Denver basketball's excruciating wait will have to continue

Last week, the Pioneers fell a win short of their first-ever NCAA Tournament. Will a school with a potential to succeed ever get to partake in the joy of March Madness?

Last Tuesday night, as the major men’s basketball leagues started kicking off their conference tournaments, South Dakota State punched its ticket to the NCAA Tournament with a win in the Summit League championship game.

For whatever elation it provided their players, coaches and fans, there was nothing particularly unexpected about what the Jackrabbits accomplished. They won the league’s regular-season title by two games and the tournament championship, and subsequent NCAA Tournament bid, is their seven since 2012, an impressive feat for a program that only jumped to the Division I level in 2005.

The game’s result, however, was maybe more consequential for the team on the opposing bench.

For the University of Denver – known locally as DU for reasons that still escape me – it deprived them yet again of reaching a long-elusive destination. The Pioneers are one of seven men’s basketball programs that were Division I members the year the first NCAA Tournament was first held in 1939 that still have yet to punch their ticket to the Big Dance.

Tuesday’s matchup was just the second time Denver has even made a conference championship and been thrust into a win-and-you’re-in situation. In both instances, it lost, though, if you’re searching for a silver lining, Tuesday’s setback was much closer than the 19-point beatdown it suffered at the hands of Louisiana-Lafayette in the 2005 Sun Belt championship. Years later, the Ragin Cajuns had to vacate that win and the subsequent NCAA Tournament appearance due to major recruiting violations uncovered by the NCAA, but, among the countless follies of trying to erase history, it’s not as if the Pioneers can suddenly claim March Madness glory because of it.

Today, Selection Sunday, is a day for dreams to be realized, for those euphoric shots of teams celebrating the simple-yet-powerful joy of seeing their school’s name appear on a television screen for a few seconds. 

For Denver, however, it’s a cruel and annual glimpse at the exhilaration it has never gotten to experience itself.

Denver’s frustrating basketball history

The Pioneers – the Pios, as they’re known colloquially – failing to make the tournament isn’t due to a lack of attempts.

Denver played its first men’s basketball game in 1904, only 13 years after Dr. James Naismith invented the game at a YMCA training school in western Massachusetts. 

Though there were occasional moments of celebration, much of the full century of Division I basketball that followed offered little encouragement. 

In 102 seasons as a Division I program, the Pioneers have finished above .500 only 40 times. Many of those seasons with winning records were only so triumphant, as they’ve won at least two-thirds of their games in a season only nine times – and only two of those have come since World War II. They have just three seasons with at least 20 wins.

In what’s perhaps a fitting fate given its nickname, Denver has been a bit of a nomadic program.