Modern NCAA Tournament history is preserved in Memories Of March Madness. The 25,000-word book focuses on the period of 1976 to the present. It was this timeframe that college basketball entered the post-UCLA dynasty phase, and implemented rule changes allowing more than one team per conference to make the field and gradually expanding the size of the bracket. The combination of increasing parity and an increased field are the two elements that made the NCAA Tournament into the event we know today.
Memories Of March Madness takes you on a ride through the best games and the best moments of the post-1976 NCAA Tournament history. Perhaps more important, we dig below the surface and find those games, moments—even entire regionals—that are overlooked by a conventional telling of NCAA Tournament history.
There’s no denying the greatness and historic import of Indiana’s 1976 unbeaten team, Jim Valvano’s celebration in 1983, Villanova’s upset of Georgetown in 1985 or Christian Laettner’s shot to beat Kentucky in 1992. But did you know just how tough the Mideast Regional was in 1976, the one Indiana had to navigate? Or learned the path of the last Ivy League team to make the Final Four trod? These are just two of the lesser known moments that readers of Memories Of March Madness will visit.
Memories Of March Madness is available on your Kindle or I-Pad for just $2.99. It’s a read that combines being both concise in its presentation and thorough in its coverage of important moments in NCAA Tournament history.
The 1979 NCAA Tournament has a special place in college basketball lore. The championship game, featuring Michigan State and Magic Johnson against Indiana State and Larry Bird remains the highest-rated NCAA final to date and is rightly seen as a watershed moment for basketball at both the college & NBA level. But the 1979 NCAA Tournament deserves to be remembered for something else—the beginning of a phenomena that continues today and it’s the gutted bracket.
Office pool players today know the gutted bracket—the one where favorites fall like dominoes—as the bane of their existence. But in 1979 the whole concept was unheard of. Parity hadn’t really taken hold in college basketball and the whole concept of seeding a bracket was unheard of.
Previous years had seen national ranking almost ignored, thus creating situations like the one the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers faced, where their reward for going undefeated was a regional with three other Top 10 teams, including second-ranked Marquette stashed in. 1979 brought seeding and began the process to a more balanced bracket.
In three regionals it didn’t matter all that much—the chalk held, with the top two teams playing in the regional final. But not in the East Regional, where fans looking forward to a North Carolina-Duke final in Greensboro had more than a few surprises ahead of them.
The Tar Heels and Blue Devils had shared the ACC regular season championship and UNC then won the league tournament. North Carolina reached the NCAA final and lost in 1977. Duke did the same in 1978. They seemed destined to play a fourth time and see which program could get a shot at redemption and they could count on a packed house in a regional final that would be played in their own backyard.
There were other compelling storylines in the East, particularly viewed with the perspective of history. Georgetown was seeded third, as John Thompson had the program growing to national prominence. Syracuse was in the 4-spot. Jim Boeheim was still the coach all the way back then and the Orange were led by the Louie-n-Bouie Show: Louie Orr and Roosevelt Bouie, who along with Dale Shackleford led the ‘Cuse in scoring. Syracuse and Georgetown weren’t league rivals yet—the Big East Conference had been agreed upon, but not yet begun. But both teams would be good opposition for the ACC favorites in the regionals. Or so the story went.
If you were digging for a Cinderella—a concept not really known in college basketball at the time, you could look at a coach who would soon become very familiar with the term. Jim Valvano would become a national legend in 1983 with N.C. State, but in ’79 he had brought Iona to the NCAA Tournament for the first time, led by center Jeff Ruland. Or there was sixth-seeded Rutgers. Just three years removed from the Final Four, their 6’9” post man James Bailey was helping popularize the alley-oop dunk, allowed back into the college game two years earlier.
The 1979 NCAA Tournament field was 40 teams, so it was 10 teams per regional. If you really wanted to scrape the bottom of the barrel you could look at #9 Penn. The Quakers had won their eighth Ivy League title in ten years and had an exciting backcourt combination of Tony Price and Tim Smith. At the end of the ladder was St. John’s, led by Lou Carnesecca, on his way to a long career on the bench in Queens.
On the tournament’s opening night there was a mild hint that something might be in the works. The lower-seeded teams won both games. Penn jumped out to a 41-29 lead on Iona and held on for a 73-69 win, while St. John’s eliminated seventh-seeded Temple 75-70. But the winners had North Carolina and Duke waiting for them.
