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

6. 2012 Kentucky

There’s a new hotbed of recruits every year, and there’s a team (usually Kentucky or Duke) that seems to land an impressive amount of that young talent. In 2011, that team was certainly Kentucky, coming off a Final Four run and adding a trio of blue chip recruits into the mix. By the following April, the Wildcats’ dreams had come true, and a current NBA star had his national championship.

In his only season of collegiate basketball, Anthony Davis (14.2 ppg, 10.4 rpg) was a star, winning both national and NCAA Tournament player of the year awards before being drafted first overall later that year. He was not alone, as fellow freshman super-recruits Michael Kidd-Gilchrist (11.9 ppg, 7.4 rpg) and Marquis Teague (10.0 ppg, 4.8 apg) were important to the Wildcats’ success. Throw in sophomores Doron Lamb (13.7 ppg) and Terrence Jones (12.3 ppg, 7.2 rpg) and you have a deep, talented, and young starting core that really got to work.

Many remember Indiana’s buzzer-beating defeat over these Wildcats, one of only two games that Davis and company dropped that season. They played cohesively, they were extremely talented, and they beat an impressive slate of teams in the NCAA Tournament, ousting rivals Indiana and Louisville and conquering Baylor and Kansas as well. Sometimes, these recruits work out, play well together, and take these programs to the Promised Land; certainly Davis made the most of his one collegiate season.