When UConn makes the NCAA men's basketball tournament, you had better hope it loses early or else the fate of the tournament might already be decided. At least, that's what the last decade and a half of results show.
Since the 2010-11 season, the postseason finish for the Huskies has followed a fascinating trend: UConn will either miss the NCAA tournament, lose during the first weekend (the first or second round) ... or win the whole thing.
It started with the Kemba Walker-led Huskies' run to the 2011 championship. After finishing the regular season just 9-9 in Big East play, that season's UConn squad found another gear. The Huskies proceeded to win five games in five days (including four over ranked opponents, highlighted by Walker's iconic winning shot against top-seeded Pittsburgh) to win the Big East tournament, then ripped off another six straight wins to hoist the national championship trophy.
A short down period would follow. UConn was eliminated in the second round of the NCAA tournament the next year, and then was ineligible for the tournament in 2013 because of low Academic Progress Rate scores.
Coach Kevin Ollie -- who took over after Jim Calhoun's retirement in 2012 -- orchestrated quite a bounce-back in 2014. The Huskies entered the tournament as a No. 7 seed, and, after surviving an overtime test in the first round against Saint Joseph's, proceeded to win five more games to cut down the nets in Arlington, Texas. UConn became the first 7 seed to win the championship.
After that title though, the Huskies went into another lull. Over the next six seasons, UConn would make the tournament only once, a second-round exit in 2016. Dan Hurley took over as coach in 2018, and led the team to back-to-back tournament appearances in 2021 and 2022, but both of those were first-round exits.
But those two first-round losses couldn't have been less indicative of what was coming.
Hurley's 2023 tournament squad charged to the national championship as a No. 4 seed, winning their six games by an average margin of 20 points. And the 2024 tournament team was even more dominant, upping the average tournament margin of victory to 23.3 points as UConn became the second school to repeat as men's tournament champions since Florida nearly two decades earlier.
Last season's Huskies squad was bounced in the second round after giving the eventual champion and 1 seed Gators a scare. But this season's team survived the first weekend, and Braylon Mullins' long-range winning shot against Duke on Sunday seemed to put fate on UConn's side again, which raises the question: Will history repeat itself?