Gonzaga takes and maintains men's short lineal in 2020-21

Gonzaga won the short version of the men's college basketball traveling championship and kept it, becoming the all-time leader in one fell swoop and still holding it entering the 2021-22 season.

There's a pretty good chance that the list of Bing Crosby's contributions to 20th century entertainment is longer than anyone else's. And he is, like the Zags, Spokane's own. The house where Crosby grew up now sits on the Gonzaga campus. Crosby attended Gonzaga for three years and didn't graduate. On Oct. 21, 1937, just more than a dozen years after he last sat in a Gonzaga classroom, the university awarded him an honorary Ph.D., he was named mayor for the day and given a key to the city. By then, Crosby already had been the country's top-selling recording artist for seven years running, and he was just getting started (Public domain image).

Gonzaga got its mitts on the short version of the men's college basketball lineal early in 2020-21, and you know how that went. Gonzaga didn't lose all year, until facing Baylor in the NCAA Championship Game.

And in the short version, which includes only the regular season, that means Gonzaga never lost. The Zags faced Auburn, defending a 15-game title streak, at a Thanksgiving Tournament in Fort Myers, FL, and turned up a 90-67 win.

And off they went. The Zags popped up a 23-game championship streak that's still ongoing entering 2021-22.

With 23 wins, Gonzaga suddenly becomes the all-time leader in the short version, surging ahead of previous leader UCLA at 17. Auburn is third now with 15 games, North Carolina has 11 and Kentucky and Xavier each have 10 since tracking began with the 2015-16 season.

Auburn roars toward the top in men's basketball short lineal

Auburn added one more game to it's season-leading performance in the short traveler through men's college basketball, finishing 2019-20 with 14 games. The Tigers now are second place all-time behind UCLA, which has 17.

                            

Other than the coronavirus, you'd have to say the 2019-20 men's basketball season went pretty well for Auburn.

The Tigers were, after all, coming off a trip to the national semifinals and a 30-10 finish, then they were 25-6 in 2019-20 when play was ended, having risen as high as fourth in the basketball writers' poll. We'll simply never know what the Tigers could have accomplished in 2019-20.

Come to think of it, we'll never know how far Kentucky could have gone, either. The Wildcats actually won the Southeastern Conference, finishing a game ahead of Auburn. The Cats clinched that championship on Feb. 29, a 73-66 win against Auburn that also returned the short version of the men's college basketball lineal to Lexington.

With that win, the Cats had a chance to move up in the all-time standings, but they immediately lost to Tennessee, which then lost the title right back to Auburn on the final day of the regular season.

With that Auburn finished the season with 14 games of lineal championship in the short version, the most of any team. Kentucky, with five games, was second, followed by Alabama with four.

Auburn moved up to second place in the all-time standings with its 14 wins, trailing only UCLA, which has 17. North Carolina is third with 11 wins, followed by Kentucky and Xavier, each with 10.

Auburn wins short-season men's college basketball traveler

Auburn snatched the short version of the men's college basketball traveling championship early from South Alabama and mounted 12 defenses to claim honors for the season. But Kentucky holds the prize as we come to the end of the season.

Auburn coach Bruce Pearl took his squad to the Final Four in 2018-19, and now the Tigers have won the short-season version of the men's college basketball lineal championship for 2019-20 (U.S. Air Force photograph by Master Sgt. Kurt Skoglund/Public domain image).

We follow two separate linear championships across the nation in college basketball, men's and women's, simply because we want the regular season in college basketball to have its due. We're not sure we have succeeded.

Once upon a time, college basketball was a growth sport. The NCAA receives about 90 percent of its operating revenue from the television rights for the men's tournament, and the corresponding emphasis on the tournament has decreased interest in the regular season since the mid-1990s. The coach who wins 22 games every year is insecure if he isn't also consistently getting three rounds into the tournament.

Anyway, we do one traveling championship that includes all of the postseason, and another one that includes none of it. We might expect them to look quite a lot alike. In time, perhaps, they will.

