I was thinking of the Final Four yesterday, which wasn't a bad idea considering the NCAA championship game is Monday. Thinking about the same thing as 75 million people can be healthy, unless it involves things like criminal activity or the Backstreet Boys.
Anyway, I was musing over North Carolina getting to the Final Four on confidence and tradition, and how Wisconsin and even Florida ruined a lot of peoples' brackets. I was also thinking of Michigan State, which by all accounts should be the national champion by Monday night.
That led me to the Utes' national championship (1944) and their most recent trip to the Final Four (1998), and it got me wondering if they'll ever get another chance. My conclusion: maybe.
If they wait 20 or 30 years.
The great appeal to March Madness is the hope that anyone can win the national title. That's the "Rocky" version. The real version is that the Utes —and all but a handful of teams, really — had virtually zero chance of winning a title this year. The odds are too great.
Even defending champ Connecticut didn't have much of a chance, at least according to the record book. That's because only four teams have won more than two championships: UCLA (11), Kentucky (7), Indiana (5) and North Carolina (3). Not counting the seven straight titles by UCLA in the '60s and '70s — UCLA always has to be dismissed as an anomaly, doesn't it? — there have only been five teams to win back-to-back championships (Oklahoma State, Kentucky, San Francisco, Cincinnati and Duke). Nobody except UCLA has won three straight.
Winning a championship, even for the traditional powers, is an unlikely proposition, thanks largely to the one-loss-and-out format. There's no such thing as a mulligan in March. There are 310 Division I teams. By comparison, the NBA has 29 teams, the NFL 31, Major League Baseball 30, the NHL 28. So at least numerically speaking, each pro team has about one chance in 30 to win a championship. At the start of the college season, a team has one chance in 310 to win the national title.
The NBA playoffs are grueling and long, but there are plenty of chances for recovery. The shortest series in the playoffs is still best-of-five, the NBA Finals best-of-seven. The World Series involves no fewer than four games.
The NCAA Tournament isn't so forgiving; one foul-up, and you're catching a plane back to Lawrence, Kan., or Lexington, Ky.
The Super Bowl championship could be compared to an NCAA title in that it, too, is a one-game-and-out format. But repeating as champion in pro sports is easier than in college; pro teams don't usually have the turnover of key players. You can keep your Joe Montanas and Karl Malones for a decade or more.
And there's no such thing as flunking out.
In college basketball, coaches must deal with injuries, same as the pros, but also graduation of players, transfers, academic ineligibility and — in the case of some schools — the disruption of LDS missionaries coming and going.
College football is comparable, in that it has the same college-related problems. But football teams have more players, so the loss of one isn't as significant. Winning the national championship in football is in a category by itself, anyway because it doesn't have a playoff system.
In the last 52 years, the No. 1-ranked team in the Associated Press poll going into the NCAA Tournament has won the title only 19 times. That means just over a third of the time, the acknowledged best team in the country has survived. Since the seeding process began in 1979, the highest-seeded team in the Final Four won the championship 11 times, but lower-seeded teams have won the title 10 times. Thus, if you're Michigan State — the only No. 1 seed to make it to the Final Four this year — there's still only about a 50 percent chance of walking away with the championship trophy.
"What makes it so tough is the best team doesn't always win. Things can happen," said Fresno State coach Jerry Tarkanian from his hotel room at the Final Four. "I really feel bad for Stanford. They had such a great year, but they're not in it, while North Carolina had a horrible year, and they're in (the Final Four). Those things happen. That's what is so tough. There's no doubt Michigan State is the best team, but that doesn't mean it's going to win. One key call can decide the game . . . just a bounce of the ball."
Tarkanian, who won the championship at UNLV in 1990, but hasn't won one since, points out that a key player can get in early foul trouble, and it's all over. "It changes the whole outcome," he said.
So if your favorite team wins Monday night, be sure to party hard. You deserve it. Not only is it a big accomplishment, but you're not likely to get the chance again soon.