Barring a miraculous victory in the Pac-12 Tournament, I’m sad to report that the Washington men’s basketball team will not play in this year’s NCAA tournament. That means this season will almost certainly continue a peculiar trend that has seen the Huskies play in both a football bowl game and the NCAA tournament just once since the 1998-99 academic year.<\/p>\n
Over that 18-year span, UW has made six NCAA tournaments and played in 11 bowl games. Assuming the two were distributed equally, you’d expect three or more likely four years where the Huskies reached both. Yet it’s only happened the once: 2010-11, when Steve Sarkisian<\/strong> led the football team to its first bowl game since 2002-03 and the men’s basketball team lost to North Carolina in the round of 32.<\/p>\n Graphing the performance of the two teams over that span (as measured by Sports-Reference.com’s<\/strong><\/a> simple rating system<\/strong><\/a>) shows the relationship between Washington’s performance in the two main revenue sports has been closely — and inversely — linked.<\/p>\n