But right now, they don't. Five years into following two linear titles in men's college basketball, one that includes the postseason and one that doesn't, the differences are rather stark.

We call these two separate championships the long corn and the short corn. The corn, of course, goes back to the ancient Ear of Corn, which goes back to the abandoned high school football fields in Western Illinois that inspired the lineal championships on these pages. The long one includes the postseason, and the short one does not.

We're almost through the 2019-20 short season, with only one week remaining, and Auburn will be the easy winner for 2019-20 with 13 wins. Kentucky, the present titleholder, has five wins this year and can add two more. The Wildcats won't catch Auburn for the season in this championship, though they clinched the regular-season SEC title with a 73-66 win against Auburn on Feb. 29.

For their labors this season Auburn and Kentucky move up the all-time standings five years into this championship. The all-time leader remains UCLA, which has 17 games of the short title in five years. With 13 wins this season, Auburn has 13 all-time, which is good for second place. North Carolina stands third all-time with 11 wins, followed by Xavier and Kentucky with 10, and Oregon with eight. Again, though, Kentucky can pass North Carolina and Xavier in these standings if it can win its remaining two games of the regular season.

One contrast comes clear when looking at the higher order of the long corn standings, where none of the same teams are in the top five. On the long corn side, we find Villanova leading the way with 27 wins, followed closely by Michigan State (26), Michigan (23), North Carolina (23), Wisconsin and UCLA (eight), then Purdue (seven) and Ohio State (six). Here, we find five Big Ten teams out of the top eight. By contrast, we find only one game of Big Ten championship in the short corn. Indiana snatched it from Marquette in November 2018 and promptly dropped it to Arkansas.

We also have close to a year of the short corn running through the Sun Belt Conference, where the long version has never ventured.

There has been very little chance that these two championships might run together, though it certainly could happen. The long version has spent the conference portion of the season consecutively in the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big East, the Big 10 (twice) and, this year, the Pac-12. The short version has spent the conference schedule during those years in the ACC, the Pac-12, the Big East, the Sun Belt and, this year, the Southeastern Conference.

The dynamic in these championships is essentially the same, with one big difference. Each championship is bound to spend January to early March in some specific conference. But the short corn schedule includes only one window for the prize to switch conferences, which is the pre-January period, while the long version has the additional inter-conference window of the NCAA Tournament.

Virginia leads men's hoop long corn, but UCLA has speed

Winning the NCAA Championship in men's basketball means taking the long lineal title to the next season. Thus, Virginia sprinted out to seven games of title defense in 2019-20 and still has the lead. But UCLA has the title now, three games down with the regular season still not done.

Mamadi Diakite is one of only three seniors trying to defend the men's college basketball championship this season with the Virginia Cavaliers (SneakinDeacon/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

The long version of the men's college basketball traveling championship is touring the Pac-12 this season, and the results are about as one would expect.

The Pac-12 is an even league in which every team went to Feb. 29 with at least five losses in the league and six teams were within two games of the top. Now that the weekend of games has played out, three teams still have a chance to at least tie for the title. The most likely outcome is that Oregon and UCLA will tie in the end, and Oregon won their head-to-head match, 96-75, in Eugene on Jan. 26. No other league was that close.

The Big Ten had five teams within two games of the top, but that's close as anyone got to league-leading Maryland until Michigan State dropped the Terps, 78-66, in College Park on Feb. 29. Now, Maryland is 13-5 in the league with two games left. But Michigan State, Illinois all are within a game at 12-6, while Iowa and Penn State both are two down at 11-7

But the Pac-12 has a thick one going, too. UCLA is on top at 12-5 with one game left coming up Saturday at Galen Center against Southern Cal. Oregon 11-5 with the NoCal teams, Stanford and Cal, visiting Eugene this weekend. Arizona State has an outside chance to tie for the title at 10-6.

The Pac-12 is not a league in which anyone is going on long winning streaks. And, considering that the traveling prize had only briefly before been in UCLA's possession among all the Pac-12 teams, this first dip into an even league wasn't going to produce an immediate threat to the crown. Villanova's all-time leading 27 games of championship was in no jeopardy once the title entered the Pac-12.

