History UsefulNotes / Basketball

*** ''Most recent winners (2023)'': Shaka Smart, Marquette (men); Teri Moren, Indiana (women)

*** ''Most recent winner (2023)'': Shawn Poppie,[[note]]male[[/note]] Chattanooga

*** ''Most recent winners (2023)'': Zach Edey, C, junior[[labelnote:*]]US college students in general are classified in order of the number of years of attendance. In ascending order: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.[[/labelnote]], Purdue; Caitlin Clark, PG, junior, Iowa (women)

*** ''Most recent winners (2023)'': Jerome Tang, Kansas State (men); Dawn Staley, South Carolina (women)

* '''Sabrina Ionescu''': Joined the league in 2020 as ''the'' face of American women's basketball, starting her pro career with the New York Liberty as the first overall pick out of Oregon and having already entered FirstNameBasis.[[note]]She's the only D-I player, male or female, with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, and 1,000 assists in a college career... for now. Iowa's Caitlin Clark has a decent chance of joining her in that club in 2023–24 barring misfortune.[[/note]] Unfortunately, her rookie season came to a premature end, as she went down with a severe ankle sprain in the Libs' third game in the COVID bubble. When the league came back to home markets in 2021, Sabrina didn't take long to have a signature moment. In her first game in Brooklyn, she sank a buzzer-beating game-winning three. Two games later, she became the youngest WNBA player to record a triple-double. However, she was still recovering from the previous season's injury, putting up solid but not spectacular numbers for the rest of the season. She still ended up with the league's top-selling jersey in 2021, also appearing in a couple of commercials for State Farm Insurance alongside NBA superstar PG Chris Paul. Finally fully healthy in 2022, Ionescu picked up where she left off after her 2020 injury, first becoming the most recent of four players with a second career triple-double (achieving that one while ''sitting out the fourth quarter'') and then becoming the second after Candace Parker (below) with two triple-doubles in a season and three in a career. And also becoming the first W player ever with [[MasterOfAll 500 points, 200 rebounds, and 200 assists]] in a season.[[note]]It doesn't sound like a lot, but keep in mind two facts: (1) the WNBA regular season was 36 games in 2022 (increased to 40 for 2023), compared to the NBA's 82, and (2) regulation WNBA games last only 40 minutes instead of the NBA's 48.[[/note]] In 2023, she set a new W single-season record for three-pointers (although the league's expansion to 40 games helped); blew away the field in the All-Star Game three-point contest, making all but two of her 27 final-round attempts for a record 37 points; and got her own signature shoe ''and'' apparel line from Nike, all being marketed as ''unisex''.

* '''UsefulNotes/CaitlinClark''': Though yet to formally enter the WNBA, as she is currently still playing college ball at Iowa, Clark is possibly ''already'' the most famous woman to ever play basketball and all but guaranteed to be the Indiana Fever's #1 overall pick in 2024. A dominant long-range scorer and an equally skilled passer, Clark essentially rewrote the record books for college basketball; she holds the NCAA Division I records for both women and men in single-season and career points plus single-season three-pointers, scored more points than any male or female player in NCAA tournament history in Iowa's 2023 campaign (coming up short in the final against LSU), and led the nation in points and assists in three of her four seasons at Iowa. Perhaps even more critically, she contributed to a nigh-unprecedented interest in women's basketball, setting several attendance and viewership records throughout her career--notably, the average TV viewership for women's college basketball actually ''exceeded'' the men's game during her final regular season. %% Clark is 6 threes away from tying the women's career threes record. She won't come close to the men's career record.

*** For the first few years of her WNBA career, she was one of the very few high-profile WNBA players who never played overseas. (She has [[WordOfGod publicly stated]] that she normally stays in the States to help care for her disabled older sister; her family ties were seen as playing a big part in her desire to move to Washington.) EDD did join a Chinese team for that country's 2017 playoffs, but a flareup of post-Lyme disease syndrome[[note]]in 2008, she contracted the disease, which was initially misdiagnosed; she's dealt with the aftereffects ever since[[/note]] forced her to return prematurely to the States. Her Lyme disease history, which has left her seriously immunocompromised, meant that she sat out 2020 despite the league turning down her petition to skip the abbreviated season (the Mystics announced they would pay her anyway). With disability causes so close to her heart, she's also a high-profile ambassador for Special Olympics and is also heavily involved with Lyme disease charities.

* '''Courtney Vandersloot''': Point guard for the Chicago Sky from 2011–2022 before signing with the Liberty as a free agent, Vandersloot has basically been the league's poster child for OvershadowedByAwesome and DudeWheresMyRespect, despite currently standing as the league's all-time leader in assists per game.[[labelnote:*]]By close to a full assist per game over the current #2, Sabrina.[[/labelnote]] A native of the Seattle area, she wasn't seen has a big-time recruit out of high school, ending up on the other side of the Cascades at Gonzaga. After leading the Zags to a surprise run to the NCAA regional finals in her 2010–11 senior season, and becoming the first NCAA player (male or female) with 2,000 points and 1,000 assists in a career (since joined by Sabrina),[[note]]Incidentally, she and Sabrina played for the same head coach in college, Kelly Graves (male).[[/note]] the Sky made her the third pick in that year's draft. [[FanNickname Sloot]] made an immediate impact, making the All-Star Game and the All-Rookie team... though in a harbinger of things to come, she happened to join the league at the same time as Maya Moore. With other big names at her position, most notably Sue Bird and Skylar Diggins-Smith, she didn't make another All-Star team for a while. Despite leading the league in assists in 2015. Then setting a new league record for assists per game in 2017. And another in 2018. She finally got her second All-Star nod in 2019, with a ''[[OverusedRunningGag third straight]]'' assists record to boot. Sloot at long last got some real attention in 2020, when she set ''[[SerialEscalation yet another assists record]]''. Through 2023, she has the top six seasons in per-game assists in league history. On top of that, she joined Sheryl Swoopes in the exclusive club of WNBA players with multiple triple-doubles, posting one in the 2018 regular season and one in the 2021 playoffs. Further developing the "overshadowed" theme, she didn't make the 2016 US Olympic team, and given USA Basketball's long track record of demonstrating loyalty to established players, wound up opting to play internationally for Hungary in 2017, believing (not without reason) that she'd never get to play for Team USA in her prime. Also in a same-sex marriage, in her case with former Sky backcourt mate Allie Quigley, with some fans calling them "[[PortmanteauCoupleName The VanderQuigs]]".

* '''UsefulNotes/CaitlinClark''': Though yet to formally enter the WNBA, as she is currently still playing college ball in Iowa, Clark is possibly ''already'' the most famous woman to ever play basketball and all but guaranteed to be the Indiana Fever's #1 overall pick in 2024. A dominant long-range scorer and an equally skilled passer, Clark essentially rewrote the record books for college basketball; she holds the NCAA Division I record for both women and men in single-season and career points and three-pointers scored, scored more points than any male or female player in NCAA tournament history in Iowa's 2023 campaign (coming up short in the final against LSU), and led the nation in points and assists in three of her four seasons at Iowa. Perhaps even more critically, she contributed to a nigh-unprecedented interest in women's basketball, setting several attendance and viewership records throughout her career--notably, the average TV viewership for women's college basketball actually ''exceeded'' the men's game during her final regular season.

