We've all had that feeling: Your team has just suffered a horrendous loss; a beat-down; a clinic. It was bad. Nothing went right. Your star player couldn't hit a shot, the opponent couldn't miss. You ignore Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, trying to avoid the almost certain mocking from your rival’s fans. Come Monday, you can’t imagine how far your team has fallen in the most recent AP Poll. You don’t even want to know.

But hey, it’s only the regular season, right? That’s the beauty of college basketball, isn't it? These losses may affect your seeding in the NCAA Tournament, but once that single-elimination madness begins, all bets are off. You get to start over, and hope, maybe even for a couple of weekends, that your team learned something from that terrible loss back in November/December/January/February. Maybe, just maybe, they can still be NCAA Men’s Basketball Champions.

Or maybe they can’t….

Bob Knight’s 1975–1976 Indiana Hoosiers were the last team to complete a perfect season

All teams lose, even those that eventually win the NCAA Championship. In fact, since Bob Knight’s 1975–1976 Indiana Hoosiers team went 32–0, there has not been a single NCAA men’s basketball team that ran the table through their regular season and conference tournament before winning the NCAA Tournament. That’s a 40 year period encompassing the entire modern era of college basketball. In that time, three teams have come close: The 1978–1979 Indiana State Sycamores, led by future Hall-of-Famer Larry Bird, advanced all the way to the National Championship game before losing to the Magic Johnson-led Michigan State Spartans, finishing the season 33–1. The 1990–1991 UNLV Runnin’ Rebels advanced to the Final Four before losing in the National Semifinal game to eventual champion Duke. Most recently, the 2014–2015 Kentucky Wildcats made it to the Final Four before losing to Wisconsin (The 2013–2014 Wichita State Shockers finished the regular season undefeated, though they lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament).

The past four decades of basketball have shown us that great teams, even National Champions, lose games during the regular season. It’s a part of college basketball, so much so that many fans and college basketball commentators will argue that losing at certain times of the season to certain opponents can actually be good for a team’s long-term success.

But how does that work? What’s a “good loss?” How many good losses does a team need to motivate them to win a National Championship? And what about bad losses? Can a single bad loss be so debilitating that it runs the entire season off the rails, or can a truly great team overcome even the worst margin of defeat?

Let’s find out….

Below, I have analyzed the losses of every NCAA Men’s Basketball Champion since 1976. Some of these losses were close games that came down to the buzzer; some of them were blowouts; some came early in the season; some came as late as a conference tournament. But no matter what, each loss helped the eventual NCAA Champion win somehow. By taking a closer look, we can draw conclusions about how teams lose, and what it means for their long-term success.

This is how the stats break down: