Men's basketball long lineal seldom sits still in 2020-21

Oddly enough, the long version of the men's college basketball traveling championship spent the conference portion of 2020-21 in the Big East, yet Villanova never played for it. Thus, the Wildcats didn't extend their all-time leading win total of 27. The best team of the year in this chase was Connecticut.

Edna Maud Whitney, the First Lady of Mansfield, was the first librarian at the University of Connecticut. She died in 1970, age 102 (public domain image).

So, in the 2020-21 men's college basketball long lineal, we saw 11 teams win the title  a combined 15 times, and that's not counting the team that entered the season with the title and lost it. The championship changed hands 16 times in a 29-game campaign.

We've never seen anything like it. Ordinarily, this championship might turn over 10 or 12 times, but it's taking 40 games for it to happen. 

Another peculiarity: This championship spent the conference portion of the season in the Big East for the first time since 2016-17, when Villanova piled up 23 games of title on its way to the all-time lead, which is 27 through six years of tracking. Yet, Villanova never got a chance to play for the championship in 2020-21.

Of course, with coronavirus concerns, November and December, when the intersectional games normally happen, didn't happen so much. USC held the prize entering the season and beat a couple of Western teams before venturing at the start of December to Uncasville, CT, a Mohegan casino town with a basketball arena. There, the Trojans defeated Brigham Young before losing to homestanding Connecticut.

Seems odd, perhaps, that Connecticut had never before played for the long lineal, which did, after all, spend all of 2016-17 in the Big East. The Connecticut women's teams have all but put both versions of the all-time women's championship in cold storage. But the men had never played for it.

In 2020-21, though, the Connecticut men had the best year of anyone in the long version, winning three different championships covering seven games. But all of that didn't come until later. Connecticut didn't play for almost three weeks after beating USC, then came back with a loss to Creighton, which tacked on four title defenses.

After that, it was a roller coaster. Connecticut won it's third championship in late February, beating Georgetown, then held on for four defenses before falling, again to Creighton, in the Big East semifinals.

But Georgetown beat Creighton in the conference championship to take the long lineal to the NCAA Tournament, and from that point through the end, the championship was never successfully defended. It passed successively to Colorado, Florida State, Michigan, UCLA, Gonzaga and Baylor.

The biggest game of the season in this title, and the best of the year by any measure, was the NCAA semifinal game between Gonzaga and UCLA. Gonzaga obviously didn't put the short version on the line, but UCLA went in with the long version, and that was on the table. 

Gonzaga's win, 93-90, in overtime, unified the short and and the long versions for the first time since the 2016 postseason, when they first broke apart.

Of course, Baylor easily prevailed in the championship game against Gonzaga, so the titles came right back apart. Gonzaga still holds the short version entering 2021-22.

In the big picture, the historical standings (six years, 2015-16 through 2020-21), Michigan's win brought it's total all-time to 24, breaking a third-place tie with North Carolina. Villanova still leads with 27, followed my Michigan State (26), Michigan (24) and North Carolina (23).

Creighton added six games of championship in 2020-21 and is up to nine all-time, which is where UCLA is with it's win in the NCAA Tournament. Both moved into a tie with Virginia for fifth. That means Wisconsin, which has eight, now is eighth on the all-time list.

Finally, something to discuss in women's basketball short corn

We've followed the short version of the women's basketball traveling championship silently because, simply, it wasn't traveling. After 97 games, someone finally beat Connecticut. Now, five years into tracking, three teams have won it.

As we've recounted several times, this championship began with the start of the 2015-16 season under the care of Connecticut, which was middle into a dominant run through the sport. Of course, we have two versions of this championship -- the long version, which includes the postseason tournaments, and the short version, which does not.

It stands to reason that the long version would present the best chance of challenging Connecticut, simply because the NCAA Tournament competition should produce worthy challengers, and this is how it turned out. Within two years of starting the traveler, Connecticut did lose, on a buzzer beater in the NCAA semifinals to Mississippi State.

But the short version doesn't change hands during the NCAA Tournament. That means someone needed to beat Connecticut during the regular season. And this took a while. 

It took until Jan. 3, 2019, three and one-half seasons into tracking, before Connecticut lost, 68-57, at Baylor. 

