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March Madness Tournament Betting
So, when did the NCAA Basketball Tournament become "March Madness"? When did the semifinals become the "Final Four"? When did the NCAA men's basketball championship tournament arrive as an Event, on a par with the World Series, even surpassing the NBA playoffs, and deserving to be mentioned with the Super Bowl?
Many believe it was March 26, 1979, Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird.
Subscribers to the "great man" theory of history would have us believe that the 1979 matchup between Johnson and Bird, the catalysts for the NBA's spectacular rise in the '80s, made March mad. After all, it was the highest-rated game in college basketball history. And it remains as such.
The game itself was anticlimatic, as Johnson's Michigan State Spartans easily beat Bird's Indiana State Sycamores, 75-64. The Spartans' matchup zone defense, which double-teamed Bird moments after he touched the ball on offense, effectively shut down the Sycamores. But the buildup was incredible.
"At the time, it was as much hype as you could get," said Hank Nichols, who officiated the contest. "All the sports pages around the country were writing about it."
But the conventional wisdom that these two great players changed the course of college basketball history forever, on that one night, is not entirely true. It's only part of a much more complicated explanation. It is our belief that office pools and march madness betting has truly made the NCAA tournament what it is today…
March Madness Betting: the early years
The term "final four" was first printed in an official NCAA publication in 1975, and became a proper noun - "the Final Four" in 1978. March Madness tournament betting has been gaining popularity in recent years, especially with the availability and ease of online basketball betting.
The term "March Madness" goes back much further even: it was the title of a 1939 article in Illinois Interscholastic magazine, describing the frenzy surrounding the high school basketball playoffs in that state. March Madness stuck as the unofficial, and then the official, name of that high school tourney. However, that isn't the place you want to look for march madness tournament betting!
Although the first NCAA basketball tournament, in 1939, actually lost money: $2,531, to be exact, college basketball betting became pretty big business as early as the 1930s and 1940s, and the profits came quickly, and rather easily. Regular-season sellouts were common at the old Madison Square Garden in New York.
Fan interest was high enough to sustain two major post-season tournaments -- the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) was even bigger than the NCAA tourney in the 1940s, but was reduced to a consolation prize when the NCAA changed its rules in the mid-1950s to make it mandatory for conference champions to compete in the playoffs. In 1970, Al McGuire's Marquette rejected an NCAA tourney bid in favor of the NIT (which Marquette won), and the NCAA responded by making the rules even more authoritarian: if you don't want to play in the NCAA tournament, you can't play in any other post-season tournament, either. And in those days, with two major tournaments there were more opportunities for college basketball betting. Today's prevalence of office pools makes march madness betting a huge hit nationwide.
In some circles, the NCAA championship game was a big deal very early on. Horace "Bones" McKinney, who played for a UNC team that lost in the final, 43-40 to Oklahoma State in 1946 at Madison Square Garden, said, "Maybe the final four hadn't come of age back then, but it couldn't have been bigger for us. That old Garden was packed with 19,000, and the smoke was so thick I couldn't even see the upper deck. It was New York, and we were big stuff."
Big stuff, indeed. That 1946 game was the first title game televised, broadcast to about 500,000 viewers in the New York area over CBS. The first nationally televised final came in 1954--the broadcast rights sold for $7,500--gathered a respectable audience, and the championship game remained a reliable high-ratings Saturday staple for almost two decades.
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