Winless watch is on
It's way too early for this, or is it?
Since 1950, there have been just six D-I teams to go through entire college basketball season without a victory1. (Thanks, College Basketball Reference for data prior to 1997.) Technically, the winless campaign is more rare than the unbeaten season, which has happened nine times. But we say technically because an unbeaten season hasn’t happened since 1976, while each of the winless seasons have happened since 1992.
To go unbeaten, you have to win a tournament against the best teams in the country. But to avoid going winless, those in the top division of college athletics can simply schedule their way to a victory if need be since there’s no shortage of inferior teams at lower levels. This is how Mississippi Valley State already has a win despite possibly being headed for a finish at the bottom of the kenpom table.
It’s also the reason that as of Monday morning, there are 79 unbeaten teams but just 25 winless teams. Of those, 20 still have a non D-I to look forward to on the schedule. The coaches of these teams are what one might call “lame”. In the midst of teaching their charges they must figure out to handle adversity, they have given their teams the easy way out of staring down a zero in the win column.
However, Joe Scott is not among those coaches because he is a man of honor. In his 23 seasons of coaching mid-major style programs, he’s scheduled just three games against non D-I teams.2 The last of which was as a first-year coach at Denver in 2007 when the Pioneers beat East Central University of Oklahoma, 75-74, in overtime. Perhaps the close call scared him from ever the scheduling another one.
Now Scott coaches at Air Force and if there was ever a place where scheduling non D-I’s would be acceptable, it’s there. No program is a worse fit for its league than the Air Force Academy is for the Mountain West, mainly because the Falcons have major recruiting obstacles that other teams in the league don’t face:
Realistically, no NIL incentives or transfers
No international players
The typical promising basketball prospect has little interest in cadet life
While Army and Navy get to compete with teams in the Patriot League — the 27th-ranked league in the country as of now — Air Force is misplaced in a conference that, at least for one more season, normally produces multiple tournament bids. The last time the program had a winning conference record was in 2007. They have a 6-26 record all-time in the Mountain West tournament.
Past Air Force coaches often scheduled multiple non D-I’s to pad the record a bit, with the likes of Colorado College, Johnson & Wales (a cooking school!), and Regis (the Jesuit school in Denver, not Kathie Lee’s late co-host) regularly showing up at Clune Arena for a light beating. While I detest games against non D-I’s, Air Force’s situation is one of the most understandable for doing so. Even in the Mountain West, just two other teams (shout out, Grand Canyon and Nevada) didn’t schedule a non D-I this season, despite having little need to do so from a record standpoint, and some incentive not to do it from a tournament résumé standpoint.
It’s worth noting that Air Force has never been particularly bad relative to the rest of D-I, just relative to its league. Last season was just the second time that Air Force didn’t rank in the top 300. So it’s not like they’ve flirted with true disaster in modern times.
This season might be different. Despite having one of the best home-court advantages in the sport mainly due its extreme elevation, Air Force may not be favored in a game the rest of the season. Last Tuesday, the Falcons had a home game against LIU which figured to be one of their best chances at getting a win. They jumped out a 20-9 lead, but gave it all away by halftime, and trailed by as many as 15 in the second half before losing by four. In their previous game they lost at home to Austin Peay by 20 in a game where they went 8-for-24 from the free throw line. (The Falcons are a comical 55% from the line through four games.) Austin Peay proceeded to lose at Wyoming by 14 in their next game. On Saturday, Air Force was not terribly competitive in a 15-point home loss to Miami Ohio.
Besides not hosting a non D-I, Air Force didn’t exactly plumb the depths of D-I for their non-conference slate, either. While they may not play anyone that finishes in the top 100, they also may not play anyone that finishes outside the top 300. At least they scheduled just two true road games.
Realistically, they’ll find at least one win somewhere and possibly three or four. Being expected to lose each of your games is a lot different than being expected to lose all of your games. Currently, their chance of going winless barely registers on my schedule page. They play Alabama State on Wednesday and may actually be favored or at worst a slight underdog, even though Alabama State does have a road win against #107 UAB.
Air Force gets IU Indy next week, and one might think IU Indy’s frenetic pace will struggle in the thin air of Clune Arena, but the Jaguars will get to a play a game there before they meet Air Force. If the Falcons somehow go through non-conference play without figuring it out, they are going to run out of chances pretty quickly in Mountain West play, where the bottom of the league is better than it has been in recent seasons.
Update! Last week we documented the increase in scoring across the sport. There’s typically a modest dip in scoring as the season progresses due to the typical decrease in pace outstripping the increase in efficiency as shooting improves. But there was still enough juice on Saturday to make it the third-highest scoring day in the last 30 seasons. Which means that this season now has the top three scoring days and five of the top ten over this time.
1. 11/8/25 78.9
2. 11/3/25 76.8
3. 11/15/25 76.7
4. 11/19/17 76.1
5. 1/18/24 75.6
6. 11/8/24 75.5
7. 12/17/16 75.4
8. 11/11/25 75.4
9. 11/16/15 75.3
10. 11/7/25 75.3
Well, sort of. We are not including Chicago State’s 0-9 season in 2021 nor The Citadel’s 1955 season which is listed as 0-17 by some sources but disputed by The Citadel.
As head coach of Denver, he was forced to play Alaska-Anchorage in the seventh-place game of the Great Alaska Shootout, but we are not counting that in his total.