The NCAA basketball championship history has been alive and strong for 70 years. Masses of fans of the sport and rabid alumni from colleges across the country have made the March Madness tournament the highlight of the sports year. From the beginning of the basketball season when midnight madness 2008 begins until the Finals are played, college basketball has kept hearts beating and has been filled with close scoreboard action.
The history of March Madness begins at the dawn of the twentieth century in the unlikely state of Illinois. The Illinois High School Association (IHSA) began to sponsor a popular end of season tournament for the state’s best high school teams in 1908. The college game was not yet established and so the high school tournament swelled in popularity and the number of teams grew to 900 after a few years. The top 16 of this group, the “Sweet Sixteen” always drew sellout crowds. The tournament continued in this format, hosted by the University of Illinois until the mid 1930s. The term “March Madness” came from Henry Porter, an assistant secretary of the IHSA, as he wrote in a newsletter about the high school tournament in 1939. Because of this documented reference, the IHSA continues to share the trademark of this iconic term with the NCAA.
Though the high school tournament continued, the March Madness basketball tournament began as a college game in 1939 where it matched the top eight teams from NCAA Division I regular season competition. This first season the tournament was conceived and run by the National Association of Basketball Coaches. That first competition saw Oregon win the title in a final competition played in Illinois. After this tournament, the NCAA took over the tournament, helping it blossom into the behemoth it is today.
As the history of March Madness unfolded, more and more teams were added to the mix and the methods of selection became increasingly more complex. It went through various format changes until it settled into the 64-game single elimination tourney that has become so popular. Though the tournament has been exclusively broadcast by giant CBS network since its television debut back in 1952, the tournament added a play-in game in 2001. This game, played the week before the tournament of 64 begins, matches the two lowest seeds in a bid to get into the big dance. Each final round has added its own nickname: the “Sweet Sixteen,” the “Elite Eight” and the “Final Four.”
The basketball championship history is filled with buzzer-beating, last second, miracle shots that have propelled Cinderella (low-seeded, underdog teams) above the expected winners. This is one of the big draws of the tournament and its single-elimination format. Despite this reputation that anyone can win, there are several powerhouse college programs that have dominated as winners throughout the history of March Madness. Five schools have dominated in the number of Final Four appearances in the tournament: North Carolina, UCLA, Duke, Kansas and Kentucky have each appeared at least 13 times. UCLA, meanwhile, is the by far the most winning program in March Madness history, winning 11 times. The next closest program, the University of North Carolina, has won five times.
As an electronic scoreboards continue to light up.