Big Ten hasn't won basketball national championship since 2000. Can Michigan change that?

On Sunday, a Big Ten team won the NCAA women's basketball tournament championship for the first time since all the way back in 1999, with conference newcomer UCLA thumping South Carolina 79-51 . Tonight at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, the league will hope a similarly long drought will come to a merciful end. Michigan men's basketball 's matchup against UConn in the championship game of the 2026 NCAA Tournament is more than just an opportunity for the Wolverines to earn their second championship (and first since 1989) and for coach Dusty May to complete one of the more remarkable turnarounds in the history of the sport.

REQUIRED READING: 5 reasons Michigan will beat UConn for national championship — and one reason it won't For all the Big Ten's money, influence and power in the broader world of college athletics, the conference hasn't seen one of its men's basketball programs win an NCAA championship since all the way back in 2000. Since then, UConn, Michigan's opponent on Monday night, has won five national championships by itself. What’s made the drought so confounding is Big Ten teams haven gotten close to winning a championship.

It’s not as if this is the Patriot League or the WAC, where it has a single representative in the tournament that’s fortunate to win a game. Big Ten teams regularly reach the biggest and brightest stages in college basketball; they just haven’t been able to close the deal. Since Michigan State’s title in 2000, and not including Michigan this year, 15 teams from the conference have made it to the Final Four.

Eight of those squads advanced to the national championship game, but in each instance, they lost. A couple of them came agonizingly close, with Illinois losing to North Carolina, 75-70, in 2005 and Wisconsin coming up short against Duke, 68-63, in 2015. It’s not like its teams haven’t been in advantageous spots entering the tournament in recent years, either.