Products You May Like
Quite the exclusive group Dawn Staley now seeks to join. Five men, three women. More humans than that have walked on the moon. The Perfection Club.
All you have to do is go unbeaten and win the Division I national championship. Just one little zero on the right side of the hyphen of your team’s record, and you’re in. Piece of cake. So here are the South Carolina women, 37-0 with one more test to pass, facing an opponent from the cornfields of the Midwest led by Caitlin something or another. One more win and Staley joins the pantheon. Surely that part has her thrilled about her Gamecocks vs. Iowa on Sunday afternoon, right? Right?
“No, not really,” she said Saturday at her press conference. “When I look at basketball, I don’t look at wins and losses. I look at how things are executed and allow the wins or the losses to take care of themselves. And as much as you bring up an undefeated season, it doesn’t feel like it because we’ve played some bad basketball that made it feel like we lost.”
“It’s really hard to believe that we’re undefeated because I don’t feel it. As a coaching staff, we have to pinch ourselves to even know that’s true because deep down we see what our shortcomings are every single day.”
Yes, Staley seems the most wary 37-0 coach in America. Listen to her discussing Caitlin Clark’s legacy, now that the Iowa megastar is the last hurdle. “If Caitlin wins the championship, she’s pretty damn good, yeah, like, she’s a GOAT. I mean, she’s really damn good regardless. But winning the championship would seal the deal. I hope to the dear Lord she doesn’t.”
Maybe the unbeaten coaches who came before felt that way, too. Still, to be on a list this short has to be special. If not now, one day. And if there is to be an imminent addition to The Perfection Club, we should take a roll call for both the women and men.
Geno Auriemma.
Where else to begin but the coach who has done it six times? Six. There have been nine unbeaten national champions since the women’s NCAA tournament began in 1982, and Connecticut owns two-thirds of them. The most recent was 2016, which was part of the Huskies’ record 111-game winning streak and the last of the Breanna Stewart-led fourpeat champions. “They’ve created an amount of excitement that the game has not seen in a long, long time, if ever,” Auriemma said.
Auriemma nearly stacked even more unbeaten teams. His 11 national champions had a combined record of 407-11. Included in the 36-0 NCAA tournament record of the six perfect seasons were 24 wins by at least 20 points, and only four by single digits. The average winning margin for the 2016 champions in the tournament was 39.8.
One other interesting thing he said that night in ’16 about trying to continue to attract the team-first players who were willing to work their way up; the sort who had helped build the UConn dynasty. “The tide is shifting under your feet, you can feel it. The kids are kids, they’re affected by all the stuff now that kids weren’t affected by before. Parents are parents. They live through their kids since the time their kid picks up a basketball.”
Connecticut has not won a national championship since.
John Wooden.
Ten national championships, four unbeaten teams. Two were led by Bill Walton, one by then Lew Alcindor and now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Wooden’s first of 10 champions was also his first perfect record. The 1964 Bruins went 30-0 with no starter taller than 6-5 and survived a series of close calls in the tournament, beating Seattle by five, San Francisco by four and Kansas State by six. In contrast, the 1967 Alcindor Bruins went on a rampage winning four NCAA games by 49, 16, 15 and 15 points. That total of spread of 95 points over four games was the largest in the history of the men’s tournament — until Connecticut this March.
Auriemma and Wooden. Each had back-to-back perfect seasons. Each won their first title with no losses. But that’s it for the coaches who have known perfection more than once, The other six are one-timers, in chronological order.
Phil Woolpert.
He was barely 40 years old when San Francisco went 29-0 in 1956. It helped considerably that his center was named Bill Russell. In the 83-71 championship game win over Iowa, Russell had 26 points and 27 rebounds. Woolpert retired at a relatively early age and ended up driving a school bus.
Frank McGuire.
One of 13 kids of a New York City policeman, McGuire had already accomplished a lot before he took the job at North Carolina in the early 1950s, having coached St. John’s into both the basketball Final Four and baseball College World Series. But 1957 was the highlight when his Tar Heels went 32-0 and won a championship with the hardest labor possible — triple overtime over Michigan State in the semifinals, and triple overtime over Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain the next night in the championship game.
Some alleged major recruiting violations eventually forced McGuire out in Chapel Hill. He was replaced by his assistant, a Kansas native named Dean Smith.
Bob Knight.
In 1975, Indiana was unbeaten headed into the Elite Eight but lost a 92-90 heartbreaker to Kentucky. The Hoosiers would finish the job the next season, going 32-0 and clinching the championship 86-68 over Michigan, the first time two teams from the same conference met in the title game. Knight was 35 years old that night in Philadelphia. He remains the fourth-youngest national championship coach, and that Indiana team is still the last unbeaten men’s champion 48 years later. He and Dan Smith are also the only men to both play for and coach a national champion.
Jody Conradt.
Given the powerhouse Conradt built in women’s basketball at Texas in the 1970s and ’80s, it seemed clear the fledgling NCAA tournament would not go long before a Longhorns team stood on the championship podium. That took only five years. Texas went 34-0 in 1986 and won the championship game over USC and Cheryl Miller, 97-81, with freshman Clarissa Davis coming off the bench to score 25 points and be named Most Outstanding Player. Conradt would coach 21 more years at Texas but never returned to the championship game. But she will always be the first women’s coach to go unbeaten through an NCAA tournament.
Pat Summitt.
Eight national championships, nearly 1,100 wins, the patron saint of women’s college basketball, Summitt accomplished everything imaginable, and that included a three-peat title run in 1996-98. It was something of an odd journey for the Vols. They won in 1996, then repeated in ’97 after an uncharacteristically wobbly season with 10 defeats. To this day they are the only women’s champion in history with double-digit losses. How to follow that? Go 39-0 in 1998, with only three of the 39 wins in single digits.
Summitt would win two more titles a decade later and then, so suddenly, be gone.
Kim Mulkey.
She surely has always known how to stir the pot, from her words to her wardrobe, but there was something pretty simple about Baylor in 2012. The Bears were better than anyone. No team, men or women, had ever gone 40-0 before. But Baylor did. That was the second of three titles with the Bears for Mulkey, who added a fourth at LSU in 2023.
It was also part of a parade of unbeatens in the women’s game. From 2009-2016 there were five in eight years. But none since.
At least until Sunday. The Perfection Club awaits its ninth member. One last problem to solve, and her name is Caitlin Clark.