Indiana’s run as college basketball’s last undefeated team will officially go beyond the 50-year mark.
This 2025-26 IU team wore a jersey patch commemorating the accomplishment — that will now live on for at least a 51st season. That comes after previously 31-0 Miami (Ohio) was knocked off in its MAC Tournament game against UMass Thursday afternoon.
While fans enjoy the distinction of IU being the last undefeated team, the players from the 1976 squad don’t throw a party when the last unbeaten squad goes down.
“We don’t celebrate,” former IU guard Quinn Buckner said. “I have not been to a celebration. The Miami Dolphins thing does not happen where they pop the champagne. We don’t do that. If they do, they’ve done it without me and I think they would at least tell me about it.”
Former IU forward Tom Abernethy says the 1976 Indiana players might have a role in crowning this year’s champion at Lucas Oil Stadium on Monday, April 6, and he says he would have been happy to honor an undefeated team at the Final Four in Indianapolis next month.
But the 2026 champion will not have an unblemished record, and the players on that 1976 team know that is something that still has meaning to the fans.
Abernethy sees it in his own family.
“So I’ve got twins that they’re 46 years old now, but they’ve started to call me in the last 10 or 15 years,” Abernethy said. “And my brother Spike started calling me as teams would start losing and stuff. Now, I’m not celebrating crazily, but within our family, we sort of laugh.”
Miami had one of the deepest undefeated runs in recent history. Only twice in the last 12 years has a team made it to the NCAA Tournament undefeated — 2015 Kentucky and 2021 Gonzaga.
Led by legendary head coach Bob Knight, Indiana also made it to the 1975 NCAA Tournament undefeated before suffering its first loss of the season. That set the stage for the 32-0 run in 1976.
“He (Knight) said: ‘If you do what I’ve told you to do and what we practice to do, it’s going to be very difficult to beat you,'” Buckner said. “And that says a lot. And we were able to do that.”
On the 50-year anniversary of the undefeated basketball season, Indiana also completed an undefeated college football season, the first 16-0 year at the sport’s highest level since 1894.
At least going back to the start of the NCAA basketball tournament in 1940, Indiana is the only team to simultaneously claim the last undefeated/untied season in both football and basketball.
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