The first NCAA men’s basketball tournament was organized by the National Basketball Coaches Association in 1939. 5,000 spectators attended the championship game, which Oregon won, and the tournament posted a deficit of $2,531.
Times change. March Madness is now a billion-dollar dream machine fueled by images of greatness. Stories of past dynasties and teams through the ages are told with reverence, with the promise of more to come. But in reality, men’s college basketball dynasties are a thing of the past. And we may never see a truly great men’s college basketball team again.
The standard for excellence in college basketball was set by the UCLA Bruins, who won 10 championships in 12 years (1964 to 1975) under coach John Wooden. Three of those championships came with Lou Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) at center and three with Bill Walton at center. Alcindor’s Bruins have won 47 consecutive games. Walton won 88 in a row. UCLA has outscored its opponents by an average of 23.4 points per game throughout its 88-game winning streak.
Alcindor’s Bruins also appeared in what many historians believe to be the most important college basketball game ever played. On January 20, 1968, UCLA faced the Houston Cougars at the Astrodome in what was billed as the “Game of the Century.” This was the first college basketball game to be broadcast nationally in prime time. Both teams entered the competition undefeated. Houston (led by Elvin Hayes) won a 71-69 thriller. Each team then won the remainder of the regular season before meeting again in the NCAA semifinals. There was no contest this time. UCLA got its revenge with a 101-69 blowout.
In addition to UCLA, six teams have won consecutive championships. San Francisco (led by Bill Russell and K.C. Jones) became the most famous of the six, winning 60 consecutive games en route to national championships in 1955 and 1956. Other back-to-back winners include Oklahoma A&M (1945 and 1946). , Kentucky (1948-1949), Cincinnati (1961-1962), Duke (1991-1992) and Florida (2006-2007).
Ohio State won the NCAA championship in 1960 but lost to Cincinnati in the finals in each of the next two seasons. Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek and Mel Nowell played on all three Ohio State teams, as did a scrappy guard named Bobby Knight (yes, that Bobby Knight).
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UNLV (led by Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon and Greg Anthony) won the national championship in 1990 while in the midst of a 45-game winning streak. However, they lost to Duke in the following year’s championship game.
Two teams widely considered “great” came up short in their championship appearances. In 1983, Houston (led by Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler) lost to North Carolina State on a buzzer beater by Lorenzo Charles, who missed Dereck Whittenburg’s 30-foot jump shot. Two years later, Georgetown featured five players (led by Patrick Ewing) who would be selected in the first or second round of the next two NBA drafts. However, the Hoyas were upset in the tournament final by a 10-loss Villanova team that shot 78.6% from the field and missed only one shot attempt in the second half.
In all, seven undefeated teams have won the NCAA men’s basketball title: San Francisco (1956), North Carolina (1957), UCLA (1964, 1967, 1972, 1973) and Indiana (1976). Since the Hoosier championship 48 years ago, six teams entered the tournament undefeated and failed to win them all.
Indeed, in recent years the tournament has become a complete disgrace. None of the top 10 teams in 2023 have made it to the Final Four. The last time a team entered March Madness ranked No. 1 in the polls and won the championship was in 2012. Going even further, the nation’s No. 1 team has won the NCAA men’s tournament just twice in the last 21 years.
Now we come to the reasons for this.
First of all, men’s college basketball teams no longer have the talent needed to be great. Here’s a little bit of history.
There was a time when the NBA didn’t allow players to turn pro until four years after their class graduated from high school. One reason for this was that the NBA, in its early years, relied on universities to produce compelling stars. And young athletes were not considered physically mature enough to play professional ball. College freshmen were not even allowed to play varsity basketball until the 1972-1973 season.
In 1969, the fledgling Denver Rockets of the American Basketball Association signed a college sophomore named Spencer Haywood. Two years later, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Haywood’s lawsuit that the NBA must allow high school graduates to enter the draft without the required four-year waiting period as long as the graduates show “economic hardship.”
This opened the door for Moses Malone (1974) followed by Darryl Dawkins and Bill Willoughby (1975) to move directly from high school to the pros. But it took another 14 years before another player (Shawn Kemp) skipped college to play in the pros.
Then the dam collapsed.
