Kentucky wins All-Time Starting Five NCAA basketball tournament

The NCAA March Madness has been running a Twitter contest to determine which college basketball team would have the best all-time starting lineup.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the Kentucky Wildcats have once again emerged as champions.

Voting for the championship game began on August 17th and the winner was announced Monday morning as Kentucky defeated the Florida Gators by getting 58% of over 35,000 votes.

Kentucky’s starting five for the tournament has been John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins, Anthony Davis, Tayshaun Prince, and Tony Delk. Florida’s runner-up team included Bradley Beal, Chandler Parsons, Al Horford, Joakim Noah, and Erving Walker.

Kentucky began the NCAA All-Time Starting Five tournament as a No. 2 seed and defeated West Virginia, Ohio State, Kansas, and top overall seed North Carolina on their way to the championship game.

Kentucky’s closest match-up came against the North Carolina Tar Heels, who trotted out Kenny Smith, Michael Jordan, Vince Carter, James Worthy, and Tyler Hansbrough. Kentucky took 55% of the 40,000 votes to advance to the finals.

Florida topped Cincinnati, Duke, and LSU before the biggest upset of the tournament as they beat UCLA in the Final Four with just 51% of the votes for that match-up.

Fan vote competitions for college basketball competitions are largely predictable and repetitive, but this did create a fun way for fans to interact leading up to the regular season. Big Blue Nation came up huge in the month of August to show that no basketball team in history has had more support from its fan base.

It also makes you wonder what it may actually look like to have these players share the court together. Here is a glimpse of what each of Kentucky’s five could bring to the team.

That said, Kentucky has a storied history with plenty of great players who deserved to be on this list. Guys like Dan Issel, Jamal Mashburn, Kenny Walker and Cliff Hagan all had strong cases to be part of Kentucky’s all-time starting five.

Who do you think Kentucky’s starting five should have been?