During Final Four week, I wondered how many times a Pac-12 or Big Ten school had won the Rose Bowl and reached the Final Four in the same college sports cycle, comprised of the football season in the fall moving into basketball for the winter. How many times did a Pac-12 or Big Ten school party on New Year’s Day (or January 2) in Pasadena, and then book a spot at the Final Four roughly three months later?
Here is the list of schools which have pulled off the feat, and the list of instances in which this has occurred:
USC won the 1940 Rose Bowl and reached the 1940 Final Four.
Illinois won the 1952 Rose Bowl and reached the 1952 Final Four.
Michigan has done this several times: The Wolverines pulled off this dynamic double in 1965, 1989, and 1993. In 1989, Michigan won the Rose Bowl and then won the NCAA Tournament.
UCLA won the 1976 Rose Bowl and reached the 1976 Final Four.
Wisconsin won the 2000 Rose Bowl and reached the 2000 Final Four.
No school has forged this feat since the Badgers did it 20 years ago.
A few other teams MADE the Rose Bowl and reached the Final Four in the same year — California in 1959, UCLA in 1962, Michigan in 1992 — but in only seven college sports cycles — 1940, 1952, 1965, 1976, 1989, 1993, and 2000 — did a team win the Granddaddy and make the Final Four a short while later. With Michigan having done this three times, only FIVE schools are on this very select list.
Wisconsin is on it. Ohio State, you might have noticed, is not.
We know that Michigan State is amazing in basketball, with a few great football seasons thrown in over the past 40 years (1987, 2013, 2015), and that Michigan had a really good run from 1969 through 2007 in football, with some superb basketball seasons in the mix (1976, 1989-1993, 2013, 2014, 2018, 2019). We know that USC is a football giant in the Pac-12 and that UCLA is a basketball blue-blood with 11 national titles.
Yet, we know that in terms of combined football and basketball excellence among Big Ten and Pac-12 programs, Ohio State is number one. We don’t have to pretend otherwise. The Buckeyes are the program of Paul Brown and Woody Hayes and Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer in football. They are the program of coaches Harold Olsen, Fred Taylor, and Thad Matta in basketball.
Ohio State has 11 Final Fours to Michigan’s eight. The Buckeyes — since the introduction of the Associated Press College Football Poll in 1936 — have won eight college football national titles to Michigan’s three. If we were to include the history of college football dating back to the late 1800s, when the game was more primitive and hadn’t yet been redefined by the forward pass and other enhancements, one could make the case that Michigan’s all-time history dwarfs Ohio State’s, but since World War II (a reasonable marker of both time and modernity), Ohio State has been the better program, combining basketball and football. It certainly has left Michigan in the dust in football over the past 12 years since Lloyd Carr left Ann Arbor. Michigan has been slightly better in men’s basketball in that same time period, but not hugely.
Ohio State has set so many high standards in Big Ten and national collegiate athletics. Yet, when looking at the shared history of the Rose Bowl and the Final Four, Wisconsin has pulled off the dynamic double in the same college sports cycle.
Ohio State has not.
That’s pretty cool.
That’s it. That’s the tweet.