In a recent post about the Dodgers, I wrote the following:
Could they be the best team ever?
This is a complicated question, because it’s difficult to define the word “best” in this context. The two logical choices are 1) the best team in the context of their time and 2) the best team if dropped into any time. If the route is 2), then the answer is more likely yes, because the Dodgers are poised to be this year’s best team and baseball teams are always getting better (though how quickly they’re getting better impacts the answer). If the route is 1), the answer is more likely no. But there’s 1.1), also, which is probably the most common one, an iteration of 1) that’s limited to the live-ball era, with a special weight on championships.
For college basketball, there’s no real equivalent to the live-ball era (there have been a higher number of significant changes to the game than in Major League Baseball, but none as singularly significant as the dead-ball/live-ball shift), but aside from that clause, the paragraph applies here too. Would 2020 Kansas beat 2021 Baylor? Probably not. Would 2019 Virginia? I’d guess they’d be an underdog. Would 1976 Indiana or those UCLA teams from a few years earlier? Absolutely not.
Had Gonzaga won last night, we would have gotten a new greatest-team-ever under all the definitions. An undefeated team in the modern era who played four of the best teams the nation could offer in its nine nonconference attempts (and beat a solid BYU team thrice), who navigated their way through the NCAA Tournament without falling, who boasted thirty percent of the consensus first and second-team All-Americans in a highly competitive era…that’s something.
We didn’t get that, though. Baylor won. Baylor, who was undefeated before missing three weeks due to a once-in-a-century pandemic. Baylor, who scuffled in their return from said absence, lost once, started to play better, lost again, and then turned on the jets for an absolute steamrolling of a trip through the NCAA Tournament. Baylor beat Gonzaga. They throttled them. Because Baylor didn’t go undefeated, the greatest-team-ever arguments have lulled. But if we were ready to anoint Gonzaga thusly, and Baylor beat Gonzaga…
There are, to be fair, two problems with Baylor’s greatest-of-all-time candidacy. The first is the Oklahoma State loss. Even if you write off the Kansas defeat as Covid-induced, chalking up the Bears’ Big 12 Tournament struggles to the absence, three weeks after they returned and one week after they whooped up on Oklahoma State and Texas Tech, is a bit of self-trickery. Could they have been Covid-related? Sure. But there was enough time between the layoff and those games that the effect should have rather significantly faded. And it looked like it did.
The second problem is a bit odder.
It’s that Gonzaga might still be better than Baylor.
KenPom is not Gospel, but it does track closely with real results, and it would have Gonzaga favored by a couple of points were the Zags and Bears to play a rematch tomorrow night. Vegas odds would likely lean towards Baylor by a point or so, but betting on the odds to be better than KenPom isn’t the safest bet (I have made a small amount of money doing the opposite, at least with outliers, which would include such a line).
This is, of course, a silly argument. Gonzaga lost. Baylor’s the national champion. Everyone agrees on this. But if we’re looking for the best team ever, even in the context of one’s time…each of the two has a case.