Saturday afternoon in Raleigh would prove to be one of the darkest days in the history of basketball in the state of North Carolina. The Penn-North Carolina and St. John’s-Duke games were a doubleheader at the same venue in Reynolds Coliseum. Duke had been something of an out-of-nowhere team a year earlier—a group immortalized in John Feinstein’s book Forever’s Team—so they should have known to be wary. But the Redmen (the team nickname was years from being changed to the more politically correct Red Storm) pulled an 80-78 shocker. And the Price was right for Penn, who administered a 72-71 defeat to North Carolina, completing the day that would become known as “Black Saturday.”
Further north in Providence the other two second-round games were being played, and even the #3 seed wasn’t safe. Rutgers knocked off Georgetown 64-58. It would take Thompson two more years to go deep into the NCAAs, when his 1980 team reached the regional final and not until the recruitment of center Patrick Ewing would he make the Final Four and win a national title. Of the regional’s early favorites only Syracuse survived, an 89-81 winner over UConn.
The prospect of St. John’s-Rutgers and Penn-Syracuse didn’t exactly thrill the folks of Greensboro when the four teams gathered to decide who would go to the Final Four. Only 9,102 attended the Sweet 16 games. By contrast, both Bird and Magic had 17,000-plus on hand for their games and the West Regional, headlined by UCLA and ultimately won by DePaul, had over 15,000.
St. John’s got a big game from guard Reggie Carter, who knocked down 22 points and the Redmen overcame 53 percent shooting from Rutgers and a 19-pooint night from Bailey to win 67-65, their second straight two-point win. Syracuse couldn’t cash in its surprising favorite status, as Price scored 20 points, grabbed seven rebounds, led his team to a 13-point halftime lead and ultimate 84-76 win.
The unthinkable had occurred—not only were the top two seeds out, not only were other favorites gone by the wayside, but the last two teams in the bracket were playing for the Final Four! It was the #9 and #10 seeds for a trip to Salt Lake City. I suppose “chalk” by this point would have meant a St. John’s win, but Price wasn’t going to allow that. The Quaker lead had 21 points, while Carter couldn’t repeat his heroics from the regional semi-final. A 64-62 win in front of little more than 7,200 people sent Penn on to the Final Four.
It was the last time an Ivy League team has made the Final Four. And the 1979 NCAA Tournament was the first time a bracket was gutted beyond all recognition.
The four days of NCAA Tournament basketball ahead don’t have the whirlwind quality that last week’s first and second-round games did. For the most part, true Cinderellas have gone by the boards—only Ohio really fits the quality this year. Otherwise, 7th-seeded Florida or 10th-seeded Xavier have to pass for America’s miracle team.
And on the other extreme, this isn’t a weekend about settling a championship like we have coming up in New Orleans. But if you want a balance between a lot of basketball flying back and forth on the TV screen, along with the tension of raised stakes, then the twelve games from Thursday to Sunday are as good as it gets in sports. TheSportsNotebook is opening up the time machine, as it were, to pull out the best weekends that each regional has produced.
Selection criteria is pretty basic. First, the timeframe is limited to 1976 forward because that’s when the modern NCAA Tournament really began. Second, this is not about selecting the best individual games—it’s about the best overall regional weekend. Hence, all three games at a given venue must have been barnburners.
To pick the most obvious example—the 1992 Duke-Kentucky regional final in the East was arguably the greatest college basketball game ever played. If this column were about best games, it would at or near the top of the list. But the regional semi-finals both teams won to get there were pedestrian blowouts.
The scope of this article is to focus on what venues gave fans three games of non-stop screaming their lungs out. Furthermore, it’s not about picking the best four regional weekends—the criteria requires that each regional give us its historical best. With that in mind, here are the four selections, in order of that “seed number” in TheSportsNotebook’s historical bracket.
#4 SEED: EAST REGIONAL 2006–I’m going to say from the outset I was disappointed in the East Regional over the years. There was really no year where all three games were absolute epics, and when you consider there’s been 36 tries in the modern era, that’s in the category of unpleasant surprises.
So I had to settle for a year where you had two masterpieces and the third game could at least hold its own. We settle on the Verizon Center six years ago. UConn was the top-heavy favorite to win the national championship, and they had what looked like a gutted bracket in front of them. 5th-seeded Washington was the highest-ranked opponent left. UConn still struggled with the Huskies in the Sweet 16 and this came conjured up a memories of a classic 1998 battle these same teams played in this round of the tournament.
UConn had to go to overtime to pull it out. It set up a Sunday final with 11th-seeded George Mason, who’d beat up on Wichita State on Friday. Mason rallied from nine down at halftime, actually missed a couple chances to put it away in regulation, looked ready to do the same in overtime, before UConn inexplicably settled for a three-pointer on its final possession of OT, trailing 86-84, when the opportunity existed to go to the basket and enable the more talented team to extend play. The trey missed and George Mason was the biggest Cinderella to ever crash the Final Four.