* '''Sabrina Ionescu''': Joined the league in 2020 as ''the'' face of American women's basketball, starting her pro career with the New York Liberty as the first overall pick out of Oregon and having already entered FirstNameBasis.[[note]]She's the only D-I player, male or female, with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, and 1,000 assists in a college career... for now. Iowa's Caitlin Clark has a decent chance of joining her in that club in 2023–24 barring misfortune.[[/note]] Unfortunately, her rookie season came to a premature end, as she went down with a severe ankle sprain in the Libs' third game in the COVID bubble. When the league came back to home markets in 2021, Sabrina didn't take long to have a signature moment. In her first game in Brooklyn, she sank a buzzer-beating game-winning three. Two games later, she became the youngest WNBA player to record a triple-double. However, she was still recovering from the previous season's injury, putting up solid but not spectacular numbers for the rest of the season. She still ended up with the league's top-selling jersey in 2021, also appearing in a couple of commercials for State Farm Insurance alongside NBA superstar PG Chris Paul. Finally fully healthy in 2022, Ionescu picked up where she left off after her 2020 injury, first becoming the most recent of four players with a second career triple-double (achieving that one while ''sitting out the fourth quarter'') and then becoming the second after Candace Parker (below) with two triple-doubles in a season and three in a career. And also becoming the first W player ever with [[MasterOfAll 500 points, 200 rebounds, and 200 assists]] in a season.[[note]]It doesn't sound like a lot, but keep in mind two facts: (1) the WNBA regular season was 36 games in 2022 (increased to 40 for 2023), compared to the NBA's 82, and (2) regulation WNBA games last only 40 minutes instead of the NBA's 48.[[/note]] In 2023, she set a new W single-season record for three-pointers (although the league's expansion to 40 games helped); blew away the field in the All-Star Game three-point contest, making all but two of her 30 final-round attempts for a record 37 points; and got her own signature shoe ''and'' apparel line from Nike, all being marketed as ''unisex''.

* '''Indiana Fever''': Founded in 2000, named for Indiana's well-known basketball obsession. Saved from potential folding with a run to the 2009 Finals, and then won the 2012 Finals. Was projected to make its first profit in 2013 and remained a competitive force until the end of the 2010s. They share the Indiana Pacers' home of Gainbridge Fieldhouse in UsefulNotes/{{Indianapolis}} (though renovations displaced them for part of the early 2020s). The Fever may show signs of a resurgence in 2024, with 2023 ROY Aliyah Boston almost certain to be joined by all-time Division I career scoring leader Caitlin Clark.[[note]]The Fever will have the #1 pick in the 2024 draft, as it did in 2023, with Clark's selection being viewed as a foregone conclusion.[[/note]]

* '''Caitlin Clark''': Though yet to formally enter the WNBA, as she is currently still playing college ball in Iowa, Clark is possibly ''already'' the most famous woman to ever play basketball and all but guaranteed to be the Indiana Fever's #1 overall pick in 2024. A dominant long-range scorer and an equally skilled passer, Clark essentially rewrote the record books for college basketball; she holds the NCAA Division I record for both women and men in single-season and career points and three-pointers scored, scored more points than any male or female player in NCAA tournament history in Iowa's 2023 campaign (coming up short in the final against LSU), and led the nation in points and assists in three of her four seasons at Iowa. Perhaps even more critically, she contributed to a nigh-unprecedented interest in women's basketball, setting several attendance and viewership records throughout her career--notably, the average TV viewership for women's college basketball actually ''exceeded'' the men's game during her final regular season.

* '''South Carolina''': The two-time national champion Gamecocks emerged in the last half of the 2010s as the SEC's new kid on the block with double Hall of Fame player Dawn Staley as head coach. They've made every NCAA tournament since 2012, missing the Sweet Sixteen only once in that span, with four Final Fours and the 2017 and '22 national titles as well, in the latter season becoming the only team ever to beat [=UConn=] in a national title game. Not to mention they were the top-ranked team when COVID scuttled the 2020 tournament; Carolina claims a mythical national title from that season. Current WNBA superstar A'ja Wilson was the biggest star of the first title team, with Aliyah Boston, star of the 2020s teams, ready to join her in WNBA superstardom as the top overall pick in the 2023 WNBA draft and that year's unanimous Rookie of the Year. Even after having to replace ''the entire starting lineup'' in 2023–24, the Gamecocks entered the NCAA tournament unbeaten. The Gamecocks suffered rare tastes of defeat when they were upset by Kentucky in the 2022 SEC Championship Game, and again when one Caitlin Clark (now the all-time D-I career scoring leader) torched them for 41 points to lead Iowa to an upset in the 2023 NCAA semifinals, spoiling a previously unbeaten season.

While the NCAA tournament is the sport's official championship, there are some other postseason events. Most notable among these is the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), which is actually one year older than the NCAA tournament (the first NIT was 1938, the first NCAA was 1939[[labelnote:*]]Though that 1939 tournament was actually organized by the National Association of Basketball Coaches, the trade association for college men's coaches, the NCAA took it over the next year, and [[{{Retcon}} recognizes the 1939 NABC event as its own]].[[/labelnote]]). It had been run outside of NCAA control until the NCAA bought it in 2006. For the first part of its history, all NIT games were played at Madison Square Garden in New York City, which gave schools important media exposure in the era before widespread television coverage of sports. Up until the end of TheFifties, the NIT was considered the equal of the NCAA tournament, but as the NCAA tournament started expanding, the NIT's importance gradually faded, and it became a tournament for teams not quite good enough to make the Big Dance. The NIT started expanding as well, finally settling on 32 teams, with early rounds played at home arenas, while the semifinals and championship game were still at Madison Square Garden through 2022. (Again, except in 2021, when the NCAA reduced the field to 16 and moved the tournament to Dallas–Fort Worth.) The NCAA announced that for at least the 2023 and 2024 editions, the NIT semifinals and final would not be in NYC; Las Vegas hosted in 2023 and Indianapolis will do so in 2024. The 2024 edition saw a major change to the NIT selection process--the NCAA scrapped its recent practice of giving an automatic NIT invite to any conference champion that fails to win its conference tournament and doesn't make the NCAA field. Instead, the consensus top six conferences in men's basketball (the UsefulNotes/PowerFiveConferences plus the Big East) receive two autobids each, which go to the top two teams from each league that don't make the NCAA tournament (as determined by the computer ranking the NCAA uses as its primary tournament selection tool)... ''regardless of regular-season record.''[[note]]This change was made to preempt Fox Sports' reported plan for a future tournament involving the top 16 teams from the Big East, Big Ten, and Big 12 that didn't make the NCAA tournament.[[/note]] The remaining 20 teams are selected on a purely at-large basis, with deference given to NCAA's official "first four out" (i.e., the four teams that were atop the selection committee's ranking of teams that didn't get in the Big Dance). The 12 automatic qualifiers, plus the top four teams from the remaining 20 entrants, host first-round games. The NIT champ is sometimes derisively called the "69th best team in the country".[[note]]However, it is argued that an NIT winner could probably best some of the teams which only made it in the Big Dance as conference champions.[[/note]] There's also the College Basketball Invitational, featuring 16 teams with all games at a single venue; that event invites members of power conferences sometimes, but in the past few years none of them have shown up. Two other postseason tournaments have been played in this century, but both have gone belly-up. The Basketball Classic, an effective 2022 rebranding of the [=CollegeInsider.com=] Postseason Tournament (normally 32 teams; made a point of not even inviting teams from major conferences), wasn't renewed after its 2022 edition. The Vegas 16 (which had an [[NonIndicativeName 8-team]] field but was aiming for 16), tried to revive the old NIT format of all games at a single venue, but folded after only one edition in 2016. Collectively, they are pretty much college basketball's equivalent to those otherwise non-important bowl games whose only purpose are to give Creator/{{ESPN}} something to do in mid-December. The majority of fans never take them seriously, and teams turn down those bids regularly.[[note]]In an embarrassment for the NCAA, no fewer than ''six'' power-conference teams (two from the ACC, one each from the Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC) turned down NIT bids in 2024--even with the NCAA changing the selection process to heavily favor those leagues.[[/note]] The NIT is generally considered to be the best of these tournaments, and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane have frequently promoted their two NIT wins as being part of their "championship tradition". Some recent Cinderella runs in the NIT (Cal State Bakersfield making the semifinals in 2017, [[UsefulNotes/{{Nashville}} Lipscomb]] making the championship game in 2019) have brought some renewed attention to that tournament. The COVID-19 pandemic scuttled the 2020 editions of all of these events and also scuttled the 2021 CIT.\\\

