Blowouts and National Championships

[SCMatt33]

At this point, everyone is well aware of UNC's 33 point shellacking at the hands of unranked Florida State. After the game, Mike DeCourcy of The Sporting News wrote an article questioning whether or not UNC could ultimately recover to be a title contender after such a bad loss. That got me thinking as to what the worst losses for eventual national champions were. I immediate thought of us in 2010 with Georgetown, but forgot that a late run brought the final margin down to only 12. In fact, by margin, the NC State loss was the worst one that year, losing by 14. Using statsheet.com for game info, and collegepollarchive.com for rankings, I looked up the worst losses by eventual national champions since 1981 (as far back as Stat Sheet had info). I found 10 games in which a champion got blown out by 17 points or more. Losses by less than that margin seemed pretty common, especially one you got under 15.

Year	Team	Margin	Opponent	Opp Rank
1993	UNC	26	Wake	NR
1985	Villanova	23	Pittsburgh	NR*
1991	Duke	22	UNC	7
2002	Maryland	21	Duke	1
1988	Kansas	19	Iowa	11
1983	NC State	18	UNC	3
1983	NC State	18	Wake	NR*
2011	UConn	17	St. John's	NR
1999	UConn	17	Syracuse	16
1991	Duke	17	Virginia	19

I found several interesting facts about this list. For UNC to win the title, they would have to break their own record by 7 points. The next week after their current record setting game, that Wake team jumped all the way from unranked to 13, a pretty incredible jump for a single week during conference season. UNC did get their revenge a month later, beating that same Wake team by 18.

Duke seems to be very involved in this list on several level. The 1991 team has the distinction of being only one of two teams (NC State 1983) to appear on the list twice, losing to UVA and later by 22 to UNC in the ACC tourney. Duke would of coarse match that 22 point margin if they were to win a title this year. Duke was involved in a total of 3 of the games, and only Villanova in 1985 and UConn in 2011 did not play Duke at some point during the season.

Not only did NC State make the list twice in 1983, the two games were only 3 days apart, occurring on Wednesday and Saturday of the same week.

If you think this sounds a little ACC heavy, you're right. 6 of the 10 games were ACC games, with all 4 ACC programs to win a title appearing on the list.

I was also surprised to see that 4 of the 10 winning teams were unranked, while only 3 were top 10 teams, although given some information from the surrounding weeks, I feel like Wake in 1983 might have been in the top 25 that week had the polls extended that far.

As a whole over the last 31 seasons, 8 champions (just over 25%) lost a game by at least 17, though it's only happened once in the last 9 years. I was quite surprised to see how common that is, and hopefully we can see Duke 2012 slip right into the middle of that list for next year.

*AP poll only had 20 teams before 1990

[Bigdukeboi22]

I was actually wondering this same thing after the game...Thanks for sharing this!

[-bdbd]

Thanks SCMatt. Great research!!

I was thinking that I might add an asterisk to the 1991 Duke team as well. That while it was technically the last game of 1990, the 90-91 Duke squad entered their championship season on the heels of a 30 point shellacking in the preceding NC game, which psychologically probably felt for them like it was a big part of their 1990-91 undertaking. I know as a fan, many of us were sorta looking at all of our 90-91 accomplishments with a grain of salt, waiting to see how we could do if we made if back to the FF again (and whether there might be a similar collapse). Well, Hurley made a miracle three, Christian made the crucial free-throws, and the rest, as they say, was history. (And, oh yeah, we beat KA in the final game too...)

[arnie]

Thanks SCMatt. Great research!!

I was thinking that I might add an asterisk to the 1991 Duke team as well. That while it was technically the last game of 1990, the 90-91 Duke squad entered their championship season on the heels of a 30 point shellacking in the preceding NC game, which psychologically probably felt for them like it was a big part of their 1990-91 undertaking. I know as a fan, many of us were sorta looking at all of our 90-91 accomplishments with a grain of salt, waiting to see how we could do if we made if back to the FF again (and whether there might be a similar collapse). Well, Hurley made a miracle three, Christian made the crucial free-throws, and the rest, as they say, was history. (And, oh yeah, we beat KA in the final game too...)

And Brian Davis had the 3-point play that I thought was almost as important as hurley's 3. I thought Davis's greatest moment as Devil.

[Kedsy]

Thanks, SCMatt33. Great work.

One thing I notice is that most of the teams on that list were "surprise" national champs. '83 NC State, '85 Villanova, and '88 Kansas are sort of the poster children for "anyone can win," and all had seeds of 6 or lower in the NCAAT (NCSU #6, Kansas #6, Villanova #8). UConn last year was 9-9 in the Big East and nobody thought Duke in 1991 would win the title. That's 7 of the 10 games, leaving only 1993 UNC, 1999 UConn, and 2002 Maryland. Maryland's loss was to a (to them) arch-rival who happened to be #1 in the country (and the game was also a 1 point game at halftime). UConn's loss was without both their starting center (Jake Voskuhl) and leading scorer (Rip Hamilton), and was "only" by 17.

So really the only comparable team on this list is 1993 UNC. Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself in that regard.

[SCMatt33]

I did mention this briefly with UNC, but I forgot to mention one huge pattern, and that is the revenge pattern. Out of these 10 games, 7 had at least one rematch later in the season. Of those, the eventual champion would not only get at least 1 win, but in 6 out of the 7, they reversed the blowout, winning by at least 12. The exception was NC State over UNC, who didn't blow them out, but did win twice over them by 7. Out of the other 3, Duke had earlier beaten UNC twice, winning once by 14. As it was a non-conference game, Kansas did not get another shot at Iowa, and UConn last year didn't get another shot at St. John's because of the unbalanced Big East schedule. Overall, out of 10 blowouts, 7 had a reverse blowout, one had a non-blowout revenge win, and 2 never got a rematch. That's pretty telling that these teams, even some of the "surprise" champions, proved those games to be a fluke before the tourney started.

Bringing that to this year, Duke could only get another shot at OSU in the NCAA's. UNC does not have a return game from Florida St. on the regular season schedule and would have to meet them in the ACC or NCAA tourney.

[JasonEvans]

Matt BRINGS IT with the research. Fabulous stuff.

I might add that there are fewer chances for a rematch/revenge game today versus in the 80s and 90s because conference expansion has taken away so much of the home-away conference scheduling. Sniff.

-Jason "we all long for the good old days of 16 games against 8 opponents, don't we?" Evans

[SCMatt33]

BTW, for anyone still interested, I was listening to a CBS podcast today and they mentioned that the all-time biggest loss by a champion was 27 by UCLA in 1965 (I only researched back to 1981). I looked up the game and it was their first game of the season. They lost 110-83 to Illinois. They would only lose one other game that year.

EDIT: Since I was already in their media guide, I looked at all of UCLA's championship seasons. The only other blowout that they suffered was a 22 point defeat at Washington in 1975. They had beaten Washington by 10 earlier that season.