Transfer portal, NIL making it more difficult to 3-peat

UConn has a chance to join very rare company as March Madness winds into full gear this week. The Huskies have won the last two national championships and could become only the second team to three-peat, joining John Wooden’s UCLA teams of the 1960s and ‘70s. Florida was the last team with a chance to three-peat after winning titles in 2006 and 2007 but failed to make the NCAA Tournament the next season. Limited eligibility for players has played a role, making it tough for teams to have continuity from one season to the next. The transfer portal and NIL opportunities have made it even more difficult, with coaches essentially having to rebuild their rosters every year.

Florida had a dominating team in 2005-06, winning 33 games on its way to the program’s first national championship. The Gators returned nearly everyone the following season and did it again, becoming the seventh team to win consecutive national titles.

Their three-peat bid fell short the next year. The key players from the title teams were all gone and the Gators didn’t even make the NCAA Tournament, proving just how difficult it is to win three straight national championships.

“It’s just hard to win in general,” said former Florida coach Billy Donovan, now the head coach of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls. “I’ve always said this: If you played the NCAA Tournament over after it finished, you’d have a different national champion every year, for the most part.”

Heading into this year’s NCAA Tournament, one team has a chance at the first three-peat in more than 50 years: UConn.

Dan Hurley led the Huskies to their fifth national championship in 2023, retooled the roster and added No. 6 last season, becoming the first team since Donovan’s Gators to go back to back.

The ride to a third straight title has been a bumpy one.

The Huskies opened the season No. 3 in the preseason AP Top 25, but went 0 for 3 at the Maui Invitational and have spent most of the season fighting injuries and inconsistencies, entering the bracket 23-10.

UConn may not be as dominant now as it was when winning NCAA Tournament games by an average of 20 points per game the past two seasons, but this is March and the Huskies have shown they can tame the madness.

“Early in the year, it (three-peating) was something that was talked about around here,” said Hurley, whose team opens the NCAA Tournament against Oklahoma in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday. “With the way that we played to this point, it is not something we are talking about (now).”

Should the Huskies pull it off, they’ll join rare company.

John Wooden’s UCLA teams of the 1960s and ‘70s set the standard for college basketball excellence, winning at a rate not seen before or since.

The Bruins won consecutive titles in 1964-65 and set a mark that may never be broken, seven straight from 1967-73. UCLA had a massive advantage with those teams, first with Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), then with Bill Walton, two of the greatest centers in basketball history.

“We set records that still stand to this day,” Walton said in a 2024 interview with The Associated Press, a few months before he died in May. “He did not talk about winning and losing. He talked about effort and purpose, and we tried with everything we had to get to acknowledge that we were doing something right.”

Florida and Duke in 1991-92 were the only teams to have a chance at joining UCLA in winning at least three straight titles. Since Florida’s back to back, no reigning champion had even made it to the title game the next season until UConn.

Part of it is continuity. College players have limited eligibility, so it’s rare for coaches to have the same rosters coming back. Injuries also can crush a team’s chances, or a bad matchup in the lose-and-go-home NCAA Tournament can quickly halt a second deep March run.