D-I women have two alternate tournaments as well. In 2023, the NCAA finally launched a direct counterpart to the men's NIT in the form of the Women's Basketball Invitation Tournament (WBIT), whose first edition was held in 2024. Like the men's NIT, the WBIT features 32 teams and is directly run by the NCAA. It gives an automatic invitation to any conference regular-season champion that fails to make the NCAA tournament (unless ineligible, like Southern Indiana in 2024), a practice the NCAA abandoned for the men's NIT in 2023–24. The Women's National Invitation Tournament (WNIT) had been the acknowledged second-tier women's postseason event before the launch of the WBIT. With the WBIT now getting first dibs of teams that didn't make the Big Dance, the WNIT dropped from 64 teams to 48 in 2024. Unlike the men's NIT, the WNIT, established in 1998, has never been run by the NCAA. Before the reduction to a 48-team field, the WNIT had a slightly different structure from the men's equivalent, with all 32 Division I conferences having at least one guaranteed bid to the tournament, plus 32 at-large bids. In 2024, the WNIT organizers awarded automatic bids to 11 mid- to low-major conferences, and filled most of its other slots with teams outside the power conferences. A third tournament run outside of direct NCAA control was the Women's Basketball Invitational (WBI), launched in 2010 and featuring 8 teams, but it held its last edition in 2023, shutting down once the WBIT was announced.\\\

While the NCAA tournament is the sport's official championship, there are some other postseason events. Most notable among these is the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), which is actually one year older than the NCAA tournament (the first NIT was 1938, the first NCAA was 1939[[labelnote:*]]Though that 1939 tournament was actually organized by the National Association of Basketball Coaches, the trade association for college men's coaches, the NCAA took it over the next year, and [[{{Retcon}} recognizes the 1939 NABC event as its own]].[[/labelnote]]). It had been run outside of NCAA control until the NCAA bought it in 2006. For the first part of its history, all NIT games were played at Madison Square Garden in New York City, which gave schools important media exposure in the era before widespread television coverage of sports. Up until the end of TheFifties, the NIT was considered the equal of the NCAA tournament, but as the NCAA tournament started expanding, the NIT's importance gradually faded, and it became a tournament for teams not quite good enough to make the Big Dance. The NIT started expanding as well, finally settling on 32 teams, with early rounds played at home arenas, while the semifinals and championship game were still at Madison Square Garden through 2022. (Again, except in 2021, when the NCAA reduced the field to 16 and moved the tournament to Dallas–Fort Worth.) The NCAA has announced that for at least the 2023 and 2024 editions, the NIT semifinals and final would not be in NYC; Las Vegas hosted in 2023 and Indianapolis will do so in 2024. The 2024 edition will see a major change to the NIT selection process--the NCAA has scrapped its recent practice of giving an automatic NIT invite to any conference champion that fails to win its conference tournament and doesn't make the NCAA field. Instead, the consensus top six conferences in men's basketball (the UsefulNotes/PowerFiveConferences plus the Big East) receive two autobids each, which go to the top two teams from each league that don't make the NCAA tournament (as determined by the computer ranking the NCAA uses as its primary tournament selection tool)... ''regardless of regular-season record.''[[note]]This change was made to preempt Fox Sports' reported plan for a future tournament involving the top 16 teams from the Big East, Big Ten, and Big 12 that didn't make the NCAA tournament.[[/note]] The remaining 20 teams are selected on a purely at-large basis, with deference given to NCAA's official "first four out" (i.e., the four teams that were atop the selection committee's ranking of teams that didn't get in the Big Dance). The 12 automatic qualifiers, plus the top four teams from the remaining 20 entrants, host first-round games. The NIT champ is sometimes derisively called the "69th best team in the country".[[note]]However, it is argued that an NIT winner could probably best some of the teams which only made it in the Big Dance as conference champions.[[/note]] There's also the College Basketball Invitational, featuring 16 teams with all games at a single venue; that event invites members of power conferences sometimes, but in the past few years none of them have shown up. Two other postseason tournaments have been played in this century, but both have gone belly-up. The Basketball Classic, an effective 2022 rebranding of the [=CollegeInsider.com=] Postseason Tournament (normally 32 teams; made a point of not even inviting teams from major conferences), wasn't renewed after its 2022 edition. The Vegas 16 (which had an [[NonIndicativeName 8-team]] field but was aiming for 16), tried to revive the old NIT format of all games at a single venue, but folded after only one edition in 2016. Collectively, they are pretty much college basketball's equivalent to those otherwise non-important bowl games whose only purpose are to give Creator/{{ESPN}} something to do in mid-December. The majority of fans never take them seriously, and teams turn down those bids regularly. The NIT is generally considered to be the best of these tournaments, and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane have frequently promoted their two NIT wins as being part of their "championship tradition". Some recent Cinderella runs in the NIT (Cal State Bakersfield making the semifinals in 2017, [[UsefulNotes/{{Nashville}} Lipscomb]] making the championship game in 2019) have brought some renewed attention to that tournament. The COVID-19 pandemic scuttled the 2020 editions of all of these events and also scuttled the 2021 CIT.\\\

D-I women have two alternate tournaments as well. In 2023, the NCAA finally launched a direct counterpart to the men's NIT in the form of the Women's Basketball Invitation Tournament (WBIT), whose first edition will be held in 2024. Like the men's NIT, the WBIT will feature 32 teams and will be directly run by the NCAA. It will give an automatic invitation to any conference champion that fails to make the NCAA tournament (unless ineligible, like Southern Indiana in 2024), a practice the NCAA abandoned for the men's NIT in 2023–24. The Women's National Invitation Tournament (WNIT) had been the acknowledged second-tier women's postseason event before the launch of the WBIT. With the WBIT now getting first dibs of teams that didn't make the Big Dance, the WNIT will drop from 64 teams to 48 in 2024. Unlike the men's NIT, the WNIT, established in 1998, has never been run by the NCAA. Before the reduction to a 48-team field, the WNIT had a slightly different structure from the men's equivalent, with all 32 Division I conferences having at least one guaranteed bid to the tournament, plus 32 at-large bids. In 2024, the WNIT organizers awarded automatic bids to 11 mid- to low-major conferences, and filled most of its other slots with teams outside the power conferences. A third tournament run outside of direct NCAA control was the Women's Basketball Invitational (WBI), launched in 2010 and featuring 8 teams, but it held its last edition in 2023, shutting down once the WBIT was announced.\\\