In 1995, Kevin Garnett was selected with the 5th pick in the NBA draft by the Minnesota Timberwolves. In 1996, Kobe Bryant (No. 13 pick) and Jermaine O’Neal (No. 17 pick) followed in Garnett’s footsteps. The exodus continued after that, with a total of 41 players drafted directly out of high school (most notably LeBron James, who was selected No. 1 overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2003 draft).
In July 2005, the NBA and the NBA Players Association amended their collective bargaining agreement to prevent players from being drafted directly out of high school. Now, in order to enter the draft, the player must be at least 19 years old and have been out of high school for at least one year. But some of today’s top high school graduates now choose to play in a developmental league for a year rather than go to college. And those who go to college often do it “all at once.”
College freshmen are at an age where they can be expected to get physically stronger, improve their skills, and increase their understanding of the game with each year on campus. But many college coaches, desperate to compete for talent, now tell new hires: “Come here for a year. We’ll hone your skills as fast as we can and get you to the pros.”
“One and done” deprives a college team of what would otherwise be the three most productive years of a player’s college career. It gives coaches less time to mold players into a cohesive unit. And many of today’s college players are less willing than in the past to bend to a coach’s philosophy. The actor is not only a professional; The transfer portal (introduced at the beginning of the 2018-2019 season) means that if a player is unhappy with his coach’s directives, he can pack up and move to another school.
Would UCLA have started a dynasty if Alcindor and Walton had gone pro a year later? What about Walt Hazzard, Keith Erickson, and Gail Goodrich (who coached the first two UCLA championship teams) and other UCLA greats like Lucius Allen, Henry Bibby, Curtis Rowe, Sidney Wicks, Dave Meyers, Richard Washington, Jamaal Wilkes, and Marques Johnson? , all of whom played before the one-and-done, stayed the course for a full college career and contributed to the Bruins dynasty.
This is a rhetorical question.
Consider Kentucky under coach John Calipari, who was an early advocate of recruiting on a “one-and-done” basis. Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist were freshmen at Kentucky during the 2011-2012 season and turned pros a year later. So did Julius Randall (2013-2014) and Karl-Anthony Towns (2014-2015). All four were All-Americans as freshmen. Imagine if, instead of going one-on-one, they stayed in college and played alongside a roster that included Willie Cauley-Stein (who committed to Kentucky in 2012 and stayed for three seasons).
Foreign-born stars like Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic and Victor Wembanyama could have attended college in the United States had they been young years ago. Imagine the impact they would have had if each of them had played four years of college basketball.
There is another notable statistic about talent loss in men’s college basketball. Only one of the top five picks in the 2023 NBA draft went to college. This was Brandon Miller, who turned pro after spending a year at Alabama.
The recently added NIL money (which allows a college athlete to benefit financially from the sale of their name, image and likeness for commercial purposes) offers some compensation to college stars previously exploited as unpaid labor and a modest incentive for them to stay in college. campus But this NIL money is minuscule compared to what an elite college player can make on and off the field professionally.
Meanwhile, consider the fact that the most well-known college basketball player in the United States right now is a woman: Iowa star Caitlin Clark. And major NCAA teams like undefeated South Carolina now reside in the women’s game because good players can make more money in college (as a rookie) from the NIL than they could by going to the WNBA, where the maximum salary is $235,000. minimum $1.1 million in the NBA).
No men’s college basketball team has come close to greatness this season. By the second week of January, there was no undefeated team left. On two occasions (including this past weekend), four of the five top-ranked teams were defeated in a single 48-hour period. Only one team — Purdue — was ranked in the top five in the Associated Press poll all season. Purdue, on the other hand, lost to Northwestern, Nebraska, Ohio State and Wisconsin (which has a combined 47 losses this year).
Here we are with March Madness about to begin. There are 18 losses among the four No. 1 regional seeds (Connecticut, Houston, Purdue and North Carolina). And 3 of the number 1 seeds lost their last match.
For the registration; I think the last major college basketball team was Duke’s 1991-1992 NCAA championship squad, led by Grant Hill and Christian Laettner.
Will there be another great men’s college basketball team?
Probably not in the near future.
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Thomas Hauser’s latest book – a memoir titled Mother and Me – will be published this month by Admission Press. In 2019, he was elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame, boxing’s highest honor.