NCAA Basketball: Ranking of 20 best college teams from last 20 years

Even in the last few seasons, the world of NCAA Basketball has greatly changed. The changes made to transferring, the extra year from the COVID season, the changes to NIL; things are changing on a yearly basis in the world of collegiate sports. One thing that hasn’t changed is the dream: winning the NCAA Tournament.

When the season starts in November, each team has its different players and goals, but in the end, the biggest dream is to cut down those nets in April as national champions. We’ve seen some really intriguing runs to the title in recent years. We’ve also seen some incredible upsets along the way, as teams that looked like national title favorites were cut down earlier in the NCAA Tournament.

Today, we’re going to be undertaking the unenviable task of ranking some of the best teams in recent memory. Specifically, we’ll be going back twenty years, going as far back as the 2002 NCAA Tournament (even if that season was technically twenty-one seasons ago). However, the task ahead is clearly not just difficult but extremely subjective.

There’s no specific formula or analytic that we’ll be using to make these rankings, we’ve simply acquired what we believe are the twenty best teams from the last twenty years. A team doesn’t have to win the national championship to be one of the best teams, and several of these teams didn’t cut down the nets. One last thing to note about this list is that we tried to make this a varied list; what this means is we didn’t include consecutive seasons (such as both two Florida team’s that won consecutive titles).

We’ve got twenty great teams to dive into, so let’s get right into the list, starting with a potent mid-major as our twentieth inclusion.