The 1972 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament involved 25 schools playing in single-elimination play to determine the national champion of men's NCAA University Division (the predecessor to today's Division I) college basketball. It began on March 11, 1972, and ended with the championship game on March 25 in Los Angeles, California. A total of 29 games were played, including a third place game in each region and a national third place game.
UCLA, coached by John Wooden, won the national title with a 81–76 victory in the final game over Florida State, coached by Hugh Durham. Bill Walton of UCLA was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player.
In a historically significant note, the University of Southwestern Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns made the tournament in their first season of eligibility for postseason play. No school would repeat this feat in the men's tournament until North Dakota State in 2009. Southwestern Louisiana also made the tournament in 1973, but due to major infractions that resulted in the basketball program receiving the NCAA death penalty both appearances have since been vacated and the records expunged.
Read more about 1972 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament: Locations, Teams
Famous quotes containing the words men, division and/or basketball:
“The children are all crying in their pens
and the surf carries their cries away.
They are old men who have seen too much,
their mouths are full of dirty clothes,
the tongues poverty, tears like pus.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Between married persons, the cement of friendship is by the laws supposed so strong as to abolish all division of possessions: and has often, in reality, the force ascribed to it.
”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)