D-I women have two (or maybe three) alternate tournaments as well. In 2023, the NCAA finally launched a direct counterpart to the men's NIT in the form of the Women's Basketball Invitation Tournament (WBIT), whose first edition will be held in 2024. Like the men's NIT, the WBIT will feature 32 teams and will be directly run by the NCAA. It will give an automatic invitation to any conference champion that fails to make the NCAA tournament (unless ineligible, like Southern Indiana in 2024), a practice the NCAA abandoned for the men's NIT in 2023–24. The Women's National Invitation Tournament (WNIT) had been the acknowledged second-tier women's postseason event before the launch of the WBIT. With the WBIT now getting first dibs of teams that didn't make the Big Dance, the WNIT will drop from 64 teams to 48 in 2024. Unlike the men's NIT, the WNIT, established in 1998, has never been run by the NCAA. Before the reduction to a 48-team field, the WNIT had a slightly different structure from the men's equivalent, with all 32 Division I conferences having at least one guaranteed bid to the tournament, plus 32 at-large bids. The organizers of the WNIT haven't announced how that tournament will fill its field going forward. A third tournament run outside of direct NCAA control has been the Women's Basketball Invitational (WBI), launched in 2010 and featuring 8 teams, but it remains to be seen whether it will continue after the addition of the WBIT.\\\

* '''Caitlin Clark''': Though yet to formally enter the WNBA, as she is currently still playing college ball in Iowa, Clark is possibly ''already'' the most famous woman to ever play basketball and all but guaranteed to be the Indiana Fever's #1 overall pick in 2024. A dominant long-range scorer and an equally skilled passer, Clark essentially rewrote the record books for college basketball; she holds the NCAA Division I record for both women and men in career points and three-pointers scored, scored more points than any male or female player in NCAA tournament history in Iowa's 2023 campaign (coming up short in the final against LSU), and led the nation in points and assists in three of her four seasons at Iowa. Perhaps even more critically, she contributed to a nigh-unprecedented interest in women's basketball, setting several attendance and viewership records throughout her career--notably, the average TV viewership for women's college basketball actually ''exceeded'' the men's game during her final regular season.

* '''Tamika Catchings''': A forward who spent her entire 15-season career with the Indiana Fever, Catchings was drafted #3 overall in 2001 out of Tennessee. She's one of the league's most decorated players--Rookie of the Year in 2002 (she missed the 2001 season with a torn ACL), MVP in 2011, a record 10 All-Star appearances, five-time Defensive Player of the Year, Finals MVP in 2012, named to the league's All-Decade Team in 2006 and Top 15 Team for the league's 15th anniversary in 2011.[[labelnote:*]]Not to mention the Top 20 for the league's 20th anniversary in 2016 and "The [=W25=]" for the 25th in 2021.[[/labelnote]] Basically a stretch four, much like her contemporary Lauren Jackson and more recent players such as Elena Delle Donne and Candace Parker (all below). Catchings ended her career in 2016 as the league's all-time leader in rebounds and steals (the rebound record has since fallen twice, with Sylvia Fowles as the current leader), and #2 scorer, and made it to the Naismith and Women's Halls in 2020, by which time she had become the Fever's general manager (she stepped down from that role after the 2021 season). And back in high school, she became the first known player to manage a ''quintuple''-double. (It's happened once more since.)

* '''Seimone Augustus''': Hall of Fame forward who spent all but the last of her 16 WNBA seasons with the Minnesota Lynx. She was featured on the cover of ''Sports Illustrated'' for women in high school, promoting her as the possible female Michael Jordan. Her success continued during her college years at LSU where she won many national awards and led her team to three Final Four appearances; LSU put a statue of her up in front of its arena in 2023. Augustus was drafted #1 overall by the Lynx in 2006, where she quickly made her presence known by winning Rookie of the Year. In 2011, when another promising rookie named Maya Moore joined the team, she led the Lynx to their first WNBA title and won Finals MVP; she would contribute to three more titles in Minnesota over the following decade. She initially planned to retire after 2019 season but lost most of that season to injury and ultimately left for the Sparks as a free agent, spending the 2020 season in the "Wubble" in Bradenton before entering coaching.

* '''Sabrina Ionescu''' joined the league in 2020 as ''the'' face of American women's basketball, starting her pro career with the New York Liberty as the first overall pick out of Oregon and having already entered FirstNameBasis.[[note]]She's the only D-I player, male or female, with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, and 1,000 assists in a college career... for now. Iowa's Caitlin Clark has a decent chance of joining her in that club in 2023–24 barring misfortune.[[/note]] Unfortunately, her rookie season came to a premature end, as she went down with a severe ankle sprain in the Libs' third game in the COVID bubble. When the league came back to home markets in 2021, Sabrina didn't take long to have a signature moment. In her first game in Brooklyn, she sank a buzzer-beating game-winning three. Two games later, she became the youngest WNBA player to record a triple-double. However, she was still recovering from the previous season's injury, putting up solid but not spectacular numbers for the rest of the season. She still ended up with the league's top-selling jersey in 2021, also appearing in a couple of commercials for State Farm Insurance alongside NBA superstar PG Chris Paul. Finally fully healthy in 2022, Ionescu picked up where she left off after her 2020 injury, first becoming the most recent of four players with a second career triple-double (achieving that one while ''sitting out the fourth quarter'') and then becoming the second after Candace Parker (below) with two triple-doubles in a season and three in a career. And also becoming the first W player ever with [[MasterOfAll 500 points, 200 rebounds, and 200 assists]] in a season.[[note]]It doesn't sound like a lot, but keep in mind two facts: (1) the WNBA regular season was 36 games in 2022 (increased to 40 for 2023), compared to the NBA's 82, and (2) regulation WNBA games last only 40 minutes instead of the NBA's 48.[[/note]] In 2023, she set a new W single-season record for three-pointers (although the league's expansion to 40 games helped); blew away the field in the All-Star Game three-point contest, making all but two of her 30 final-round attempts for a record 37 points; and got her own signature shoe ''and'' apparel line from Nike, all being marketed as ''unisex''.

* '''Kelsey Plum''': Drafted by the San Antonio Stars #1 overall in 2017 after breaking the D-I women's basketball all-time scoring record (since surpassed) while at Washington, the point guard made the move with the team when they moved to become the Las Vegas Aces the next year, sticking around as a core part of the team as they built towards their back-to-back titles in 2022-23.

* '''Diana Taurasi''': Guard for the Phoenix Mercury [[LongRunner since 2004]], drafted #1 overall out of [[OverusedRunningGag UConn]] after leading them to three straight national titles. [[ArsonMurderAndLifesaving Hot-headed, foul-mouthed, charismatic, and exceedingly talented]], she won three championships in Phoenix, claimed one regular season MVP and two Finals [=MVPs=], led the WNBA in scoring five times (and assists once), set the single season scoring record in '06, became the league's career scoring leader in '17, and was named the league's "Greatest of All Time" by fans for the WNBA's 25th anniversary in '21. Taurasi set all of these records depite sitting out the 2015 WNBA season at the request of the Russian team she then played for during the traditional basketball season, which offered her [[MoneyDearBoy a bonus well in excess of her WNBA salary]] to do so.[[note]]To put the financial decision in perspective, she was making slightly under the WNBA maximum salary (at that time) of $107,000. Her Russian team was paying her $1.5 million a season, not including the aforementioned bonus. In Taurasi's defense, she turned 33 during the 2015 WNBA season and hadn't had an offseason since she was at [=UConn=]. This wasn't the first time that Taurasi had been offered a bonus to sit out a WNBA season, and several other WNBA players have reportedly been offered similar bonuses; she's just the first player to accept such an offer. Also, Taurasi won ''six'' [=EuroLeague=] titles while playing overseas.[[/note]] As noted above, she and Sue Bird became the first basketball players with five Olympic golds in 2021. Off the court, Taurasi is married to longtime Mercury teammate Penny Taylor. She also portrayed a member of the Goon Squad in ''Space Jam: A New Legacy'', voicing White Mamba, a humanoid snake that bears her nickname.

