5 CHAPTER Before the Madness Stanford University and Long Island University play a college basketball game in 1935 College basketball had no championship tournament until 1939 1 It was forty years before Larry Bird and Earvin Magic Johnson met for the college basketball national championship March Madness didn’t yet exist College basketball fans weren’t filling out tournament brackets Office pools weren’t commonplace ESPN wasn’t that familiar friend in America’s living rooms The year was 1939 Eight college basketball teams were invited to Northwestern University The school’s central location near Chicago made it easier for teams to attend In Illinois they would play in the first National Collegiate Athletic Association NCAA men’s basketball tournament Basketball had been around since 1891 However there was no official college national championship until then The iconic
6 tournament was single-elimination from the start Little else from that tournament looked like the modern March Madness though The eight-team field was limited to conference champions And the Final Four was not yet held in a football stadium Instead the entire tournament was played at 9,000-seat Patten Gymnasium The University of Oregon and Ohio State University played in the first championship game The game was held on March 27 1939 Official figures show that only 5,500 people showed up Those not at the game could follow it on the radio But the game was not News IN THE The Oregon Daily Emerald independent student newspaper ran a banner headline after the University of Oregon won the first NCAA basketball championship Nation hails Ducks after 46 33 victory They’re national champions now these tall Oregon boys who have no peer no match wherever basketball is played in this old world They’ve walked a long time and marched a long way along the nation’s long trails and now they’ve reached the top the highest pinnacle for which anyone can strive Source Oregon National Champs Oregon Daily Emerald March 28 1939 Print 1
7 broadcast on TV A makeshift band played Mighty Oregon as the Webfoots won the first NCAA title 46 33 The game was hardly a major event In fact some fans and teams preferred the National Invitation Tournament NIT The NIT crowned its first champion in 1938 in New York City It was not until the 1950s that the NCAA Tournament began to take over Modern touches of March Madness were added to the tournament over the years The tournament expanded to add more teams Yet even into the mid-1970s the tournament had not grown larger than 25 teams By the end of that decade however no one would look at the NCAA Tournament as a niche event again The University of California Los Angeles and the University of Houston play in the 1968 Final Four
