturday-night opponent, John Calipari.

4. 1992 Duke Blue Devils

A Duke alum himself, Davis notes that he was in the same graduating class as Christian Laettner, the senior hero of the 1992 champs.

With help from Laettner’s endlessly-replayed buzzer-beater in the Elite Eight, the Blue Devils capped a 36-2 season by annihilating Michigan’s Fab Five in the title game, 71-51.

The title was Duke’s second in a row with largely the same personnel (including the peerless Bobby Hurley at point guard), but as Davis notes, it was only in that 1991-92 season that Duke came into its own as “one of the greatest teams of all time.”

The year before, they’d been overshadowed by defending champion UNLV, whom they beat in the national semifinals in a game that, despite Duke’s wealth of talent, was seen at the time as “one of the greatest upsets in the history of the NCAA tournament.”

3. 1990 UNLV Rebels

Few No. 1 seeds in history have had to face as much talent on the way to an NCAA title as the 1990 UNLV squad, which finished 35-5 for the year.

Larry Johnson and company beat Bo Kimble’s Loyola Marymount team in the Elite Eight, Kenny Anderson’s Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in the national semis, and Christian Laettner’s Duke squad by a title-game record 30 points.

Davis, who was in the stands the next season when basically the same Rebels squad lost a Final Four rematch to Duke, says that “UNLV just had a swagger about them.”

He paid them about as high a compliment as an opposing fan can give, pointing out that “if you didn’t have to play against them, that was a fun team.”

2. 1976 Indiana Hoosiers

Everything seemed to come together for Bob Knight’s first national champions. Led by Naismith Award winner Scott May (who’d missed the previous year’s tourney with a broken arm), the Hoosiers completed the undefeated season that had escaped them in 1975.

Davis believes that those 32-0 Hoosiers will be the last undefeated national champions college hoops will ever see.

“In 1976, going undefeated was not such a huge deal,” he observes—it had, after all, been done six other times in the preceding two decades.

Today, though, Davis sees the combination of heightened media pressure, the increased length of the season—the 2012 champion will have had to play a minimum of 39 games—and the prevalence of younger teams (as players turn pro early) as being too big of an obstacle to overcome. 

1. 1967 UCLA Bruins

When CBS asked Davis to vote in a survey to pick the greatest NCAA champ in history, he waded through “a ton of research” before settling on his selection: the undefeated 1967 UCLA squad.

Those Bruins won every NCAA tournament game by at least 15 points to cap a 30-0 campaign.

While Mike Warren and Lucius Allen played key roles on the squad, Davis had good reason to refer to the John Wooden-coached group as “Lew Alcindor’s first championship team.”

The 7’2” future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was making his varsity debut as a sophomore—freshmen weren’t eligible at the time—and averaged 29 points and 15.5 rebounds a game in leading the Bruins to a spotless record.