We thought UConn's 73-game winning streak as the long version caretaker was impressive. But in the short version, UConn held the title for 97 games before falling at Baylor.

Anyway, a chase is on, finally. Baylor held the short version for 26 games. In 2019-20, South Carolina knocked off Baylor, and held the title for a total of 22 games before play ended due to coronavirus.

And those are the only three teams to win the short version of the women's college basketball traveling championship in five seasons that it has been tracked. During those same five seasons, the men's college basketball short title changed hands 47 times. 

New champ in women's hoop lineal, but UConn still leads

We can look at the all-time long lineal in women's college basketball two ways: either with or without Connecticut's 73-game streak as the original caretaker. Either way, UConn is still on top after 2019-20.

We hoped for a deep, competitive NCAA Tournament in women's college basketball for 2019-20, and we got no tournament at all. Of course, coronavirus ended the season in March.

We did get some of the conference tournaments, which enabled South Carolina to tack three more games of lineal title onto 22 with which it ended the regular season. Thus, South Carolina was easily the lead team in women's basketball lineal for 2019-20, ending with 25 games.

The Gamecocks won the championship on Nov. 29, thumping Baylor, 74-59, in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. The result ended Baylor's 35-game streak with the championship, which began with a win at home against Connecticut nearly 11 months earlier.

UConn remains the all-time leader with 108 wins. But 2019-20 was the first season in which the Huskies never held the championship. They failed in a challenge against South Carolina's onslaught in February. Baylor in second place at 35, which is what Connecticut would be left with subtracting its 73-game caretaker run.

South Carolina, the title holder at the end of 2019-20, was third all-time with 31 wins, followed by Notre Dame with 11.

UConn down but definitely not out for women's long traveler

Even since its dominant run with the women's college basketball traveling championship has ended, Connecticut remains a strong player for the title. But the results this year have not shown it.

Christyn Williams is a key player for a Connecticut women's basketball team trying to return to the top (Danny Karwoski/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).

When we began tracking the women's college basketball traveling championship with the 2015-16 season, Connecticut was in the middle of its historically dominant run through the sport.

The Huskies already had won 38 consecutive games and three straight national championships. They were the only choice to be the caretaking lineal champion. And they ratified that choice with 73 straight wins from the start of the 2015-16 season until March 31, 2017, when a buzzer-beater brought them down to a 66-64 loss to Mississippi State in the national semifinals.

Now, we're on 2019-20, and this isn't a year in which Connecticut is a hands-down favorite to win the NCAA Tournament. Maybe that era of dominance is over for good, maybe it's just taking a breather, but no one is going to stay as victorious for as long as Connecticut was victorious for any longer than Connecticut was that victorious.

From the moment when Connecticut finally lost, this competition took on a new look. Connecticut was set in the lead at 73 games of championship. What would come next?

What has happened since then is that the Huskies still are about as good as anyone. They're not a top-down, lead-pipe cinch to win every game, but you probably wouldn't bet against them. Then again, if you had bet against them this year when they played Baylor, Oregon and South Carolina, you would have won, even giving away a lot of points.

We're are at the end of February now, and Connecticut hasn't held the long version of the women's lineal title for a moment of the season. In fact, Connecticut hasn't held it since Jan. 3, 2019, when the Huskies ventured to Baylor and lost to the new top team in the country, 68-57.

The 2019-20 season has brought some difficult, historic losses on UConn. On Jan. 9, it played No. 6 Baylor again, this time in Hartford, and lost, 74-58, ending UConn's 98-game homecourt winning streak. On Feb. 3, third-ranked Oregon visited and thumped the Huskies, 74-56, in Gampel Pavilion, the campus home where they had never lost that badly and where they hadn't lost at all in seven years. Now, the Huskies have lost twice at home for the first time since 2013.

On Feb. 10, the Huskies traveled to Columbia, SC, to take on the new lead team and traveling champion in women's college basketball, South Carolina. And UConn didn't even come close in a 70-52 loss. It was UConn's first loss in three attempts as a linear title challenger.

Despite its recent foibles, Connecticut has remained a force in this championship since finally losing that provisional title at the 2017 Final Four. The first time UConn got to challenge for the championship, it took down Notre Dame at home, 80-71, on Dec. 3, 2017, then held the title for 29 more games before the Irish took it back with a 91-89 win in the national semifinals.

