NCAA Tournament has faced disruption before, but it always crowned a champion. Until now
Monday night in Atlanta, college basketball’s 82nd national champion was to be crowned.
For the first time since 1938, that won’t happen. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic ended the NCAA Tournament before it got started. The announcement to end all winter and spring sports championships came on March 12.
As concerns of the virus quickly escalated in early March, NCAA officials initially suggested saving the event by conducting it in empty arenas and move the Final Four from Mercedes-Benz Stadium to a smaller venue.
That idea didn’t last long, and once NBA player Rudy Gobert was diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 11, the NBA announced its suspended season later that night. The NCAA made its announcement the next day.
So, March unfolded without hoop madness, and April comes without a confetti, a net-cutting ceremony and the champions anthem “One Shining Moment.”
How rare is this?
The men’s basketball championship had survived financial hardship, an assassination attempt of a president and war breaking out on the day of the tournament opener. No matter the potential obstacle, every event until this one filled the month with with buzzer-beaters, Cinderella stories and ubiquitous banter about brackets.
Here are the years when the NCAA Tournament, or at least part of it, didn’t occur.
1940
The idea for a national championship originated at the 1938 convention of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. That spring, the first National Invitation Tournament, or NIT, was successfully staged at Madison Square Garden.
The NIT was the brainchild of the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association of New York, and coaches argued that if any group should stage a national tournament, it should be the schools and not sportswriters.
Eight teams made up the first NCAA field. Oregon defeated Ohio State at Patten Gymnasium on the Northwestern campus for the inaugural championship. After expenses, the tournament lost $2,531 and the NABC and NCAA considered not holding a second tournament.
But Kansas coach Phog Allen, who founded the NABC, assured the groups that if the tournament games were played in new 10,000-seat Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, large crowds would translate to financial success.
“We cannot afford to fail,” Allen said in a letter to Ohio State basketball coach and athletic director Harold Olsen.
The event was a box office success, helped by Allen’s Jayhawks playing in the Western Regional and championship games in Municipal before a full house.
The tournament netted more than $9,500. The figure fell below what the more prestigious NIT was paying teams, but the amount was encouraging enough to continue.
1944
Through its first 12 years, the NCAA Tournament field was eight teams. But it wasn’t always easy in the early era to complete a field. Some teams turned down NCAA invitations for exams, others to play in the NIT. World War II also complicated things.
Utah had lost its 1944 NIT opener when coach Vadal Peterson received a call in his hotel room the next morning that the NCAA field needed another team. Arkansas had qualified, but two of its starters had been hurt in a car accident and the team withdrew from the event.
Utah quickly packed, hopped on a train to Kansas City and defeated Missouri and Iowa State, then took a train back to New York and beat Dartmouth for the national championship.
Utah had played its entire season without a home gym. The Utes’ fieldhouse had been converted to Army barracks. Until the postseason, they had played only three college teams. The rest of their schedule was filled with games against service teams.
Other NCAA championships were suspended during the war. The wrestling championship, which began as as annual event in 1934, shut down for three years starting in 1943. Men’s gymnastics missed five years.
1981
Players were in their hotel rooms in Philadelphia in the early afternoon of March 30 when television broadcasts were interrupted with a news flash. President Ronald Reagan had been shot.
The NCAA championship game between Indiana and North Carolina was set to tip off that night.
But should the game be played?
While Reagan was in surgery in Washington, D.C., NCAA officials, university presidents and coaches Bob Knight and Dean Smith discussed whether it was appropriate to play as scheduled. Hours passed without a decision.
About an hour before the game, in a broom closet at the Spectrum, Knight and Smith met with Dave Gavitt, commissioner of the Big East and a selection committee member. The news about Reagan’s condition was positive and the game would be played. (Dave Gavitt’s son, Dan, is the NCAA vice-president of men’s basketball.)
The Academy Awards show was scheduled for that night and was postponed for 24 hours. Many believed that NCAA should have opted for the same delay. But a large TV audience watched Knight win his second championship.
“The spirit of sports is to rally,” said NBC announcer Dick Enberg during the pregame show.
2003
Americans woke up on the morning of March 20, the first full day of the NCAA Tournament, with their country at war. The Allied “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq started about six hours before the first games tipped off. At the time, Bowlsby wondered if those games would, or should, be played.
“We had some very oddly-timed conference calls, and I always thought it was exceedingly strange that we would be a part of anything ... to do with a military operation,” said Big 12 commissioner Bowlsby, who then was a member of the Division I men’s basketball committee. “But the representatives made us understand just how important March Madness is to the culture of our country. And how disconcerting it would be to not play the tournament.”
CBS was to have shown all 63 games of the tournament after the opening round. But the afternoon games of Thursday and Friday were moved to ESPN.
The tournament forged ahead with Syracuse defeating Kansas in the championship game.
This year, top-ranked Kansas would have entered the NCAA Tournament as the favorite. The other top seeds could have been Gonzaga, Dayton, Baylor or San Diego State.
But because of a pandemic, the list of tournament champions will now forever be interrupted and include an explanation.
2020 NCAA Tournament canceled, COVID-19 pandemic
This story was originally published March 13, 2020 at 1:54 PM.