Heads up: This was not meant to be a super depressing, trolling, Northwestern sucks type-of-post. This is probably really dumb and unnecessary information, but I found it sort of interesting...and quite depressing and pathetic at the same time. Whatever. Here it goes.

It's been well documented that Northwestern is the only team from a major conference to have never received a bid to the NCAA tournament. I decided to search for those big time schools with only 1 or 2 NCAA bids to give Northwestern fans a decent school to compare our basketball woes to.

Yeah...none of those exist. Northwestern's basketball history is far behind even all those other historically-bad-at-basketball schools. South Florida, a more recent acquisition to the Big East (since 2005), has reached the tournament 3 times. Every other major conference team has reached the NCAA tournament at least 6(!) times. Those with 6 NCAA appearance include Nebraska (last appearance: 1998), Mississippi (last appearance: 2002 - but a bubble team this year), Minnesota (last appearance: 2010 - but probably will make it this year), Rutger (last appearance: 1991), and Washington State (last appearance: 2008).

To further put this in perspective, Northeastern has reached the tournament 7 times, and even Northwestern State has cracked the field twice.

I don't want this to turn into a fire/keep Carmody thread. All I know is that I'm hungry for an NCAA Tournament berth - and soon. Because as it stands now, our basketball history is ridiculously pathetic. Northwestern football just won a bowl game for the first time in 64 years. Let's hope we can get a second monkey off our back with an NCAA Tournament appearance ASAP.