I don’t like including a bracket where one of the three games was a clunker, but if you’re stuck with that, then a couple overtime battles and the biggest story in Final Four history isn’t bad. 2006 narrowly edges out 1990, which had two buzzer-beater finishes—UConn over Clemson in the semis, then Duke over UConn in the final—but lacked the Cinderella quality.
Besides, the day of the 2006 final my godson was baptized and we watched the game at a big party afterward with an entire room going crazy, while during 1990 I was alone in a dorm room. If it’s a close vote, the writer and selector’s memories can tip the balance.
#3 SEED: WEST REGIONAL 1996—This was another region that I felt was a historical disappointment. There was no bracket that made me go “Wow”, or “Yeah, I remember going crazy during that.” Or “I wish I hadn’t been so hungover when I watched those games, I might have appreciated them more.” But the ’96 West bracket in Denver gave three solid games.
Top-seeded Purdue had been ousted by Georgia, and the Bulldogs took Syracuse to overtime in Friday’s semi-final. If you watch a CBS highlight clip showing the late analyst Al McGuire dancing with Syracuse players in a postgame interview, it was after this game. Kansas and Arizona then went after each other in a great 2-3 game.
Paul Pierce, soon to be an NBA star with the Boston Celtics scored 20 for Kansas. Miles Simon, just one year away from being a Final Four MVP for Arizona knocked down 21. The Jayhawks prevailed 83-80. Sunday’s final was a teeth-grinder as Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim was able to slow the game down with his zone defense. The Orange led 60-57, and while Kansas got a last look on a three-pointer to tie, Boeheim got what was then the second Final Four trip of his career.
There’s a very clear separation between these two regionals and the two to come. The top two seeds in this column are what I was ultimately looking for.
#2 SEED MIDWEST REGIONAL 1985: The matchups were Oklahoma-Louisiana Tech and Memphis-Boston College. Before you groan at this, consider the talent on the floor. OU was led by power forward Wayman Tisdale, one of the best players in the country and a member of the 1984 U.S. Olympic team, the greatest amateur basketball team ever assembled.
Louisiana Tech was led by Karl Malone, on his way to a great NBA career with the Utah Jazz. Memphis had center Keith Lee, who was as well-regarded as any college big man, even if his pro career didn’t pan out. And Boston College? BC was just the little engine that could in the early 1980s. They’d reached a regional final in 1982, a year that also saw them upset top-seeded DePaul and were coached by Gary Williams, who would eventually win a national title in Maryland.
So those four names in of themselves constituted a more exciting bracket than it might appear to the modern eye. And the games themselves were gut-wrenchers. Oklahoma won in overtime, with both Tisdale and Malone having big nights. Memphis survived Boston College by a bucket—Lee didn’t play well, but his fellow big man, William Bedford, had 23 points.
And Memphis-Oklahoma—the top two seeds in the region also went down to the wire. This time Lee came up big with a 23/11 afternoon, outplayed Tisdale and his team won 63-61. There wasn’t a dull moment in Dallas.
#1 SEED MIDEAST REGIONAL 1983: This is the regional that’s undergone the name changes over the years, soon changing to the Southeast and now is the South. But in 1983, imagine going to Knoxville and having your four teams be Indiana, Kentucky, Louisville, and an Arkansas team that was coached by Eddie Sutton, a consistent national contender, had been to the Final Four in 1978 and nearly got there the following year before losing by two to Larry Bird’s Indiana State (by the Hog fans, your ’78 West Regional came in second to 1996 in the push for the #3 seed in this historical bracket).
Then add to the fact that this was at a time when Kentucky refused to play Louisville, a subject that got nationwide attention. Regardless of how the games go, this weekend won’t be boring. In the semis, Kentucky won a hard-fought 64-59 game over Indiana, playing without injured forward Ted Kitchel. Louisville, the region’s #1 seed, dug a ten-point hole at halftime against Arkansas before rallying to win by two. At last, Kentucky and Louisville would meet on the floor and a Final Four berth was at stake.
UK had this game all but sewn up late, when Louisville head coach Denny Crum put on the full-court press and his players unleashed a furious rally, closing the gap and forcing overtime. Louisville then scored the first 14 points of overtime and won 80-68 in a game that I still remember watching as a 13-year-old, pulling for the ‘Ville and just going nuts in disbelief.
The Kentucky performance is one of the more underrated collapses in sports history, especially set against the backdrop of their snobbish refusal to play an in-state program that had won the 1980 NCAA title, reached the Final Four in 1982 and would win another title in 1986. Those three days in Knoxville were the best NCAA regional ever.