There are some teams you expect to see excel each year in college basketball. Schools like the University of North Carolina or UCLA, which holds the record for most NCAA championship wins at 11. In 2006, George Mason was not one of those teams. The Fairfax school had only advanced to the NCAA tournament three times, and it had never won a single tournament game. Mason, largely a commuter school at the time, had only been playing in Division I since 1978.
But that year, the Patriots, who one columnist remarked "put the 'mid' in 'mid-major'" school, went a wild, impressive journey to the NCAA Final Four.
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