Arizona State is the biggest winner this year among the Pac-12 teams with six games of championship, not even enough to dislodge Virginia from the lead after the defending national champions began 2019-20 with seven traveling title defenses.

In December, the championship went on a little tour through four teams and three conferences. Purdue smashed the Cavaliers, 69-40, on Dec. 4 in West Lafayette, IN. After one defense, though, Purdue dropped the title to Nebraska, which immediately fell to North Dakota.

If the Fighting Hawks could have defended the title just one time, they would have taken it into the Summit League, where the leading teams this year are South Dakota State and North Dakota State. But North Dakota lost that opportunity, 83-66 at Oregon State on Dec. 29, and the traveling title was headed to the West Coast.

In five years of following this championship, only once has the lineal title started the year in some conference and remained there when the conference portion of the season began in January. That was 2016-17, when Villanova began as the defending national champs and took down every foe in its pre-conference slate, which really wasn't saying much. But no one else has done it. The prize stayed in the Big East all the way until the second round of the NCAA Tournament, when Wisconsin took down Villanova, 65-62, for a Sweet 16 berth.

At the top of the all-time traveling standings, this makes for no real differences. Among the leaders, Purdue and UCLA have each picked up a couple of games and moved up to seven each, which is sixth on the all-time list going back to 2015-16. UCLA will continue adding to its total, though, as long as it keeps winning, and there's still a lot of basketball left in this championship, which goes all the way to the national championship game.

Men's short traveler takes tour of Sun Belt

The regular-season men's college basketball traveling championship took a trip to the Sun Belt Conference in 2018-19.

Trojan Arena is home of the Troy Trojans, who captured the regular-season men's college basketball traveling championship for the Sun Belt Conference in 2018-19 (Kreeder13/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike International 4.0 license).

The top of the all-time standings for the short season traveling championship in men's college basketball did not change in 2017-18, much because the title took the scenic route through the conference portion of the season.

As it ended up, the title ran through the Sun Belt Conference, which is not one of the more glamorous assemblies of programs.

The season began with Marquette holding the title. But Marquette lost it to Indiana, which later lost it to Arkansas. Following that came a couple of upsets.

First Western Kentucky of Conference-USA dropped into Fayetteville and beat the home-standing Razorbacks, 78-77. Next, Troy of the Sun Belt went to Western Kentucky and posted an 87-81 win. The title might have still gone to Conference USA for the conference schedule, but Troy held on at Alabama-Birmingham, 74-73, in a Dec. 21 road game.

So, the prize went to the Sun Belt, where no one claimed it for long. In fact, no team in the Sun Belt held it for longer than two games once the league schedule began.


The top of the standings, then, look the same as a year ago. UCLA leads with 17 games, followed by 11 for North Carolina and 10 for Xavier.

UCLA still leads short men's cage traveling title through 2017-18

Xavier had the best year of any team in the 2017-18 men's college basketball short traveling championship, ringing up 10 wins. But UCLA still has the most all-time with 17.

The shortened traveling championship in men's college basketball, which includes only the regular season, took its long run through the Big East in 2017-18.

Once there, the team that made most of it was Xavier with 10 wins, the most for any team with the championship during the year.

The prize did most of its kicking around in late November. UCLA began the season as champion and made three defenses before losing, 100-89, to Creighton in Kansas City on Nov. 20. The next night in Kansas City, Baylor took it away from Creighton with a 65-59 win in the same arena.

A week later, on Nov. 28, Baylor went to Xavier, where the challenging Musketeers produced a 76-63 victory. After Xavier's run, six other Big East teams won seven titles. The season ended with Marquette as the title holder after an 85-81 home win against Creighton on March 3.

Xavier's run of 10 wins moved it all the way to third place in the all-time standings through three years of this history. UCLA is the only team with wins in all three years, leading the all-time standings with 17 wins, followed by North Carolina with 11.