The Line: The Seven Best College Teams to Not Win a Title

Digging through college ultimate history to find the best of the best (until they weren't).

February 21, 2025 by Patrick Stegemoeller in Analysis, Opinion

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The Line brings together lists of sevens from our reporting staff.

“All championship winning teams are alike; each losing team loses in its own way.” – Tolstoy, sorta.

We’ve entered the phase of the college season where there are still a good bushel of teams with championship aspirations, hopes buoyed by exciting early season results and promising player development. But in a matter of months those hopes will evaporate for all but the one team left standing.

We’re not here today to talk about that one team. We’re here to talk about those who hoped.

There have been a lot of great players and good teams who never won a college title. But there’s a smaller handful of really great teams who didn’t win a championship. It’s not something you see every year, but you know it when it happens. A team that has all of the “it” factor, the pedigree, the talent to win. A team that, if you awoke tomorrow in an alternate universe where the major significant chance to the timeline was this team winning that title in 2017 or whenever you’d say “okay, this universe still makes sense.”

There are different flavors here: Teams that were so stacked and didn’t quite reach their potential. Teams that were clearly the best that season but lost in some freakish fashion. Teams that any other year would have been clear title favorites but had the misfortune of running into a generational world destroyer foe.

We’ve landed on seven teams that, in my mind, most fit that bill during what can loosely be described as “the Ultiworld era.” I’m sure that there was an absolutely stacked Rutgers team that should have won in 1985 if not for their two best players getting food poising from the same Arby’s, and frankly I would love to have you tell me about it over three to seven drinks, but that’s outside of my jurisdiction.

These seven could-have-beens are presented in reverse chronological order – and not as a ranking – because as our boy Tolstoy observed each of these teams are their own unique heroic tragedy. There’s only one way to win a title, but many ways to lose. Here are the greatest teams to meet their demise on the train tracks of Nationals instead of hoisting the trophy.

2022 Colorado Quandary (W)

We maybe don’t talk enough about the tragedy of the recent era of Quandary, a team that has been a supreme foil for the greatest college dynasty of all time but never gotten over the line themselves. Eliminated by UNC three years in a row, twice in the national final, twice on universe point. For the purposes of this list let’s go with the 2022 vintage, the team that lost in the final AND on universe point to Pleiades. 2022 is the choice not just because of how agonizingly close they got, but because this team was killing at Nationals. Absolute domination en route the finals. Like, “score all 10 points in the second half of quarterfinals against Vermont to come back from an 8-5 hole” level stuff. That second half against UVM becomes even more legendary if Colorado emerges with a title, but all of that excellence was still one point short of what was required that season.

2017 Minnesota Grey Duck (M)

Their win in 2016 papers over some of the historical memory here, but 2017 Minnesota are responsible for one of the greatest bag-fumbles in the history of the sport.