History
The predecessor conference of the Pacific-12, the Pacific Coast Conference began playing basketball in the 1915–16 season. The PCC was split into North and South Divisions for basketball beginning with the 1922–23 season. The winners of the two divisions would play a best of three series of games to determine the PCC basketball champion. If two division teams tied, they would have a one game playoff to produce the division representative. Starting with the first NCAA Men's Basketball Championship in 1939, the winner of the PCC divisional playoff was given the automatic berth in the NCAA tournament. Oregon, the 1939 PCC champion, won the championship game in the 1939 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament.
The last divisional playoff was in the 1954–55 season. After that, there was no divisional play and all teams played each other in a round robin competition. From the 1955–56 season through the 1985–86 season, the regular season conference champion was awarded the NCAA tournament berth from the PCC, later AAWU, Pac-8 and Pac-10.
Beginning with the 1975 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament, the Pac-12 would usually place at least one other at-large team in the tournament. Although, since the run by UCLA that ended in the 1970s, the Pac-10 would struggle to get out of the early rounds of the NCAA tournament.
By the 1985–86 season, the Pac-10 was one of three remaining conferences that gave their automatic NCAA tournament bid to the regular season round-robin champion. The other two conferences were the Ivy League and the Big Ten Conference.
Read more about this topic: Pacific-12 Conference Men's Basketball Tournament
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