So, Notre Dame held the title going to 2018-19, and UConn got another challenge against the Irish on Dec 2, 2018, coming out of it with an 89-71 win and its second earned traveling championship. UConn held that title for five games before the loss at Baylor in January 2019, and hasn't held it since.

As we look at the all-time standings today, then, UConn is well on top with 108 games of championship since we began this at the start of 2015-16. From the moment when UConn first lost, though, this has become quite an interesting race.

Baylor since then has the title it won from UConn then defended 34 times until Nov. 30, 2019, when it lost to South Carolina, 74-59, in the Virgin Islands. So, Baylor has 35 games of championship all-time. South Carolina has held the title ever since, for 20 defenses. It also had a six-game title after winning the 2017 Final Four. So, South Carolina has 27 games of championship, total, along with two championships. Notre Dame also has two titles, but only 11 games of championship, falling twice to challenges from UConn. Mississippi State, the team that originally beat UConn in the 2017 semifinals, immediately lost in the championship game to South Carolina.

That's what the other programs in women's college basketball have done with the traveling championship at the 2017 Final Four, when UConn finally lost it. What has UConn done with it since then? Not bad. Two championships and 33 games of defense, for a total of 35 games. They're right there with anyone since they have become merely beatable.

So, this isn't a year when you're thinking UConn will win the national title. The Huskies have absolutely been handled this year by Baylor, Oregon and South Carolina. But the Huskies still are right there. They'll go to the NCAA Tournament again and win a couple of rounds easily. Once we get into the Sweet 16, though, we could actually have a deep, competitive tournament, and the traveling championship will go right along with it.

UConn finally loses in women's short traveling championship

The University of Connecticut women's basketball team didn't quite make it to 100 straight games with the short version of the national traveling championship. Baylor saw to that in 2018-19.

Connecticut ran its streak of caretaker defenses to 97 games before finally losing the women's basketball short-season traveling championship.

Probably no team in any sport will hold a traveling championship for long enough to catch this all-time record. The second-longest streak also belongs to the UConn women's basketball team, a 73-game run that lasted almost two full years and ended in the 2017 NCAA Tournament semifinals.

UConn began the 2018-19 season with an impressive run of wins, not the least of which was an 89-71  win at top-ranked Notre Dame on Dec. 2, unifying the long and short women's basketball traveling titles. Notre Dame had taken the long season championship from Connecticut in the 2018 NCAA Tournament semifinals.

But the Huskies lasted only a month before venturing into Waco, TX, for a meeting with the Baylor Bears. Top-ranked at the moment UConn fell, 68-57, to eighth-rated Baylor. That set Baylor on a path to 19 straight victories as they won out to finish the regular season.

So, UConn is on top of the all-time standings with 97 wins. Baylor, the only other team to win this championship in four years, is second with 19.

Baylor ends 2018-19 with 28 wins in long women's traveling title

The Baylor women's basketball team finished the 2018-19 season with 28 straight wins in the long-season traveling championship.

The long season version of the women's college basketball traveling championship followed the path of the country's top teams in 2018-19.

It began with Notre Dame, which won the national championship in 2018 after claiming its second traveling title, the most of any team. The Irish held the championship for their first seven games of 2018-19 before taking their top ranking against Connecticut, the perennial power. Connecticut won the game, 89-71, at Notre Dame, for its second title earned on the floor, which tied the Irish.

Of course, UConn already had 103 all-time victories from this championship in its pocket and added five more before putting its top ranking on the line at Baylor, which was ranked eighth nationally. But Baylor actually was better than that, first claiming a 68-57 win against UConn to take over the long (and short) titles, then winning all the way through to the NCAA championship, a total run of 28 games.

Baylor will take the championship to the 2019-2020 season with those wins. It's still far short of UConn, which now has 108 wins. But it is a long way ahead of third-place Notre Dame (11), fourth-place South Carolina (six) or the only other team with a win, Mississippi State (one).

Notre Dame tops UConn in titles, Huskies lead in wins

After its stunning run to open the women's college basketball traveling championship, the Connecticut Huskies won one outright in 2017-18, then defended it 29 times. But Notre Dame ended the year with the title.