* '''Seimone Augustus''': Forward who spent all but the last of her 16 WNBA seasons with the Minnesota Lynx. Discovered in high school for her promising basketball talent. She was even featured on the cover of ''Sports Illustrated'' for women, promoting her as the possible female Michael Jordan. Her success continued during her college years at LSU where she won many awards including College Player of the Year. She led her college team to three Final Four appearances, and LSU put a statue of her up in front of its arena in 2023. Augustus was drafted #1 overall by the Lynx in 2006, where she quickly made her presence known by winning Rookie of the Year. In 2011, when another promising rookie named Maya Moore joined the team, she led the Lynx to their first WNBA title and won the Finals MVP Award. In 2013, she once again helped lead the Lynx to their second title in franchise history. In 2015, she came back from an injury just in time for the playoffs and helped lead the Lynx to a third WNBA title. She initially planned to retire after the 2019 season, but lost most of that season to injury, and ultimately left for the L.A. Sparks as a free agent, spending the 2020 season in the "Wubble"[[labelnote:*]]"WNBA Bubble"[[/labelnote]] in Bradenton. Shortly before the start of the 2021 season, Augustus retired from play and became an assistant for the Sparks.
* '''Sue Bird''': Point guard for the Seattle Storm from her 2002 selection out of [=UConn=] as the #1 overall pick until her retirement [[LongRunners in 2022]]. The quintessential GirlNextDoor- if the girl next door could find you blind on the fast break or drain a dagger three in your face. Her especially clutch play in 2011 earned her the FanNickname "Die complaines". Bird is the WNBA's all-time leader in seasons played, games played, and total assists (leading the league in the category thrice), but doesn't have the per-game assists record (see Courtney Vandersloot below). She and fellow [=UConn=] alum Diana Taurasi (below) are the only two basketball players with five Olympic gold medals, and Bird herself is the only player, male or female, with four golds and five total medals in the FIBA World Cup. Also half of one of American sports' most prominent power couples, as the long-term partner (and now fiancée) of US women's soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Bird is also the [[CoolOldLady oldest player]] ever to play in a full WNBA season; her final game in the 2022 playoffs was about six weeks before her 42nd birthday.[[note]]The oldest player to appear in a WNBA game was Nancy Lieberman (the namesake of the best-known award for top D-I PG), who appeared in a single game in 2008 at age 50.[[/note]]

* '''Sue Bird''': Point guard for the Seattle Storm from her 2002 selection out of [=UConn=] as the #1 overall pick until her retirement [[LongRunners in 2022]]. The quintessential GirlNextDoor- if the girl next door could find you blind on the fast break or drain a dagger three in your face. Her especially clutch play in 2011 earned her the FanNickname "Die complaines". Bird is the WNBA's all-time leader in seasons played, games played, and total assists, but doesn't have the per-game assists record (see Courtney Vandersloot below). She and fellow [=UConn=] alum Diana Taurasi (below) are the only two basketball players with five Olympic gold medals, and Bird herself is the only player, male or female, with four golds and five total medals in the FIBA World Cup. Also half of one of American sports' most prominent power couples, as the long-term partner (and now fiancée) of US women's soccer star Megan Rapinoe, and began appearing in commercials for national used-car dealer [=CarMax=] in 2021. Bird is also the [[CoolOldLady oldest player]] ever to play in a full WNBA season; her final game in the 2022 playoffs was about six weeks before her 42nd birthday.[[note]]The oldest player to appear in a WNBA game was Nancy Lieberman (the namesake of the best-known award for top D-I PG), who appeared in a single game in 2008 at age 50.[[/note]]

* '''Diana Taurasi''': Guard for the Phoenix Mercury [[LongRunner since 2004]], drafted #1 overall out of [[OverusedRunningGag UConn]] after leading them to three straight national titles. [[ArsonMurderAndLifesaving Hot-headed, foul-mouthed, charismatic, and exceedingly talented]], she won three championships in Phoenix, claimed one regular season MVP and two Finals [=MVPs=], led the WNBA in scoring five times (and assists once), became the league's career scoring leader in 2017, and was named the league's "Greatest of All Time" by fans for the WNBA's 25th anniversary in 2021. Taurasi set all of these records depite sitting out the 2015 WNBA season at the request of the Russian team she then played for during the traditional basketball season, which offered her [[MoneyDearBoy a bonus well in excess of her WNBA salary]] to do so.[[note]]To put the financial decision in perspective, she was making slightly under the WNBA maximum salary (at that time) of $107,000. Her Russian team was paying her $1.5 million a season, not including the aforementioned bonus. In Taurasi's defense, she turned 33 during the 2015 WNBA season and hadn't had an offseason since she was at [=UConn=]. This wasn't the first time that Taurasi had been offered a bonus to sit out a WNBA season, and several other WNBA players have reportedly been offered similar bonuses; she's just the first player to accept such an offer. Also, Taurasi won ''six'' [=EuroLeague=] titles while playing overseas.[[/note]] As noted above, she and Sue Bird became the first basketball players with five Olympic golds in 2021. Off the court, Taurasi is married to longtime Mercury teammate Penny Taylor. She also portrayed a member of the Goon Squad in ''Space Jam: A New Legacy'', voicing White Mamba, a humanoid snake that bears her nickname.

* '''Diana Taurasi''': Guard for the Phoenix Mercury, drafted #1 overall in 2004 out of [[OverusedRunningGag UConn]]. [[ArsonMurderAndLifesaving Hot-headed, foul-mouthed, charismatic, and exceedingly talented]]. She became the league's career scoring leader during the 2017 season, and was named the league's GOAT[[labelnote:*]]greatest of all time[[/labelnote]] by fans for the WNBA's 25th anniversary in 2021. Has gotten in a little bit of trouble, caught DUI in 2009 and implicated in steroid use (turned out to be a false positive from a sketchy lab). Sat out the 2015 WNBA season at the request of the Russian team she then played for during the traditional basketball season, which offered her [[MoneyDearBoy a bonus well in excess of her WNBA salary]] to sit out.[[note]]To put the financial decision in perspective, she was making slightly under the WNBA maximum salary (at that time) of $107,000. Her Russian team was paying her $1.5 million a season, not including the aforementioned bonus. In Taurasi's defense, she turned 33 during the 2015 WNBA season, and hadn't had an offseason since she was at [=UConn=]. This wasn't the first time that Taurasi had been offered a bonus to sit out a WNBA season, and several other WNBA players have reportedly been offered similar bonuses; she's just the first player to accept such an offer.[[/note]] As noted above, she and Sue Bird became the first basketball players with five Olympic golds in 2021. Also portrayed a member of the Goon Squad in ''Space Jam: A New Legacy'', voicing White Mamba, a humanoid snake that bears her nickname.

