Some notable hallmarks

1. Obviously KU tying Kentucky for all-time wins at 2353 is the biggest hallmark. A win against Providence and we will become (once again) the winningest team, a position we held from 1941 to 1961. I thought you might like the see the winningest teams through time. (something I am pretty sure you will only find here)



2. Ochai just passed Tyshaen Taylor and Wayne Simein to move into 15th all-time KU scoring.
3. Mitch Lightfoot blowing away games played for a KU player at 164. This record will never be broken.
4. Christian 22 points away from being the 62nd KU player to score 1000 points.
5. Kansas just achieved 30 wins in a season for the 15th time (10th for Coach Self
6. KU will almost certainly finish with the 2nd toughest SOS which marks the 9th time KU has been 1st or 2nd in SOS in the country (8 of those under Self).
7. It looks like Kansas will finish as the 3rd ranked offense which marks the 15th time KU is a top 3 offense in the country (8 of those under Self)
8. KU is currently 3rd in Sweet 16 wins, that will not change if we win Friday.
9. IF KU Advances to the Final Four and Duke loses, KU will tie Duke for 4th all-time in Final Four appearances (16)

Not to quibble (because your work is exemplary as always), but a UK newspaper had an article on the history of winningest teams (when faced with the impending tie with KU) that mentioned UNC taking the lead from UK for a while before UK took it back.

Seasoned UK backers will recall that Kentucky once before lost its status as college basketball’s wins king — only to wrest that title back.

When the Wildcats had back-to-back seasons of 13 (13-19) and 14 (14-14) wins in 1988-89 and ‘89-90, it opened the door for North Carolina to supplant UK as the winningest program.

On March 17, 1990, Dean Smith’s Tar Heels beat Oklahoma in the NCAA Tournament’s round of 32 to assume the all-time wins lead, 1,479-1,478 over Kentucky.

When North Carolina, Kentucky and Kansas all made the 1993 Final Four, the all-time wins totals entering the national semifinals stood 1. Tar Heels 1,568; 2. Wildcats 1,560; 3. Jayhawks 1,515. However, after Rick Pitino fully rebuilt UK from the ashes of the Eddie Sutton-era NCAA probation, the tide turned back toward Kentucky. During 1995-96, as Pitino’s best UK team went 34-2 and won the national title, the Wildcats gained 13 victories over North Carolina (21-11 that season) and ended the year back on top in all-time wins by three victories.

Read more at: www.kentucky.com/sports/college/kentucky...9.html#storylink=cpy

I got my data for Kansas from the KU Athletics website. For all other schools,it comes from Sports reference.com. After your post I started spot checking and found immediately a number of incorrect games. That is surprising since I sort of take sports reference .com as a gospel. Even games as recently as 2008 were wrong. I have no clue where else to turn to find the data en masse. I have about 550,000 games in my database. I know KU is right because it comes from a different source. Aargh! How frustrating. That’s
Is a lot of cost and time expended. I assume it is 98% or 99% correct. But still,.

HE, on recognizing the 2020 team, I think KU is being smart in not doing it immediately after that season. I predict that much like player rafter recognition, we wait 5 years, and then we will have a special day for that team. So, I would put money on that being in either 2024 or 2025. You do realize that Ochai and a number of other current players were a part of that team, one of which will be recognized with his number, one with the largest number of games in a KU uniform, and who knows who else might be recognized in the future. Thinking of CB and JW if both come back.

Just had a chance to compare the SRCBB data to the KU Athletic website data. SRCBB had 35 scores incorrect, 4 resulted in changing wins to losses or vice versa. More egregiously they were missing 40 games altogether. That is KU games only. Makes me wonder how many more games are missing for all the other 400 odd schools. Kind of frustrating. But in scanning the data, it is all official games in the record book against Div II opponents. So not really as big of a deal as I though.

Not to be too much of a homer, but I was fascinated to see Kansas was always near the very top of the list. As the Temples and Yales and other east coast schools dominated in the early years of college hoops, KU was always there. then the true blue bloods rose over time, and KU stayed highly successful and relevant.

Also fascinating to see some other schools who are not currently known for their hoops spend some time near the top of the list (Oregon State ?? and Washington??). what an anomaly to see certain schools rise on the list who are no longer relevant.

With a little help from USAF and HE (thanks so much for catching this) I have the cumulative wins for UNC, Kentucky and Kansas with 99.9% confidence. As it turns out, Sports-Reference.com is right and wrong. They have the correct annual wins and losses in their summary pages but they do not have the actual game data in the schedules. I was using the schedule data and generating the annual totals myself. This table is using the data from their summary data which after a bit of scrutinizing I am pretty sure it is correct. I felt terrible having bad data. It was an innocent mistake in assuming that the schedules were complete. As I posted earlier, after checking they were missing 36 games for KU (not 40 as I reported earlier since I was counting the last 4 games of this season's NCAA already). So I think you can take this table to the bank. I will add in the other schools as time permits but I have to download each school separately. Doing all 400 off schools would take days. I'm not quite that into getting it that right. Without further adieu here is the table. And as USAF pointed out, UNC did indeed take the lead for a few years. This table is not pretty from a presentation standpoint but I wanted to get it posted rather than spend time cleaning it up. One final note, Kentucky officially vacated 2 games in 1988. Those games are excluded from this list.

Oh and one other note. The data in the previous table prior to 1950 I am pretty sure is correct. That data I downloaded previously from the summary tables. So all the Yale, Temple etc years are correct.

You can see from the tabel when Larry Brown took over we were 83 behind. It climbed to 90 after his first season. Since that year (1984) we have been pretty steadily gaining.

Brown gained 13 games in 5 years
Williams gained 22 in 15 years
Self has gained 48 in 19 years and counting.

HawkErrant wrote: Here is a link to the graphic I was referring to earlier.
It runs from 1892-93 thru 2019-20.
Click on the link in the tweet to see it in action.

Is it not nifty?

Greg Harvey @BetweenTheNums

With the 2020-2021 College Basketball season set to begin in just 5 DAYS, here is an interactive timeline of total… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

20 Nov 2020 19:06

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That graphic is really cool. Thanks for digging that up!