College basketball & football top winning percentages

I recently noticed a blogger post an interesting fact: Kentucky Men’s basketball has the highest all-time winning percentage of any major american sports program or franchise. By “major” we are referring to Pro Football (NFL), Pro Basketball (NBA), Pro Baseball (MLB), Pro Hockey (NHL) and both NCAA College football and NCAA College Basketball.

In other words, of the major sports we celebrate in our culture at both the professional and amateur level, Kentucky Men’s basketball holds the highest winning percentage.

At first I found this to be a remarkable statistic for the University of Kentucky men’s basketball team. And while I still feel this is a tremendous achievement, it becomes apparent through research that professional sports and college sports do not operate on the same playing fields, so comparing their win-loss records against one another is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. For example the highest all time winning percentages for the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL are the Dallas Cowboys (0.575), New York Yankees (0.568), Los Angeles Lakers (0.620), and Montreal Canadiens (0.590), respectively. Of these four only the LA Lakers winning percentage would crack the Top 50 combined winning percentages found in college football and basketball. The proof is in the pudding: the talent gap in professional sports is not as severe as the talent gap between the best and worst collegiate level athletes.

Because so many more college programs in football and basketball have higher winning percentages than those in professional sports, I switched gears in my objective for this post. Now I simply want to give you a slightly different perspective than you are used to seeing. Below is a list of the top college football and basketball programs ranked in descending order beginning with highest winning percentage. Does anything surprise you? What are some of the most interesting observations?

Highest All-Time Winning Percentage (College Basketball and College Football Teams):
*Note that this list is composed of the top 25 basketball and top 25 football teams based on their winning percentages

1. Kentucky (Basketball) 0.760
2. North Carolina (Basketball) 0.736
3. Michigan (Football) 0.735
4. Notre Dame (Football) 0.733
5. Ohio State (Football) 0.719
6. Texas (Football) 0.717
7. Oklahoma (Football) 0.717
8. Kansas (Basketball) 0.716
9. Boise State (Football) 0.715
10. UNLV (Basketball) 0.712
11. Alabama (Football) 0.707
12. Nebraska (Football) 0.701
13. Southern California (Football) 0.701
14. Duke (Basketball) 0.699
15. UCLA (Basketball) 0.694
16. Penn State (Football) 0.690
17. Tennessee (Football) 0.690
18. Syracuse (Basketball) 0.687
19. Western Kentucky (Basketball) 0.672
20. Florida State (Football) 0.664
21. St. John’s (Basketball) 0.658
22. Louisville (Basketball) 0.656
23. Utah (Basketball) 0.654
24. Illinois (Basketball) 0.653
25. Notre Dame (Basketball) 0.645
26. Georgia (Football) 0.644
27. Temple (Basketball) 0.643
28. Missouri State (Basketball) 0.643
29. LSU (Football) 0.643
30. Arizona (Basketball) 0.642
31. Villanova (Basketball) 0.641
32. Arkansas (Basketball) 0.641
33. Indiana (Basketball) 0.640
34. Connecticut (Basketball) 0.640
35. Murray State (Basketball) 0.637
36. Miami FL (Football) 0.637
37. Weber State (Basketball) 0.632
38. VCU (Basketball) 0.632
39. Auburn (Football) 0.632
40. Penn (Basketball) 0.631
41. Purdue (Basketball) 0.631
42. Florida (Football) 0.631
43. South Florida (Football) 0.624
44. Miami OH (Football) 0.621
45. Los Angeles Lakers (Pro Basketball) 0.620
46. Washington (Football) 0.612
47. Arizona State (Football) 0.611
48. Virginia Tech (Football) 0.606
49. Central Michigan (Football) 0.606
50. West Virginia (Football) 0.600
51. Colorado (Football) 0.600

• As you can see the highest professional team is the LA Lakers, and their win percentage would rank 45th best in this list.
• In situations where two or more teams have the same win percentage, the better ranking was awarded to the team with more total wins on their resume

Things I find interesting looking at this list:

• The top 25 teams are separated by a total of 1.15 percentage points (Kentucky is 0.760 while Notre Dame basketball is 0.645). However the bottom 25 of the list are only separated by 0.44 percentage points. While I don’t have the skill to weight this statistically, you can see how much more common it is to find yourself historically at a winning percentage under 0.650 than over 0.65.
• It’s hard not to notice the gap Kentucky shares over #2 on the list. At 0.760, Kentucky is well ahead of the competition. Many variables contribute to a team’s winning percentage so I’ll leave it to the reader to speculate this particular result.
• I’m surprised to see Indiana basketball this low on the list. They are clearly a program that reeks history yet they have a lower winning percentage than Arkansas. Very surprising.
• Four basketball programs from the state of Kentucky made the Top 35. If you shook out the football programs on this list that would give the state of Kentucky four basketball programs in the top 21. I guess this is just one measure to help understand the importance of basketball in the state of Kentucky.