NCAA Basketball: Ranking the last 25 NCAA Tournament champions

10) 1999 UConn Huskies

Record: 34-2, 16-2 in Big East

It’s easy to forget how great this UConn Huskies team was, but Jim Calhoun’s first championship team absolutely deserves to be in the top-10 of this list.

For starters, both of their losses came in February against teams ranked in the top 16 nationally. This is after the Huskies won their first 19 games of the season, too, solidifying their place as one of the nation’s elite teams. They also won seven games against ranked teams during the regular season

UConn rolled through the Big East Tournament, beating the Syracuse Orangemen in the semifinals by 21 and then the St. John’s Red Storm in the conference title game by 19.

They maintained that level of dominance in the NCAA Tournament, as they weren’t tested until the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament, where they beat the No. 10 seed Gonzaga Bulldogs by five to advance to Calhoun’s first-ever Final Four.

A win over the Ohio State Buckeyes set up a monster showdown against the Duke Blue Devils in the title game, as the Blue Devils had only suffered one loss during the season.

That game was hotly contested and is still one of the best title games in NCAA Tournament history. A traveling call on Trajan Langdon with only a handful of seconds left preserved the win for the Huskies, who were holding off a late rally by the Blue Devils.

This UConn team certainly has the résumé, but didn’t have a ton of top-end talent that would put them higher than this if these 25 teams played each other. Richard Hamilton was the only first-round pick on the roster.