About Northwestern University Wildcats Men's Basketball
Currently riding their longest period of sustained success in the modern era, the Northwestern Wildcats men's basketball team is holding their own against the best the Big Ten Conference can offer. They play in the West division, regularly squaring off against the Nebraska Cornhuskers, Iowa Hawkeyes, Illinois Fighting Illini, Purdue Boilermakers, Minnesota Golden Gophers, and Wisconsin Badgers.
The Wildcats play at the newly renovated Welsh-Ryan Arena, which seats 7,039 and is the smallest-capacity men's basketball arena in the Big Ten Conference. The arena opened in 1952 as part of the auditorium complex at McGaw Hall. It played host to the 1956 Final Four, in which Bill Russell and the San Francisco Dons clinched a perfect season and their second consecutive NCAA championship.
While Northwestern has had a long history of competing against the top teams in the Big Ten, their greatest period of success (besides the modern day) came in the decade preceding World War II, when they won two Big Ten titles as well as the 1931 National Championship.
Northwestern hosting the first Final Four in 1939 as well as the 1956 title game, but the Wildcats didn't make their first NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament until 2017. They beat Vanderbilt in the first round before falling to No. 1 seed and eventual tournament runner-up Gonzaga in the round of 32.
Northwestern's recent run of success has been under head coach Chris Collins, whose father Doug was a successful player and coach in the NBA. Pro Football Hall of Famer Otto Graham was a two-time consensus All-American for the Wildcat basketball team in 1943 and 1944 before becoming one of the greatest and most successful quarterbacks in the history of pro football.