* '''Caitlin Clark''': Though yet to formally enter the WNBA, as she is currently still playing college ball in Iowa, Clark is possibly ''already'' the most famous woman to ever play basketball and all but guaranteed to be the Indiana Fever's #1 overall pick in 2024. A dominant long-range scorer and an equally skilled passer, Clark essentially rewrote the record books for college basketball; she holds the NCAA Division I record for both women and men in career points and three-pointers scored, scored more points than any male or female player in NCAA tournament history in Iowa's 2023 campaign (coming up short in the final against LSU), and led the nation in both points and assists in three of her four seasons at Iowa. Perhaps even more critically, she contributed to a nigh-unprecedented interest in women's basketball, setting several attendance and viewership records throughout her career--notably, the average viewership for women's college basketball actually ''exceeded'' men's basketball during her final season.

''Note'': these are mostly players who have, or have had, pop culture currency; if you want to make a women's basketball reference, you'll probably use one of these players.

* '''Kansas Jayhawks''' -- Arguably the team most intimately connected with the sport's history. The team's very first coach was James Naismith... yes, the very same James Naismith mentioned at the top of this page. Ironically, he was the only Jayhawks head coach to finish his Kansas career with a losing record. Four of their head coaches are in the Hall of Fame in that role--Phog Allen (the namesake of their arena), Larry Brown, former North Carolina coach Roy Williams, and current Jayhawks head coach Bill Self. (Naismith is in the Hall as a contributor.) Players? Just to name a few: Clyde Lovellette, UsefulNotes/WiltChamberlain, Jo Jo White, and Paul Pierce are in the Hall, and other past Jayhawks stars include Danny Manning and Joel Embiid. And that doesn't even get into players who went on to make their mark in coaching, with Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith (whom we'll get to soon) being the most notable. Besides their four NCAA championship titles ('52, '88, '08, '22), here are just some of the program's records going into the 2024 NCAA tournament:

** Before being forced to vacate 15 wins from the 2017–18 season due to fielding an ineligible player, it had the most wins, with 2,385 at the end of 2022–23. (Counting the reduction, they're at 2,392 going into the 2024 NCAA tournament.) The Jayhawks are now second to the next team on our list...

As for Gonzaga, even though it hasn't won a national title[[note]](the Zags also didn't even make the Final Four until 2017)[[/note]], it gets special status for two reasons: First, it's a quite small Catholic school in Eastern UsefulNotes/{{Washington}} that plays in the decidedly mid-major West Coast Conference.[[note]]Meaning that, in some of those years, they wouldn't have made it to the NCAA tournament without winning the conference tournament.[[/note]] Second, it's done it without the benefit of any revenue from football (Gonzaga hasn't had a football team since 1941).[[note]]Significant because football programs often subsidize other sports at a school. Although men's basketball makes money at many schools, it very often benefits from the money and exposure that the football team gets.[[/note]] The Zags are also the most recent D-I men's team to enter the tournament unbeaten, doing so in 2021... though they had to recover from a beatdown by Baylor in that season's title game. They got the top overall seed in 2022 anyway, but that season further cemented their recent status as a victim of EveryYearTheyFizzleOut, going down in the Sweet Sixteen.\\\

** In 2024, Southern Indiana, in the second year of its transition, won the Ohio Valley Conference's regular-season women's title by ''six games''. The Screaming Eagles earned a bye into the tournament semifinals, and romped through the rest of the tournament, winning the semifinal by 15 and the final by 28. The NCAA autobid went to the UT Martin team that USI had wiped the floor with in the final.

As with all sports, college basketball hands out a boatload of postseason awards, both at the conference and national levels, to both players and coaches. Because of the sheer number of awards, we can't list them all here, but we're including several of the more prominent national awards. Winners are from the 2022–23 season.\\\

*** ''Most recent winner (2024)'': Staley[[note]]Repeated from 2023.[[/note]]

*** ''Most recent winner (2023)'': Ta'Niya Latson, PG, Florida State

*** ''Most recent winner (2023)'': Staley

*** ''Most recent winners'': Zach Edey, C, junior[[labelnote:*]]US college students in general are classified in order of the number of years of attendance. In ascending order: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.[[/labelnote]], Purdue; Caitlin Clark, PG, junior, Iowa (women)

*** ''Most recent winners'': Edey (men); Clark (women)

*** ''Most recent winner'': Clark

*** ''Most recent winner'': Markquis Nowell, 5th-year senior,[[note]]Nowell would normally have run out of college eligibility in 2021–22, but the NCAA ruled that the 2020–21 season, heavily disrupted by COVID-19, would not count against the eligibility of any individual in the NCAA's winter sports, including basketball.[[/note]] Kansas State

*** ''Most recent winner'': Marcus Sasser, senior, Houston

*** ''Most recent winner'': Jalen Wilson, senior, Kansas

*** ''Most recent winner'': Trayce Jackson-Davis, senior, Indiana

*** ''Most recent winner'': Edey

*** ''Most recent winner'': Clark[[note]]Repeated from 2022.[[/note]]

*** ''Most recent winner'': Zia Cooke, senior, South Carolina

*** ''Most recent winner'': Ashley [[MyNaymeIs Joens]], 5th-year senior, Iowa State[[note]]Three-time winner (2021–23). Also took advantage of the COVID-19 waiver to play in a fifth season.[[/note]]

*** ''Most recent winner'': Maddy Siegrist, senior, Villanova

*** ''Most recent winner'': Aliyah Boston, senior, South Carolina[[note]][[SerialEscalation Four-time winner]] (2020–23).[[/note]]

*** ''Most recent winner'': Brandon Miller, F, Alabama

*** ''Most recent winner'': Ta'Niya Latson, PG, Florida State

** ''Most recent Division I winners'': Ben Vander Plas, Virginia (men);[[note]]Repeated from 2022, when he was playing for Ohio.[[/note]] Clark (women)[[note]]Went on to be named CSC's D-I Academic All-American of the Year across all sports.[[/note]]

*** ''Most recent winners'': Jerome Tang, Kansas State (men); Dawn Staley, South Carolina (women)

*** ''Most recent winners'': Shaka Smart, Marquette (men); Teri Moren, Indiana (women)

*** ''Most recent winner'': Smart

*** ''Most recent winner'': Staley

*** ''Most recent winner'': Shawn Poppie,[[note]]male[[/note]] Chattanooga

* '''Kentucky Wildcats''' -- Coached by the great Adolph Rupp, aka "The Baron of the Bluegrass", from 1931–72. Won eight NCAA tournaments, including four under Rupp, and have appeared in more NCAA tournaments than any other program. Three of those came in just four seasons (1948–51). Two years after the third, the team was forced to suspend operations for a full year due to several of its players being implicated in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCNY_point-shaving_scandal CCNY point shaving scandal]]; while the other six programs punished by this scandal never fully recovered from the NCAA's "death penalty", Kentucky was almost unfazed. The Wildcats are the only program to have won national titles under five different coaches--Rupp, his successor Joe B. Hall, Rick Pitino, Tubby Smith, and current coach John Calipari. They were the program that lost the 1966 final to the considerably less prestigious Texas Western (now Texas-El Paso, or UTEP), and that's the story in the movie ''Film/GloryRoad''. Before being passed by Kansas during the 2022 NCAA tournament, they were the all-time winningest team in college basketball, but reclaimed that distinction after KU was forced to vacate most of its 2017–18 wins. The Cats have also won more Southeastern Conference titles than any of the other teams... combined. The Kentucky women's team had been making some strides as well, briefly interrupted by off-court turmoil in 2015–16, though they've so far had a bad case of EveryYearTheyFizzleOut. The Kentucky women however did manage to achieve an incredible feat when they upset [[TheJuggernaut top-ranked (and eventual national champ) South Carolina]] in the 2022 SEC Women's Basketball Tournament Final by the score of 64–62.[[note]]Though it ''was'' the tournament championship game, South Carolina had already won the ''official'' SEC title. That conference determines its men's and women's basketball champions solely by regular-season conference record. The tournaments only determine the SEC's autobids to the men's and women's NCAA tournaments.[[/note]]

