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Pat Summitt's incredible career by the numbers
Legendary basketball coach Pat Summitt passed away on Tuesday at the age of 64 after a five-year battle with Alzheimer's.
For nearly four decades prior to her diagnosis, Summitt was the head coach at Tennessee, where she was a record-setter, a pioneer and an icon within the basketball community. During her time on the Lady Vols' bench, Summitt won more games than any other coach in the history of Division I basketball and built Tennessee into one of the premier programs in women's college hoops.
By any measure, Summitt is among the greatest coaches of all time. Here's a look at Summitt's unrivaled career by the numbers:
38: Seasons as head coach
In some ways, Summitt became the head coach of the Lady Vols by accident. After finishing up her playing career at UT-Martin in 1974, Summitt was hired as a 22-year-old graduate assistant while she finished her master's degree at Tennessee. Two weeks after she took the job, then-head coach Margaret Hutson took an unexpected sabbatical. The school tabbed Summitt, then known as Pat Head, to fill in for Hutson, and she ended up staying on the bench until 2012.
1,098: Total wins
Across nearly four decades, Summitt coached 1,306 games, with an all-time record of 1,098-208. Her first win came on Jan. 10, 1975, against Middle Tennessee State, and her last came on March 24, 2012, against Kansas. To date, Summitt is the only coach in women's basketball history to win 1,000 games.
8: National championships
Summitt's teams won a total of eight national championships under her leadership. The first came in 1987 and was followed by titles in 1989 and 1991, as well. From 1996-98, the Lady Vols won three consecutive championships, and Summitt's final two titles came in 2007 and 2008.
18: Final Fours
Even when Tennessee wasn't winning it all, the Lady Vols were a consistent presence at the Final Four. From the inception of the women's NCAA tournament in 1982 until the end of Summitt's career, her teams appeared in 18 of 31 Final Fours, including 13 national championship games. In addition, the Lady Vols also reached the AIAW Final Four four times from 1977-81.
112: NCAA tournament victories
The Lady Vols never missed an NCAA tournament under Summitt (they were a 1-seed a record 21 times), and only once, in 2009, did the team get sent home prior to the start of the Sweet 16. Overall, Summitt posted a 112-23 record in NCAA tournament play, with the 112 wins representing a Division I record. All told, her teams were 48-1 in first- and second-round games, 25-5 in the Sweet 16, 18-7 in the Elite Eight and 21-10 in the Final Four.
161: Players coached by Summitt
Over the course of her career, Summitt coached 161 different Lady Vols players. More than three dozen of them went on to play in the WNBA since its formation in 1997, including 16 first-round picks.
90: Branches on Summitt's coaching tree
As of the start of the 2015-16 season, there were 90 former Tennessee players, coaches, grad assistants, managers, operations directors, video coordinators or directors of character development who had gone on to coach at the professional, college or high school level after their career in Knoxville was over. Fifty-four of those 90 coaches are former players, including current Tennessee head coach Holly Warlick, who played for Summitt from 1976-80 and was an assistant on her staff from 1986-2012.
2: Courts named in her honor
On March 22, 2005, Summitt won her 880th game to pass longtime North Carolina men's coach Dean Smith as the all-time winningest coach in Division I history. Following the win, the team surprised Summitt with a postgame ceremony where the school announced it would be changing the name of the court at Thompson-Boling Arena to "The Summitt." Seven and a half years earlier, on Nov. 23, 1997, Summitt's alma mater, UT-Martin, renamed its court at Skyhawk Arena, dubbing it "Pat Head Summitt Court."
.913: Winning percentage in home games
The best argument for naming the court after Summitt could be her winning percentage on it. Summitt's teams won a staggering 91.3 percent of their home games during the coach's career, with just 48 losses to 504 wins.
15: Weeks outside the AP Top 25
In November 1976, The Associated Press released its inaugural women's basketball poll. Tennessee wasn't included among the initial Top 20, but it snuck in at No. 19 in the second-ever ranking and stayed in the poll for all but 14 weeks over the rest of Summitt's career at Tennessee. Further, 10 of those instances came during the 1984-85 season, and this past February marked the first time in 31 years that Tennessee had fallen out of the Top 25.
47: Percent of games played against fellow top 25 teams
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Summitt's nearly 1,100 wins is the level of competition it came against. Over the course of Summitt's career, Tennessee played nearly half of its games against teams ranked in the AP poll. The Lady Vols went 440-168 in those games for a .724 winning percentage. Under Summitt, Tennessee went 237-38 (.861) against teams ranked 11-25 and 176-125 (.585) against teams in the AP Top 10. In 38 years, Summitt's teams only lost 40 games against unranked opponents.
36: 20-win seasons (plus, 20 30-win seasons)
One could make the argument that Summitt's career got off to a slow start, with marks of 16-8 and 16-11 in her first two seasons in Knoxville, but from the beginning of the 1976-77 season on, Tennessee was a literal lock to win 20 games. The Lady Vols won a minimum of 22 games every year from 1976-2012, and more often than not, they reached the 20-win mark easily. In fact, Summitt's teams won 30 games 20 times, including 15 times in the 19 seasons between 1993 and her retirement.
1: Undefeated season
Since the birth of the NCAA women's tournament in '82, there have been nine instances of a Division I team going undefeated and winning a national title. During the 1997-98 season, Tennessee became the third, capping off its 39-0 run (and women's Division I basketball's first-ever three-peat) with a 93-75 win over Louisiana Tech in the national championship game.
100: Percent graduation rate
However, for all her teams accomplished on the court, Summitt's greatest victory may have come in the classroom. Upon her retirement, Summitt boasted a sparkling 100 percent graduation rate among players who completed their eligibility at Tennessee.
