NCAA Basketball: 5 biggest winners from 2019 NCAA Tournament

1. Virginia Cavaliers

Of course, Virginia would be the top winner of the tournament. I mean they just won the national championship for the first time in school history. Who else could it be right? Well yes, every team that wins the national championship is the biggest winner, but not all have had to go through what the Cavaliers had to get there.

Nobody will forget their history-making upset to UMBC last year as the number one overall seed. The Cavaliers looked poised to make a long run but was derailed before it even got started. A lot of teams would have looked lost after a devastating defeat like that, but Tony Bennett picked his team up and played this year like it never even happened. Virginia would lose just three games all year and two of those were to Duke.

But even with that, there early exit in the ACC tournament started to raise some doubts on if they could actually get it done. Those doubts kept coming as Virginia would trail Gardner Webb at halftime of their first-round game. It couldn’t happen again, could it? After playing tight in the first half they came out on a mission in the second half and outscored the Bulldogs by 21 in route to a 15-point win.

They took care of Oklahoma and Oregon before getting in an unexpected shootout with Purdue. The luck would start at the end of the game as they hit a buzzer-beater to send the game to overtime before finally shaking the Boilermakers.

A late foul call and Kyle Guy hitting three free-throws like it was nothing helped them beat Auburn to make the final and another overtime game against Texas Tech helped them seal the deal. They may have had a little luck but they crossed every hurdle and turned embarrassment into a championship.

Virginia could have let last year ruin them, instead, they got right back up and climbed the ultimate mountain in college basketball. They are national champs and for what they have gone through the last year they are the biggest winners in college basketball.