One essential dramatic element missing from the women's full season traveling college basketball championship in the first two years was, uh, plot twists.

There were none for the first 73 games of the prize's existence while Connecticut defended a place-holder title to begin this history. Finally, in the 2017 NCAA Tournament semifinals, Connecticut lost, 66-64, to Mississippi State on March 31, and we started seeing some action.

First, South Carolina took it right away from Mississippi State with a 67-55 win in the NCAA Championship Game, then carried the title into the 2017-18 season. From there, South Carolina made five defenses before a 92-85 loss to Notre Dame in Estoria, FL, on Nov. 25.

The Irish made only one defense before facing Connecticut at UConn on Dec. 3, and UConn has only four home losses since March 6, 2007. Then again, Notre Dame is responsible for two of them. This time, though, UConn won, 80-71, actually winning the title for the very first time.

Fitting the achievement, then, UConn held onto it for a long time, 30 games, all the way up to the NCAA Tournament semifinals, where it again played Notre Dame. This time, the Irish won, and they held on to beat Mississippi State, 61-58, in the NCAA Championship Game.

Adding it up, Notre Dame now has the most championships historically with two. UConn, South Carolina and Mississippi State each have one. But UConn is the clear leader all-time with 103 wins, followed by South Carolina (six), Notre Dame (four) and Mississippi State (one).

UConn still untoppled in women's short cage chase

Three years into starting the women's college short version of the traveling national championship, Connecticut has yet to lose. The Huskies have run their winning streak to 86 games through 2017-18.

We were remiss to not introduce the short-season women's college basketball championship earlier, but there wasn't any point.

And, really, there still isn't.

We started tracking it in 2015-16, same time as the full version that includes the postseason tournaments. Of course, the team charged with the first defense was Connecticut, the defending national champion. Combine that with no postseason to derail UConn, and you can imagine how this has gone.

Three years into this thing, UConn still hasn't lost a game. The Huskies are up to 86 straight wins, far outpacing their 73 straight for the full-season version. That streak snapped with a 66-64 loss to Mississippi State in the 2017 NCAA Tournament semifinals.

South Carolina captures women's basketball corn

South Carolina led steadily throughout Sunday, winning the women's national basketball traveling championship and giving Head Coach Dawn Staley another huge achievement.

Dawn Staley truly has done it all in women's basketball now that her South Carolina Gamecocks have won the traveling championship in women's college basketball (Sphilbrick/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).

It's a new world in women's college basketball, now that someone finally has beaten Connecticut. 

That world now belongs to South Carolina, guided by Head Coach Dawn Staley to the national collegiate traveling championship with a 67-55 win against Mississippi State in the national championship game Sunday in Dallas.

By every account, Staley is one of the all-time greats in women's basketball. She is, in fact, a Hall of Famer as of 2013. In 2011, fans voted her one of the top 15 players all-time in the WNBA, and this was halfway into her pro career. For six seasons, she simultaneously played in the WNBA and coached the women's team at Temple. In eight years coaching at Temple, she took the Owls to six NCAA Tournaments. In March, she was named to coach the national women's team.

But she had never won the national championship at the collegiate level in four years as a player and 16 years as a coach, despite going to the Final Four three times as a point guard at Virginia and once before as the coach at South Carolina.

Mississippi State entered Sunday's game off the high of being the team that finally beat Connecticut, but didn't have much left for the encounter with South Carolina. The Gamecocks were up, 36-26, at halftime. The Bulldogs cut it to 54-50 with 5:50 left, but that was as close as they could get.

A'ja Wilson led South Carolina with 23 points.

South Carolina became the second team to win the women's collegiate traveling championship in two years of tracking. The Gamecocks will take the championship with them to the 2017-18 season.

2015-16 season

UConn finally falls after 73 traveler defenses

The University of Connecticut ended its long stewardship of the national traveling championship of women's college basketball, losing to Mississippi State Friday night in the national semifinals. The Bulldogs become the first team to win this championship.

Geno Auriemma coached the University of Connecticut to 73 wins caretaking the national traveling championship in women's college basketball. Now, he can seek his first such title (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff/public domain image).

Nearing two years of following a traveling championship through women's college basketball, we still didn't have a winner.

