Our 2026 Candid Coaches series wrapped in the first week of September, with one of the final questions in this year's survey doubling as one of the sneaky-good barroom debates in college sports. Who's the best college basketball team since 2000? Not the best program, but the best team from a single season.
We polled nearly 100 coaches on that question, and the absurdly dominant 2023-24 UConn won by earning 17% of the votes. Not a runaway by any means, nor should it have been. That Huskies group was loaded, but the eight other highest vote-getters all have a claim, far as I can tell.
This question prompted a lot of responses Since September is the slowest month of the college hoops calendar, let's extend this topic and get some input from the CBS Sports college hoops posse. Who's the best team of the 21st century so far? When I added this question to our 2026 Candid Coaches rundown in mid-July, I gave real thought to which team would have the strongest case in the ensuing weeks, as I got feedback from a variety of coaches.
After two months of mulling, I landed on the first possible candidate at the start of the timeline. Mike Krzyzewski's third team to win a national title did not have the best record of any national champion in the past 26 years, but it did win all of its NCAA Tournament games by double digits, becoming the first school in the expanded tournament era (since 1985) to achieve the feat. My clincher: This is the only team to ever have teammates win national player of the year awards in the same season.
That would be Shane Battier and Jay Williams, who are for sure two of the 10 best players Coach K ever had. The rest of the starting five: Carlos Boozer, Chris Duhon and Mike Dunleavy Jr. That quintet can go head-to-head with any other in the past 26 seasons.
That Duke team finished 35-4 and beat opponents by an average margin of 20.2 points, one of the largest margins by any team in the past 50 years. Their KenPom efficiency margin was almost five points better than No. 2 Stanford and is one of the three largest gaps between first and second in the 30-year history of KenPom's database. That Duke team also beat 13 ranked opponents, second-most ever (only eclipsed by Arizona last season).
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