College Basketball
The national championship of collegiate basketball that is officially recognized by the main governing body for collegiate athletics in the United States, the NCAA, has been awarded to the champion of an annual national post-season tournament run by the NCAA since 1939. Prior to advent of national post-season college basketball tournaments beginning with the NAIA national men's basketball championship in 1937, the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) in 1938 and the NCAA Tournament in 1939, various third-party organizations awarded college basketball national championships in a manner similar to the selection of national champions for college football described above. The most notable of the pre-tournament era selections, and the only ones listed in the Official NCAA Men's Basketball Records Book, are those from the Helms Athletic Foundation. However, only the champions of its own post-season tournament are counted towards official NCAA National Championship totals.
The Helms Athletic Foundation named a college basketball national champion from 1901 to 1982, with its selections from 1901-1941 being awarded retroactively. The Helms Champion, for the years in which a national post-season tournament was played, matched the winner of the 1938 NIT and the winners for all years of the NCAA Tournament except for 1939, 1940, 1944 and 1954. However, despite these discrepancies, as well as the notion that the NIT was equivalently regarded to the NCAA Tournament during some of its early years, the NCAA Tournament Champions are typically regarded as National Champions. In both 1944 and 1949, the NCAA champion (Utah in 1944 and Kentucky in 1949) suffered elimination in the NIT before going on to win the NCAA. However, to raise money during World War II, the American Red Cross sponsored a game between the NCAA and NIT champion from 1943-1945 which was won in all three years by the NCAA Champion, including the 1944 Utah team. Additionally, the Helms Athletic Foundation awarded its national championship selection to the NIT champion over the NCAA champion in only once instance: 1939.
Read more about this topic: Mythical National Championship
Famous quotes containing the words college and/or basketball:
“It is true enough, Cambridge college is really beginning to wake up and redeem its character and overtake the age.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)