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

1. 2009 North Carolina

The Tar Heels won the Maui Invitational and the ACC regular-season title. They had a roster just loaded with talent, depth, and experience, with most of their key pieces being upperclassmen. North Carolina won all six NCAA Tournament games by double-digits en route to Roy Williams’ second title as head coach, doing so in even more impressive fashion than his first.

The clear star of the Tar Heels was Tyler Hansbrough (20.7 ppg, 8.1 rpg) and his legacy is unforgettable, having won national player of the year awards the season prior. Ty Lawson (16.6 ppg, 6.6 apg) had actually been the ACC Player of the Year, while Wayne Ellington (15.8 ppg, 4.9 rpg) took home NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player honors. And we haven’t even touched upon this other pieces in the frontcourt, where Danny Green, Deon Thompson, and Ed Davis played a critical role.

Roy Williams put together a pair of impressive recruiting classes and managed to keep those players in Chapel Hill to pull off this fantastic run. Another banner went up, and the legacies of Hansbrough, Lawson, and Ellington will live on forever in Tar Heels lore. This team was dynamic and dangerous up until the very end, playing like brothers on and off the field until they cut down those nets. The only question left is if this team would’ve truly beaten everyone else on this list, but we’ll never know the answer to that.

Do you agree with these rankings, or was there some other team that we left off? It’s hard to compare some of these teams that played in different years or eras, but we’ve done our best to rank the twenty best from the last twenty years.