The annual NCAA college basketball tournament, better known as March Madness, gets underway this week, and productivity around offices will surely drop as workers tend to their brackets and keep tabs on opening round games. This tournament has grown into a monster, with a record 68 teams qualifying. The NCAA added “pre-qualifying” games to make teams from lesser conferences earn their way into the 64 team field. The tourney has come a long way from what I remember growing up in the 1960s, when 16 teams qualified, duked it out for a few days, with coach John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins usually coming out as champs in the end. The 1966 tournament was a significant and historic one, in that underdog Texas Western, starting 5 black players for the first time in NCAA championship history, defeated heavily favored powerhouse Kentucky, with an all-white roster, 72-65 to win the title. The game was played at the height of the civil rights movement in this country, with racial tensions high. It’s no coincidence that Jerry Chambers, a white forward from Utah, was voted the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player even though his team didn’t even get to the title game. Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp has been painted as a blatant racist, and he probably was a product of the times, but by 1969 he began recruiting black players. The story of coach Don Haskins’ Texas Western team’s unlikely title is chronicled in the movie Glory Road.
Just like all other sports, college basketball and the championship tournament have expanded greatly over the years, and March Madness has become one of the most anticipated sporting events in the country. It has expanded to the point where the “March Madness” title game is actually played in early April. The college game has changed in recent years, with the top players, dating back to guys like Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett and Lebron James, skipping college altogether and jumping directly from high school to the NBA. The rules have changed now to force players to play at least one year of college ball, creating the “one and done” phenomenon where major college coaches recruit top players knowing they will only have them for one season. There aren’t as many recognizable superstars in college as in the past, and it’s created a type of parity in the game, to the point where, this season, there is absolutely no clear favorite to win the title. I won’t pretend to know enough about the college game to even try to pick a winner, and I feel sorry for people trying to fill out those office brackets. My only advice would be to look for teams that play a solid “team” game, like Butler last season, to advance to the Final Four. That seems to be the trend. With no bonafide “superstars” to dominate, the teams that play unselfish basketball are the teams that win. It’s kind of refreshing actually.