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 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.
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.