To rank a decade’s worth of champions is to embark on a task of relativism and hair-splitting. Each of these 10 teams, after all, won a national championship, and to declare any of them “the worst” or even, say, seventh-best of 10 is to offer them a slight required by nothing but a context of one’s own making.
And yet, after games themselves, the sports world may have no greater tradition than theoretical, impossible-to-settle comparison. It is in that spirit and acknowledgement of the current decade’s closing that SI has sought to rank each of college basketball’s national champions from the 2010 postseason through the most recent one.