Throughout TheSixties and TheSeventies the NCAA tournament was only open to conference champions and a few highly-ranked independent schools, with a total field of around two dozen teams. Eventually everyone recognized that this restriction was leaving a lot of good teams out of the tournament. In particular, the plights of USC in 1971 (the Trojans finished 24–2 and were clearly the second best team in the country, but UCLA's dynasty was in full gear and they took the Pac-8 title) and Maryland in 1974 (ranked #4 in the country, the Terrapins had nowhere to go after a crushing overtime loss in the ACC tournament title game against NC State) helped spur the NCAA to start handing out at-large bids. 1975 saw the NCAA field expand to 32 teams, a move that solidified it as the premier postseason tournament, demoting the NIT (see below) to also-ran status. Since 2011, the base of the tournament structure has involved up to 68 teams[[note]]starting with 32 teams, in 1979 it was expanded to 48 teams, expanded to 64 in 1984, 65 in 2001, and the current 68 in 2011[[/note]] divided into four groups and seeded within each group. Number 1 plays number 16, 2 plays 15, and so on. The tournament added a play-in game, in which two small schools play for a 16th seed, in 2001. Since 2011, there has been a new series of four games, the First Four, held in Dayton, Ohio (except for the first post-COVID tournament in 2021, when the NCAA moved the entire tournament to Indiana).[[note]]The VCU Rams made history in the very first year of the First Four's existence, going all the way from the First Four to the Final Four. The UCLA Bruins matched that feat in 2021.[[/note]] Two of the games feature the four lowest-ranked conference champions playing for #16 seeds. The other two involve the four lowest-ranked at-large entries; they most often play for #11 seeds (18 times through 2023), though in the past they have played for #12 (four times), #13 (once), and #14 seeds (once). Confused yet here?\\\

* '''Duke Blue Devils''' - UNC's most geographically direct and most ''vehemently'' hated rivals, they were coached from [[LongRunners 1980 to 2022]] by Mike Krzyzewski ("shi-shef-skee"[[note]]only a very loose approximation of the actual Polish pronunciation[[/note]]), often referred to as Coach K.[[note]]He also coached the US national men's basketball team in various positions from 1979 to 2016, including being an assistant coach at the 1992 UsefulNotes/OlympicGames (the Dream Team) and head coach from 2006 through 2016 (including the 2008 Olympic Redeem Team and 2012 Olympic Small-Ball Dream Team)[[/note]] In 2015, Coach K became the first men's head coach with 1,000 career NCAA Division I wins.[[note]]Not the first NCAA Division I coach with 1,000 wins--we'll get to the first later. He ''is'' the D-I men's coach with the most wins at one school--but only because the NCAA ordered more than 100 of Jim Boeheim's wins at Syracuse vacated; Coach K began his coaching career at Army.[[/note]] With just four Final Four appearances before Coach K came to Durham, they made it 13 times during his tenure, including five national championships... though his final game was a loss to North Carolina in the 2022 Final Four.[[note]]Which, by the way, was the first time the arch-rivals had ''ever'' played one another in the NCAA tournament.[[/note]] Duke players (Christian Laettner of the Dream Team, Elton Brand, Shane Battier, Jason Williams, JJ Redick) aren't superstars in the NBA, though, with the notable exceptions of Mr. NiceGuy Grant Hill, Kyrie Irving (who only spent one year at the school),[[note]] He actually only played 11 games for the team due to spending most of the season sidelined with a toe injury.[[/note]] and Zion Williamson. Former Duke player Jon Scheyer, who had been Coach K's top assistant, is now trying to continue the tradition Coach K built.
* '''Indiana Hoosiers''' - Five-time national champions, they are famous for having been coached from 1972 to 2000 by Bob Knight, who coached them to three of those titles. The first of Knight's title teams, that of 1976, is also the most recent D-I men's team to complete an unbeaten season. Knight is as well-known for getting his charges through school as well as his HairTriggerTemper. Indiana's trophy winners at the college level included Scott May and Calbert Cheaney. IU hasn't done much in women's basketball, but the Hoosier women have one ''very'' notable alum--Tara [=VanDerveer=], longtime coach of women's powerhouse Stanford.
* '''Kansas Jayhawks''' - Arguably the team most intimately connected with the sport's history. The team's very first coach was James Naismith... yes, the very same James Naismith mentioned at the top of this page. Ironically, he was the only Jayhawks head coach to finish his Kansas career with a losing record. Four of their head coaches are in the Hall of Fame in that role--Phog Allen (the namesake of their arena), Larry Brown, former North Carolina coach Roy Williams, and current Jayhawks head coach Bill Self. (Naismith is in the Hall as a contributor.) Players? Just to name a few: Clyde Lovellette, UsefulNotes/WiltChamberlain, Jo Jo White, and Paul Pierce are in the Hall, and other past Jayhawks stars include Danny Manning and Joel Embiid. And that doesn't even get into players who went on to make their mark in coaching, with Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith (whom we'll get to soon) being the most notable. Besides their four NCAA championship titles ('52, '88, '08, '22), here are just some of the program's records as of the end of the 2022–23 season:
** Longest streak of NCAA Tournament appearances: 33

