182: Ripple
A look at past Final Four success and a new era of Carolina basketball.
Michigan defeated UConn 69-63 on Monday night to win the 2026 National Championship. The title is the second in program history and first since 1989.
Michigan and UConn are no strangers to playing on a Monday night in April. The two programs have found wildly different success in the national title games.
UConn’s success in the Final Four is downright comical. The Huskies are now 13-2 overall in the Final Four and 6-1 all-time in championship games after the loss.
The Wolverines improved to 2-4 in title games since 1985. What might go unnoticed is that the last six times Michigan has made the Final Four, the Wolverines have also advanced to the National Championship game1.
Here is a list of every NCAA Champion since 1985, when the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams. The table shows the Final Four appearances and overall record for each program, plus the record in any title games.
No other program can match UConn’s six titles out of eight trips to the Final Four. Duke, North Carolina, and Kansas all have more Final Four appearances since 1985 and fewer NCAA Tournament absences than UConn in this span. All three blue bloods have won fewer titles than the Huskies since 1985.
Michigan won only 45 of 100 games from the start of the 2021-22 season to the end of the 2023-24 season. The Wolverines have won 64 games over the last two seasons under head coach Dusty May culminating with a win Monday night in the National Championship.
The Most Outstanding Player of the 2026 Final Four was Elliot Cadeau, a transfer from North Carolina. You could describe Cadeau’s play at Carolina as volatile, very bad and very good, all at the same time. His confidence was broken in Chapel Hill and reimagined in Ann Arbor.
Cadeau continues a streak of the last three MOPs of the Final Four all starting their collegiate careers at a different program:
2026: Elliot Cadeau (North Carolina → Michigan)
2025: Walter Clayton Jr. (Iona → Florida)
2024: Tristan Newton (East Carolina → UConn)
No matter how broken a program or a player might be, there is always the possibility a turnaround is right around the corner. Cadeau, May, and Michigan all proved that on Monday night.
A new era of Carolina basketball
Cadeau’s former team, North Carolina, was in the headlines throughout the past two weeks seeking a new head coach.
Carolina ended its coaching search with the surprise hiring of Michael Malone as the program’s seventh head coach since 1953. He is the first head coach from outside the Carolina family since Frank McGuire.
The Carolina search is a good example of how we consume information in the year of 2026. We moved past the Brad Stevens fan fiction, tussled our way through sitting head coaches still competing in the NCAA Tournament, found out that Steve Kerr is Tommy Lloyd’s Michael Jordan2, and Billy Donovan’s agent really wanted to earn his representation.
Whether you believe Malone was the search committee’s first and last call doesn’t matter. Malone is the choice as the next head coach at Carolina.
You can spend time talking yourself into the hire. Malone knows basketball. He won a World Championship with the Denver Nuggets in 2023. Very few guys can coach Demarcus Cousins, and Malone could do it. He spent time on Carolina’s campus watching his daughter play volleyball for the Tar Heels, so he is familiar with the community.
You can also talk yourself out of the hire too. Malone has never been a collegiate head coach. And he is now getting paid more than 99 percent of other head coaches in college basketball. Malone has never had to deal with the transfer portal.
There is also the Belichick of it all. Carolina made a risky hire in football by bringing in someone with zero collegiate experience and paying them a significant chunk of change. After this weekend, the Savannah Bananas are likely to have as many wins in Kenan Stadium as Carolina football did this fall3.
If you can think critically, I don’t think Malone and Belichick deserve a lot of comparisons. At the same time, Carolina deserves criticism when making these high stakes decisions because of what has transpired over the past 18 months.
There are many reasons why it might work and why it might not. In true 2026 fashion, a lot of people don’t even see an in between result with the hire either. Everything has to be on the extremes.
What I do know is a lot of the success of Carolina basketball is in the past. The program has felt more like a dinosaur as of late and Malone is tasked with making sure it doesn’t become extinct.
A couple of weeks ago we scrutinized the standard of Carolina basketball using the SRS or the simple-rating-system from Sports Reference. SRS rates teams using average point differential and strength of schedule.
Below is a chart that shows the SRS for every Carolina basketball season since 1954 and highlights successful seasons based on NCAA Tournament results and ACC results. The bar for success matches a lot of Malone’s contract incentives: a regular-season ACC first place finish, an ACC Tournament title, advancing to the Sweet 16 or Elite Eight, making the Final Four, or winning the national title.
Carolina’s run during the 2021-22 season was miraculous. UNC went from losing by 28 points at Miami on a Tuesday night in January to leading Kansas by 15 points on a Monday night in April. The blown lead in the title game resulted in a hangover that I’m not sure Carolina has still gotten over.
The last time UNC had back-to-back successful seasons using the criteria in the chart above was a decade ago. A Sweet 16 appearance in 2015 followed by an ACC Tournament title and runner-up finish in 2016, capped off by winning the 2017 National Championship.
The success since then has been more sporadic than sequential. And Carolina fans and its family are hungry for sustained success.
We don’t know if Malone’s hire will work or not. What we do know is that the only way most of us will be satisfied that it’s “working out” is success on the court. That starts with wins. ACC championships, Sweet 16s, Final Fours, and National Titles.
I believe Malone is a deadhead. The title of this post is Ripple, which is also the title of a beautiful Grateful Dead song. As a couple of the lyrics go:
There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
Carolina basketball has been wandering lately, and the highway back to the top isn’t simple. But as Michigan and Elliot Cadeau showed us Monday night, the road is always there if you’re willing to find a new way to walk it.
That’s it for this week.
If you’re looking for the final NET rankings for this past college hoops season, you can find a full archive here: wabwatch.com/data/net_archive.csv - the NCAA published the final standings on April 7, after no updates from March 15 (Selection Sunday) to the end of the NCAA Tournament.
A recommendation this week is draftballr.com, a historical NBA draft database that includes a treasure trove of information. It’s a lot to take in.
🤟 Thanks for reading this far🤟
The Fab Five was present at the Final Four this year, including all five members on a live broadcast. While the Fab Five didn’t win a title, those teams lost in the final game in back-to-back seasons to Duke in 1992 and Carolina in 1993.
What a quote. I think Lloyd and Carolina were a lot closer of a match than people realize, and I spent most of that Final Four weekend mumbling “Steve Kerr is my Michael Jordan” while walking around the house. Just a hilarious line.
Anyhow, here is a radar plot comparing the style of play of the last two Carolina coaches and Lloyd, and why some fans were clamoring for Lloyd.
UNC football’s win total next season is 4.5. How in the hell have they regressed? The bar should be over/under 7.5 wins in perpetuity.