How March went mad … for basketball
The big business of the annual college basketball tournament, continuing with the second day of First Four games today, has been more than a century in the making
Every year, as the seasons shift from winter to spring, college basketball fans throughout the country prepare to watch 136 men’s and women’s basketball teams battle for their respective national championships.
Although the tournament starts with the “ games for the men’s and women’s tournaments, respectively, the first two rounds that are played during the first weekend of the tournament have become an unofficial holiday marked by billions of dollars in decreased productivity as fans watch the first 48 games played in each tournament—during which teams vie to extend their seasons another week into the “Sweet 16.”
In the modern media age, this has become a tradition in our sports calendar, but it took several developments over the last half century for March to truly become mad.
Jared Bahir Browsh is theĚýCritical Sports StudiesĚýprogram director in the Ăĺ±±˝űµŘĚýDepartment of Ethnic Studies.
Basketball’s roots grew out of the college game, with James Naismith inventing the game in December 1891 to keep young men at the YMCA International Training School, which is now Springfield College, fit and occupied in the winter months. The game was soon introduced to women at Smith College, and by 1893 colleges and universities began forming teams—first playing against local amateur clubs before intercollegiate games began in 1894.
During this time, teams played under different rules, with some games featuring as many as nine players per side. By the turn of the 20th century, five-on-five became standard for men’s games, whereas women played six-on-six through most of the 1960s, with the last high school six-on-six tournament occurring in 1995 in Oklahoma.
was formed in 1906 as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) before taking its current name in 1910. The NCAA was formed in response to the prevalence of injuries in college football; President Theodore Roosevelt called for two conferences comprising top college football programs to address the injuries and deaths occurring in the game. The establishment of the NCAA led to a decades-long power struggle with the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for control of intercollegiate sports.
As the NCAA wrested control over football from the AAU, basketball continued to be loosely organized under the AAU, which organized the first tournament in 1898. Although the tournament did not happen annually until after World War I, the AAU did organize several tournaments for the 1904 Olympics, during which basketball debuted as a demonstration sport. There was an amateur tournament, a separate college tournament and several tournaments for high school and elementary school players.
A battle for control
The battle for control between the AAU and NCAA continued through the early 1900s, although the latter’s commitment to basketball was questionable through the 1930s. However, the NCAA did begin organizing rules committees and established its first championship, in track and field, for the 1921 season.
The first annual college basketball tournaments were organized in successive years with the NAIA tournament, organized by Naismith, starting in 1937, the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) in 1938 and the NCAA tournament in 1939. Coincidentally, the term “March Madness” was coined by , a noted coach and inventor of basketball equipment, in reference to the Illinois high school basketball tournament the same year as the first NCAA tournament. Sports commentator Brent Musburger first used the term in reference to the men’s tournament in 1982.
The NIT, which took place at Madison Square Garden, was seen as the premiere tournament through the 1940s due to the national media presence in New York City. Temple University defeated the University of Colorado in the first NIT championship, with the Buffaloes returning to the championship and winning in 1940 over Duquesne University. Because the NIT occurred before the NCAA tournament, Colorado and Duquesne competed in both.
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Clemson players celebrate a win over Arizona in the Sweet 16 round of the 2024 NCAA Tournament. (Photo: TigerNet.com)
The early 1950s featured two developments that further isolated each tournament, both involving the City College of New York (CCNY). CCNY became the first team to win both tournaments in the same year, with the championships of both tournaments occurring in Madison Square Garden in 1950. This double win led the NCAA to ban teams from competing in both tournaments in the same year.
Soon after, that CCNY team was implicated in a wide-ranging point shaving scandal, which involved bribery and match fixing. The school’s presence in New York provided bettors easier access to bookies and bookies greater access to players.
The NCAA held its finals in New York all but one year between 1943 and 1950, but after the scandal the championship never returned to Madison Square Garden, even as the NIT continued to call New York City home.
A growing NCAA
The next big developments occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s as the NCAA further established its control over the basketball postseason. In 1968, UCLA and Houston played in the “Game of the Century” in front of more than 52,000 fans in the Houston Astrodome. This game was a follow-up to the previous year’s semifinal matchup between the two teams, which pitted star players Lew Alcindor (now known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), who was recovering from an eye injury, and Elvin Hayes. The game was nationally televised and accelerated college basketball’s transition from a regional to a national sport.
In 1970, Marquette declined an invitation to the NCAA tournament after it was placed in the Midwest Region, where games were played in Fort Worth, Texas, rather than the Mideast Region, where games were played in Dayton, Ohio—significantly closer to Marquette’s campus in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1971, the NCAA declared that any team that is offered a bid to the NCAA tournament could not accept a bid to any other postseason tournament.
In 1975, after several top-ranked teams missed out on bids due to not winning their conferences, the tournament expanded from 25 teams to 32 teams to accommodate at-large bids from conferences, establishing a selection process and the anxiety of the “bubble.”
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UCLA player Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), right, snags a rebound as Houston’s Elvin Hayes (44) makes a leaping rebound attempt in what was called the “Game of the Cent