** Most winning seasons in Division I history: 99 (also the most seasons at .500 or better, with 102)

** Before being forced to vacate 15 wins from the 2017–18 season due to fielding an ineligible player, it had the most wins, at 2,385. The Jayhawks are now second to the next team on our list...
* '''Kentucky Wildcats''' - Coached by the great Adolph Rupp, aka "The Baron of the Bluegrass", from 1931-72. Won eight NCAA tournaments, including four under Rupp, and have appeared in more NCAA tournaments than any other program. Three of those came in just four seasons (1948-51). Two years after the third, the team was forced to suspend operations for a full year due to several of its players being implicated in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCNY_point-shaving_scandal CCNY point shaving scandal]]; while the other six programs punished by this scandal never fully recovered from the NCAA's "death penalty", Kentucky was almost unfazed. The Wildcats are the only program to have won national titles under five different coaches--Rupp, his successor Joe B. Hall, Rick Pitino, Tubby Smith, and current coach John Calipari. They were the program that lost the 1966 final to the considerably less prestigious Texas Western (now Texas-El Paso, or UTEP), and that's the story in the movie ''Film/GloryRoad''. Before being passed by Kansas during the 2022 NCAA tournament, they were the all-time winningest team in college basketball, but reclaimed that distinction after KU was forced to vacate most of its 2017–18 wins. The Cats have also won more Southeastern Conference titles than any of the other teams... combined. The Kentucky women's team had been making some strides as well, briefly interrupted by off-court turmoil in 2015–16, though they've so far had a bad case of EveryYearTheyFizzleOut. The Kentucky women however did manage to achieve an incredible feat when they upset [[TheJuggernaut top-ranked (and eventual national champ) South Carolina]] in the 2022 SEC Women's Basketball Tournament Final by the score of 64-62.[[note]]Though it ''was'' the tournament championship game, South Carolina had already won the ''official'' SEC title. That conference determines its men's and women's basketball champions solely by regular-season conference record. The tournaments only determine the SEC's autobids to the men's and women's NCAA tournaments.[[/note]]
* '''North Carolina Tar Heels''' - First and foremost, famous for being UsefulNotes/MichaelJordan's alma mater. The Tar Heels are six-time NCAA champions; Dean Smith, their coach from 1962-97, coached them to two of those, and Roy Williams, their coach from 2003-21, led them to three. The Heels had the longest streak ever of consecutive NCAA tournament appearances at 27, making every tournament from 1975-2001, before Kansas passed them in 2017. In 2022, under first-year coach (and former Heels player) Hubert Davis, Carolina not only ended Coach K's career in the NCAA tournament, but also spoiled his final home game at Duke. The Carolina women have one national title to their credit (1994).
* '''UCLA Bruins''' - In their prime, Lew Alcindor (later known as Creator/KareemAbdulJabbar) or Bill Walton was playing. The late, great John Wooden coached this team from 1949 to 1975. The Bruins hold the (men's) record for longest winning streak: 88 games from 1971 to 1974, with Walton among them. They had a couple of long winning streaks in the future Kareem's time there, too. But more importantly, they have eleven NCAA championships, ten of which were won in Wooden's last twelve seasons as coach.
* '''[=UConn=] Huskies''' - The reigning NCAA champion. Representing the University of Connecticut, the Huskies men were a regional power in New England for many decades, and the school was also a founding member of the original Big East Conference in 1979. However, [=UConn=] didn't become a national name until the 1990s under coach Jim Calhoun. After falling short of the Final Four throughout that decade, they broke through in 1999, not only reaching the Final Four but also claiming the national title. They went on to win two more titles in '04 and '11 under Calhoun. After he retired just before the 2012–13 season, he was replaced by his top assistant (and former [=UConn=] player) Kevin Ollie. After being barred from the '13 tournament for academic reasons, and being left behind in the conference realignment shuffle of the early 2010s,[[note]]Unlike NJIT, whose conference imploded around it and couldn't find a home, [=UConn=] was instead stuck in the American Athletic Conference, the football rump of the former Big East.[[/note]] they picked up a fourth national title in 2014 before falling into a dry spell, leading to Ollie's replacement by Dan Hurley, a member of a prominent coaching family. The Huskies revived their (men's) fortunes with a move to the reconfigured Big East in 2020, followed by a fifth natty in '23. Among their star players are Ray Allen and Richard "Rip" Hamilton (the latter a star on the first championship team). As strong as [=UConn=] is in men's basketball, it's even stronger in women's basketball. Led by coach Geno Auriemma, the Huskies[[note]] not Lady Huskies[[/note]] have won ''11'' national titles.[[note]][=UConn=] is the only Division I school to have won the men's and women's NCAA titles in the same season--and the Huskies have done it ''twice''. The only other NCAA school to match the feat is Division II Central Missouri, and Northwestern College of Iowa is the only NAIA school to do it.[[/note]] This makes [=UConn=] the only school whose men's and women's teams have both won multiple D-I national titles. Among their rivals in both versions of the Big East are the...
* '''Villanova Wildcats''' - One of UsefulNotes/{{Philadelphia}}'s "Big Five" basketball programs,[[note]]The other traditional members are La Salle, Pennsylvania, Saint Joseph's, and Temple. Drexel was officially added to the rivalry in 2023–24, but the group is [[ArtifactTitle still the "Big Five"]] (partially at Drexel's insistence).[[/note]] [[FanNickname Nova]] has been a power in the region for decades, regularly making NCAA appearances, but made their first major splash in 1971, losing in the championship game to UCLA... though that result would be wiped from the record books when it came out that their biggest star had signed a pro contract during that season. The Wildcats' first championship in 1985 was one of the biggest shocks in NCAA tournament history this side of UMBC over Virginia or Fairleigh Dickinson over Purdue (see below), with Nova stunning heavily favored Big East rival Georgetown thanks to shooting nearly 80% from the field in the final. Nova reached new heights in this century under HC Jay Wright, winning its second national title in 2016 over North Carolina on a buzzer-beating three-pointer and its third in 2018 in dominant fashion, winning all of their tournament games by double digits. However, in a ''far'' more stunning move than that of Coach K, Wright retired after the 2021–22 season.[[note]]Stunning in that Coach K was 75 at the time of his final game, while Wright was "just" 60.[[/note]]

Honorable mention goes to the '''UsefulNotes/{{Michigan}} State Spartans''' and '''Gonzaga Bulldogs'''[[note]]unofficially known as "Zags"[[/note]], which, with the aforementioned Jayhawks, are in the midst of the three longest current March Madness appearance streaks (at 33 for the Jayhawks, 25 for the Spartans, and 24 for the Bulldogs).[[note]]Michigan State and Gonzaga were also locks for the canceled 2020 NCAA Tournament, with the Zags being a near-certain #1 regional seed. Duke had a string of 24 straight appearances end in 2021.[[/note]] Michigan State has ten Final Fours and six Big Ten tournament championships, but have only won it all twice.[[note]]Once in 1979, where the final against Indiana State is notable for being the first meeting between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and once more in 2000 under coach Tom Izzo featuring star players Charlie Bell and Mateen Cleaves.[[/note]] In spite of this, they have done well under the leadership of coach Tom Izzo for the last 27 years and often make at least the Sweet Sixteen.

* '''Old Dominion''': The Monarchs (known in their heyday as the Lady Monarchs) out of the Hampton Roads city of Norfolk, Virginia, were a dynasty of the early '80s, coached by the aforementioned Marianne Stanley. Its stars included Anne Donovan and Nancy Lieberman, both of whom are members of the Naismith and Women's Halls. When power schools were forced to pay more attention to women's sports, their star faded, though they are still a force in their conference.

* '''South Carolina''': The two-time national champion Gamecocks emerged in the last half of the 2010s as the SEC's new kid on the block with double Hall of Fame player Dawn Staley as head coach. They've made every NCAA tournament since 2012, missing the Sweet Sixteen only once in that span, with four Final Fours and the 2017 and '22 national titles as well, in the latter season becoming the only team ever to beat [=UConn=] in a national title game. Not to mention they were the top-ranked team when COVID scuttled the 2020 tournament; Carolina claims a mythical national title from that season. Current WNBA superstar A'ja Wilson was the biggest star of the first title team, with Aliyah Boston, star of the 2020s teams, ready to join her in WNBA superstardom as the top overall pick in the 2023 WNBA draft and that year's unanimous Rookie of the Year. Even with Boston and several other stars gone in 2023–24, the Gamecocks entered the NCAA tournament unbeaten. The Gamecocks suffered rare tastes of defeat when they were upset by Kentucky in the 2022 SEC Championship Game, and again when one Caitlin Clark torched them for 41 points to lead Iowa to an upset in the 2023 NCAA semifinals, spoiling a previously unbeaten season.