Until Friday night, when Mississippi State shocked Connecticut, 66-64, in overtime, in the national semifinals.

The result marks the first actual winning of the national women's college basketball traveling championship since it started being tracked at the start of the 2015-16 season.

At that point, as UConn was the defending national champion with 38 straight wins, the Ear of Corn was bestowed provisionally upon the Huskies, to be theirs until someone beat them. And no one could do it for another 73 games. Until Friday night.

The Huskies remain the team on top of the all-time traveling championship standings with 73 wins, compared with one for all of the other teams combined.

But the Huskies still aren't credited with actually winning the championship, no matter how many times they defended it. To win the championship, one must beat the champion, and that's not how UConn got it. Thus, Mississippi State becomes the all time leader in traveling championships with one. Everyone else has zero.

But that can change quickly now. Mississippi State will play next Monday night in the national championship game against South Carolina with the traveling title on the line.

And how about Mississippi State? Of the four national traveling championships we have in college sports – two in men's basketball and one each in women's basketball and college football – Mississippi State was the first winner in two of them.

But we can't let go of UConn that quickly. What they accomplished as the provisional champions is nearly unheard of in our parallel universe of traveling championships.

What follows could more of what is said here, but why say all of that again?

Let's say instead that the parallel universe published herein has seldom spun off such a dominating winner in any sport.

The only sport with a more impressive run by one team is college football – and we can say that only because we've been tracking college football for 38 years.

Miami (FL) held the college football version for 32 straight games – from Oct. 7, 2000 until January 3, 2003. That's more than two calendar years. Southern Cal approached that with 26 straight wins starting on Jan. 4, 2004 and ending on Jan. 4, 2006. With a win in that 45-41 Fiesta Bowl loss to Texas, the Trojans would have cruised past Miami by the calendar year measure.

UConn didn't quite make it to two full seasons. But their run compares favorably with others in history.

In the NFL, the Green Bay Packers once won 14 straight for the Ear of Corn, which approaches a year's worth of games and comes nowhere near two. It's the best any pro football team has done.

Another college football team, Alabama, had a somewhat similar run to UConn's when we initiated the traveling championship for college football in 1979. Alabama was given the title provisionally and defended it for 19 games, a season and a half, before finally losing. Like UConn, the school that took down Alabama for the first championship won on the field was Mississippi State, by a 6-3 score on Nov. 1, 1980, in Starkville.

In the pro basketball traveling championship, the Golden State Warriors opened last year with 24 straight wins, a drop less than 30 percent of their season. In the national hockey traveler, the Minnesota Wild had a 12-game winning streak in December. But no other hockey team has managed more than six straight wins in two years.

In baseball, the Tampa Bay Rays held the American League version for 13 defenses in 2013. It is a bit different in baseball, because the title changes hands in series, rather than individual games. The Rays were 32-10 during that run of the title. Those 42 games are a nudge more than one-quarter of the season. It is rare for a baseball team in any version of the traveling title to hold one for more than five or six defenses.

In two years of soccer in the Americas and Europe, it has been common for teams to mount serious streaks gobbling up around two-thirds of a regular season. Barcelona ran a 17-game winning streak with the ear in La Liga, immediately followed by Real Madrid's 20-game winning streak. Last year, also, Juventus ran a 25-game streak in Serie A and Paris Saint-Germain produced a 27-game winning streak in Ligue 1.

It appears, just based on the last two years, that hockey, baseball and pro football are the most difficult sports for long title runs, with soccer and college football making it much more likely and the different levels of men's basketball running somewhere in between.

Many downplay Connecticut's dominance, as if it were a stain on women's college basketball that no one else was good enough to end this winning streak. That does seem a little easy. Considerable ingenuity and resources go into women's college basketball. Coaches get paid decent money and players receive scholarships. It's not a pick-up league.

Women receive instruction by paid school coaches from at least junior high through high school, participation is high, players learn skills and there has got to be enough highest level talent to make the top four or five programs evenly competitive. That's just eyeballing it.

Could be wrong here about how much of that talent exists. But with all the resources and participation in teen-aged basketball, it's too hard to believe that UConn gets all of the players who are capable of winning the national championship, or even the majority of them.

