During their down time, ESPN loves to do rankings to see who is the best/worst/whatever at something. Since college hoops is in their dead period, they decided to rank the top 300+ programs since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams (1984-1985 season).
They have finally gotten to the top and ... to no one's surprise ... it was occupied by Duke.
By any measure of success, Duke is king of the hill in college basketball in the 64-team era of the NCAA tournament. Besides the three national titles, Duke is No. 1 among all basketball programs with 69 NCAA tournament wins, 12 first team All-Americans, 11 top-10 NBA picks, 10 No. 1 seeds and seven title game appearances. An easy selection in any format for No. 1.
Now, ESPN used some sort of formula to come up with these rankings, so it is a numbers thing and not a "they love Duke" thing. No one has won more NCAA Championships, Final Fours, Sweet 16s, NCAA Tournament wins, first team All Americans, 30-win seasons, #1 seeds or top-ten NBA picks in the time frame.
The rest of the top ten: 2-Kansas, 3-North Carolina, 4-Kentucky, 5-Arizona, 6-UConn, 7-UCLA, 8-UNLV, 9-Syracuse, 10-Georgetown.
Oh, and there is a bit of a oopsie in regards to Kansas and North Carolina after the jump ...
Turns out that on Friday, when ESPN debuted the list, they had North Carolina ranked #2 and Kansas ranked #3. Well, the rankings changed and ESPN threw this out there:
In a July 25 story about the most prestigious college basketball programs since 1984-85, some facts for Kansas and North Carolina were incorrectly tabulated by the ESPN research department. The correct numbers for KU's conference titles and UNC's number of All-Americans resulted in Kansas switching places with North Carolina and it moved the Jayhawks from No. 3 in the overall rankings to No. 2 and dropped the Tar Heels from No. 2 to No. 3.By their point totals, UNC trailed Kansas by seven points (by comparison, UNC led #4 Kentucky by 70 points and Kansas trailed #1 Duke by 83).
