Will College Basketball see a perfect season in 2026?

This past season saw the Indiana Hoosiers set the new high mark for a perfect season in college football, finishing an unblemished 16-0 with a conference championship and three CFP wins. This season in college basketball, we sit here on February 9th with two teams remaining unbeaten — the Miami University Redhawks and the Arizona Wildcats. While both make for great national stories and will be a lot of fun to watch down the stretch, I am willing to make the proclamation that these two teams, as well as every team to follow in their footsteps for years to come, will not finish perfect. 

The Teams With A Chance:

Let’s start with Miami. This was a team that had basically zero national expectations coming into the season — not even picked to win their own conference. They’re head-coached by Travis Steele, and if that name sounds vaguely familiar to you, he was the head coach at Xavier for a few years. They returned three starters from last year’s team in Eian Elmer, Peter Suder, and Antwone Woolfolk. As fun as this run has been for them, they have essentially zero chance to win the NCAA Tournament. To put it in perspective, they are currently 85th in KenPom, and their only top-100 win is over 64th-ranked Akron.

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They’ve played the 314th most difficult schedule in the nation. They would probably be an underdog to their first-round opponent. The closest comp to this team is the 2012 Murray State Racers, a team that jumped out to 23-0 (with wins over tournament teams in St. Mary’s and Memphis) before losing their first game, and bowed out of the NCAA Tournament in the second round to a superior Marquette team. Murray State also had future NBA guard Isaiah Canaan on their roster — Miami likely doesn’t have any NBA players. As fun as this story is, there’s simply zero chance they finish the run. 

Now, let’s break down Arizona. The Wildcats are legitimate National Championship contenders. They boast two legitimate NBA First-Round Draft Picks in Koa Peat and Brayden Burries, and have experience in droves with returning starters Jaden Bradley and Motiejus Krivas. They’re 23-0 and they’ve played a legitimately tough schedule (the 43rd-most difficult), with wins over Florida, UConn, Auburn, Alabama, and BYU. This team has all of the bona fides of a team that could stay unbeaten, so why won’t they?

The answer is two-fold:

First, college basketball has its talent distributed in a way that no one team is vastly more talented than all the rest. We mentioned that Arizona has two first-round draft picks on their roster. Well, so do Duke, Baylor, North Carolina, and Houston (a team that Arizona travels to on February 21). Let’s examine the last two teams that made it to the NCAA Tournament undefeated: 2021 Gonzaga made it all the way to 31-0 (in a COVID season) before running into a supremely talented Baylor team with Davion Mitchell and Jared Butler in the National Championship game.

In 2015, Kentucky had Karl-Anthony Towns and Devin Booker on their roster, but went down in the Final Four to a Wisconsin team led by Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker. The point is, no matter how talented your team is, there’s someone out there who’s close enough to being on your level that they can take you down. And it’s asking a lot of a team to win against comparable talent for 40 or so consecutive games. 

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Secondly, in-game variance in college basketball is as high as it has ever been. The proliferation of the 3-point shot has made it so that one team’s hot shooting night, or one team’s cold shooting night, can vastly swing the outcome of the game. Take two of the best teams in modern college basketball: 2024 UConn lost a game to Kansas, where the Jayhawks shot 64% from 3. 2025 Duke lost to Clemson when they shot 63% from 2 and 40% from 3. It’s just really hard to go 40 consecutive games where you avoid a hot shooting night from your opponent. I’d say it’s so unlikely that it borders on impossible. 

There’s a reason that 1976 Indiana, exactly 50 years ago, recorded the last perfect season in college basketball. It’s really hard to do. In the case of our Arizona team, they have games remaining against Texas Tech, Kansas, Houston, and Iowa State. Win all of those, and then they have to beat all of them again in the Big 12 tournament, and then whatever teams stand in their path for 6 straight NCAA Tournament games. It’s simply not happening. So, while it is fun to track these unbeaten teams, enjoy the fun while it lasts, and have realistic expectations, because they won’t stay unbeaten forever.

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