The Wisconsin Badgers have made four trips to the Final Four — one when the event had no cultural status or cachet, three when the event had attained a central place in our sporting culture. It is nevertheless interesting to note how well the four Wisconsin Final Four teams did in the NCAA Tournament.
A fundamental, observable measurement of NCAA Tournament performance is the average margin of victory for a team. Wisconsin’s NCAA Tournament history reveals three levels of performance for the various Badger teams.
The 1941 national champions, in their three NCAA Tournament wins, prevailed by an average of four points per game: a combined margin of 12 points in those games. Wisconsin won by one, six, and five points.
The 2000 Final Four team won four games in the NCAA Tournament. Those wins came by an average of 8.5 points: 10 in the first round, seven in the second-round upset of Arizona, 13 in the Sweet 16 win over LSU, four in the Elite Eight win over Purdue.
The 2014 Final Four team won four games in the NCAA Tournament. Those wins came by an average margin of 16.5 points: 40 over American in the first round, eight over Oregon in the second round, 17 over Baylor in the Sweet 16, and one point over Arizona in the Elite Eight.
These three Wisconsin teams established the three levels of performance as measured by margin of victory in the NCAA Tournament.
Guess where the 2015 Final Four team — the national runner-up which defeated Kentucky — falls into this three-layered structure?
It might surprise you that the 2015 team’s margins most closely resembled the 2000 team, not 2014.
Wisconsin won its opening-round game by 14 points against Coastal Carolina, quite modest for a No. 1 seed against a No. 16 seed. Wisconsin then won each of its next four games by seven points each — against Oregon in the round of 32, North Carolina in the Sweet 16, Arizona in the Elite Eight, and 38-0 Kentucky in the Final Four. The best Wisconsin team in our lifetimes was not a science-fiction movie monster laying waste to anything and everything in its path. Wisconsin did, however, possess enormous resilience and the calm, settled mindset which enabled those 2015 Badgers to meet every challenge they faced… every challenge, that is, except the final one against Duke down the stretch.
This is the track record of Wisconsin’s four Final Four teams in their NCAA Tournament journeys.