The ramp-up to March Madness is in gear, with conference regular season championships being finalized this week, the league tournaments going next week, fights for at-large bids and seeding in full-force and finally Selection Sunday going on Sunday, March 15. As we get set for another great college basketball run, here’s brief look back on the seminal moments in the development of March Madness history as we know it.
The 2005 NCAA Tournament was one of the best in the modern era. It produced a rarity, a championship game between the two teams clearly acknowledged as the best in the country, and its regional final weekend produced The Greatest Eight Ever.
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.
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.