This was the year. One of the best years in the history of the Creighton Bluejays men’s soccer program. The year they could have won it all. Another season in the books where the ever-elusive national championship was just out of reach once again.

After the Jays’ title dreams were dashed two weeks ago in the quarterfinals loss to Akron, Creighton Otter said to me, “I bet Creighton has more elite eight appearances than any team that hasn’t won a national championship.” How many elite eights had we made anyway? Yeah, it seemed like we have always been a contender but surely there were other teams out there that had suffered as much postseason heartbreak as us?

There was only one way to find out. I began investigating the wonderfully obscure world of college soccer statistics. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a nice centralized resource for historical college soccer statistics like there is for college basketball and college football. After a week of data-digging and browsing several universities’ soccer program histories (often found in black and white PDF format on the most remote part of their website), I finally had my dataset. And, after reviewing the data, I can now say with confidence that Creighton is the best soccer program to have never won a national championship (at least in the last 25 years). Below is my coping mechanism of sorts, my evidence that Creighton soccer deserves a national championship.

Now let’s break this down a bit into digestible chunks.

NCAA Tournament Appearances 1991-2015

Only three teams have made the NCAA tournament every year over the past twenty-five years: Virginia, Indiana, and UCLA. Creighton is the next most frequent tournament team, only missing the tournament in its first year in the Valley in 1991 and again in 2009. Of the top ten tournament-appearing teams of the past 25 years, only Creighton, SMU, and St. Louis have not won national championships in that time.

Quarterfinal Appearances 1991-2015

Next, let’s look at quarterfinal appearances (aka elite eights). Creighton has made it to the quarterfinals 11 of the past 25 years. The only teams that have done better are perennial powerhouses Indiana and Virginia. Elite programs Maryland and UCLA also match Creighton’s cumulative total but alas the only difference of course is that both Maryland and UCLA have won championships in that time. I don’t know about you, but it surprised me that Creighton has made four more quarterfinals than North Carolina since 1991! Who would have thought?

College Cup Appearances 1991-2015

Now let’s look at College Cup (final four) appearances. Since 1991, there have only been six teams with five or more college cup appearances. Sadly, Creighton is the only one of these schools to not win a national championship in that time.

National Championships 1991-2015

Finally, the past 25 national men’s soccer national championships have been won by just 13 schools. I know you don’t need me to tell you that Creighton isn’t a part of this list, but I just threw them in there to hammer home the point.

But is this enough? Can we say for sure that Creighton is the best team to have never won a championship? I think we can. But first we need to combine the data from the four tables above into one large table that lets us see all schools at once.

The teams that are in the final table below may seem like they were selected haphazardly, but there is a method to my madness (this table is also what you see visualized in the chart at top). In short, it contains the 10 teams with the most NCAA tournament appearances over the past 25 years as well as every team that has won a national championship in that time frame. I realize it does not have every great soccer program of the past 25 years, but it does have most of them. I felt getting this article out in a timely matter was more important than creating a comprehensive list. Way too much PDF perusing for the point I’m trying to make — ain’t nobody got time for that!

I digress. The table is sorted in descending order by a custom metric I calculated that takes how many times a team has made the tournament, elite eight, College Cup, etc. and assigns these occurrences weights based on the probability of making it to that level. For example, finishing runner-up “weighs” more than a College Cup appearance and thus adds more to a team’s final composite score. It’s not a perfect measure, but I think it gives a good idea of the relative strength of some of the top soccer programs in the country over the past 25 years. The custom score gives some perspective as to who has a consistently strong soccer program and who just got lucky one year.

Top NCAA Tournament Teams 1991-2015

T= Tournament, E8 = Elite Eight, CC = College Cup, RU = Runner Up, #1 = National champion

So what can we learn from this? Creighton has been good. Not just good but exceptionally good. A “blood blue” of college soccer (to steal a term from college basketball). According to this metric, Creighton is the fifth best soccer program in the country since it joined the Valley in 1991 (if you assume postseason success is actually indicative of program strength). If anything, this makes it blatantly clear that they’re the best team to have never won a championship (SMU is a distant second).

How long will it take for the Jays to win that elusive national championships? Maybe next year? Maybe in five years? Whenever it happens, one thing is for sure — it’ll be anything but undeserved.