Here for your NCAA basketball history reading pleasure are ten fun facts about the champions of the men’s basketball tournament which began in 1939.
1.Oregon won the first NCAA tournament in 1939. They have not been to the Final Four since.
2. Of the four teams which competed in the first Final Four (Oregon, Ohio State, Oklahoma and Villanova) Oklahoma is the only one that has yet to win a national championship.
3. California is the state with the most Division I-A schools that have won the NCAA basketball championship with four. They are in chronological order of the first school to win; Stanford, San Francisco, California and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). What’s more unique is that the four schools accomplished this in the first 25 years of the tournaments existence.
4.The Cincinnati Bearcats and Ohio State Buckeyes share an NCAA tournament accomplishment which may never happen again. They are the only schools from the same state to play for the NCAA championship. While two teams from the same state may very well meet in the championship game again what separates Cincinnati and Ohio State is that they did it in CONSECUTIVE seasons with the Bearcats beating the Buckeyes in 1961 and ’62.
5. UCLA as a team has won more national championships with 11 than any other major conference has won combined except the Atlantic Coast (12). The Bruins four undefeated seasons are more than all of the other championship teams combined.
6. The Big 12 Conference has been in existence in some form since the tournament began in 1939. The only member school to boast an NCAA championship is the University of Kansas Jayhawks. Kansas won it all in 1952, 1988 and 2008. The conference which was once the Southwestern and disbanded when Texas, Baylor, Texas Tech and Texas A@M joined the Big 12 in 1996 did not have a single team win it all. Arkansas was a member of the Southwest, but did not win the championship until 1994 as a member of the Southeastern conference.
7. The University of Michigan Wolverines is the only school to lose the championship game to two schools from the same state in back to back years. They lost to Duke in 1992 and North Carolina in 1993.
8. Twenty-three states and Washington D.C. can lay claim to a school which has won the NCAA title. They are:
Arkansas
Arizona
California
Connecticut
Florida
Illinois
Indiana
Kansas
Kentucky
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Nevada
New York
North Carolina
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Texas
Utah
Wisconsin
Wyoming
Georgetown University represents Washington D.C.
9.. North Carolina is the only state which can claim two different schools winning the NCAA title in consecutive seasons three times. In 1982, the North Carolina Tar Heels won the title followed by the Wolfpack of North Carolina State in 1983. Exactly ten years later, the Duke Blue Devils won the second of two consecutive championships in 1992 which was followed by a North Carolina title in 1993. North Carolina and Duke flip-flopped in 2009 and 2010 with the Tar Heels winning it first followed by the Blue Devils. Duke, North Carolina and North Carolina State’s conference (the Atlantic Coast) can lay claim to having two member schools win the title in consecutive years four times if you add the Blue Devils 2001championship with the University of Maryland’s in 2002.
10. No one has started on an NCAA men’s championship team as a player and coached one to the championship game.