It boggles the mind to think no else could gather enough players to just beat UConn in a game. Despite being in the lightly regarded American Conference, the Huskies played 19 games in the last two years against ranked opponents, including three against No. 2 teams and one each against a No. 3 and a No. 4.

Do they get more than their share of players? Maybe, but there's still got to be plenty to go around.

More likely, though, UConn is that far ahead of the game with the share that it does get. Its achievement should not be under-rated.

UConn unstoppable, as always, in women's college basketball

Nowhere in America during the last four years is any other college women's basketball team even close to the University of Connecticut. The Huskies are so good that they raise a question here and there. (This piece originally was published on EarofCornAwards.com on April 8, 2016.)

Breanna Stewart, center, won four national championships in her four years at the University of Connecticut. Here she is receiving the Wade Trophy in 2015 (Sphilbrick/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license).

Long before we thought about applying the Ear of Corn to women's college basketball, the University of Connecticut was dominating the sport.

So, nothing really changes with UConn trouncing Syracuse, 85-51, for the national championship Tuesday night. UConn finished the season with its fourth consecutive national championship and a 75-game winning streak. It now has been more than three years since UConn last lost in regulation time – a 61-59 loss to Notre Dame on March 12, 2013.

So, there's no question about UConn. UConn is the best.

The question here is about the Ear of Corn, which UConn holds in both versions for women's college basketball.

Once upon a time, the idea was hatched to establish a traveling trophy across college football. Well, we had to start somewhere. So, we started with Alabama because it happened to be 1979 and Alabama had won the 1978 national championship.

We couldn't really say that Alabama "won" the Ear of Corn. We just gave it to Alabama as a start. But every time Alabama won a game with the Ear from that point, we counted it as a defense, so we end up saying that a team is defending a title that it didn't actually win in the first place.

In a lot of sports, this doesn't end up being a problem. The Corn starts changing hands early, and it happens often. But from the time we began tracking the Corn at the start of the 1979 season, Alabama wouldn't lose a game until Nov. 1, 1980, a 6-3 loss at Mississippi State.

So, Alabama ended up defending the title 19 times without having won it. On the totals, it might look a little strange. But that's just going to have to be the Corn's heritage in some sports.

It seems odd to say that UConn still hasn't "won" an Ear of Corn. The Huskies have destroyed everyone in their path, and that includes the very best competition in their sport. It's not like the Huskies are ducking people.

But we still can't say they've won it, just because they haven't lost it since we gave it to them.

We're going to have to say that, at this point, no one has yet won the Ear of Corn in women's college basketball.

But UConn has defended it 38 times in as many opportunities.

And here are the results for the postseason:

A note about the Ear of Corn in college basketball

We introduce the Ears of Corn in college basketball by introducing two separate versions, postseason and regular season, for the men's and women's championships. (This piece originally was published on EarofCornAwards.com on April 6, 2016.)

Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of the game (Public domain image).

The Ear of Corn in college basketball is a unique challenge. In no other big spectator sport does every team with any kind of pulse enter the postseason. Because of that, the Ear of Corn almost always will go into the postseason, which means the prize, in the end, almost always will meet with the national championship.

Boring.

We want the Ear of Corn to run a trajectory of its own. At the same time, we hate to ignore the postseason. Who wants to just put the prize on the shelf during March Madness?

So, the decision here is to recognize two distinct ears in college basketball. One will, indeed, track through the postseason. The other will end at the end of the regular season. Perhaps, at times, the two will unite down the line, but the regular season ear always will end with the regular season, and the postseason ear will run through the NCAA Tournament. Of course, we'll do this in men's and women's college basketball.

Ending the 2015-season, Virginia Tech holds the men's Ear of Corn for the regular season, and the Hokies will defend that title with their first game of the 2016-17 season. Villanova, a buzzer-beating winner against North Carolina in a 77-74 NCAA Championship Game, now holds the postseason ear and will put on the line with its regular season opener next year.

In each case, though, the Team Supreme is hereby declared to be North Carolina, which held the Ears during the longest stretches of the regular season and postseason. That will be explained in the separate account of each championship.

There is little to explain about Connecticut in women's basketball. It does make one wonder about the policy for initiating these championships across this site and on labigleagues.com. Again, that will be explained in the account about the UConn women's team.