10 best Final Four teams that didn’t win the national championship

1. 1985 Georgetown Hoyas

As we hinted at earlier on the list, this is (in our opinion) the biggest upset in NCAA Tournament history. The Georgetown Hoyas were a college basketball powerhouse in the 1980s, reaching the national championship game in 1982 and winning it in 1984 behind future Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing.

Ewing was one of five eventual NBA players on the 1985 Hoyas, who ended up winning a very competitive Big East by going 30-2 and topping archival St. John’s at Madison Square Garden to claim the tournament title. The Big East ended up placing three teams in the Final Four that year: Georgetown, St. John’s, and Villanova.

While many expected the Hoyas and Red Storm to get to Lexington, Villanova’s appearance was a surprise. The Wildcats finished fourth in the conference in the regular season and slumped down the stretch, losing seven of their last 13 games to limp into March Madness.

Villanova won a lot of close games to get to the Final Four, where they topped Memphis State for a date in the finals with Georgetown, which had beaten St. John’s yet again. The Hoyas had won both regular season matchups with the Wildcats so few expected this to be a close game.

Instead, the Wildcats played as close to a perfect game as humanly possible, pulling off a stunning 66-64 upset to claim the national title as an 8-seed, the lowest seeded team to ever win the NCAA Tournament. Georgetown, which saw Ewing graduate after the season, didn’t return to the Final Four again until 2007.