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College Basketball History

The game of basketball was devised by Dr. James Naismith in 1891. The first recorded game involving a college basketball team took place in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania on April 8, 1893, when a team from Geneva College defeated the New Brighton YMCA [1] [2]. The first intercollegiate game was played on February 9, 1895, when the Minnesota State School of Agriculture (now the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus) defeated Hamline College by a score of 9 to 3. The first intercollegiate game involving the now familiar five-player format occurred in Iowa City, Iowa on January 18, 1896, when the University of Chicago defeated the University of Iowa 15 to 12. Before that time, there were usually seven to nine players on each team.

By the turn of the 20th Century, enough colleges were fielding basketball teams that leagues began to form. The NCAA was founded in Chicago in 1906. The first NCAA Men's College Basketball Championship tournament was held before 5,500 fans in Evanston, Illinois in 1939. That year, Oregon beat Ohio State 46 to 33 in the final game to win the national championship.

The National Invitation Tournament (NIT) was also a thriving tournament in those days, generally thought to be of as much quality as the NCAA Tournament, just with different teams and a more New York or East Coast feel to it. In fact, the NIT was formed the year before the NCAA created their championship tournament. By the early 1950s, the NCAA had taken over as the dominant tournament and the NIT became a place for postseason play for those teams that couldn't quite make the "Big Dance". It is still played at Madison Square Garden.

The first college games to be televised took place at Madison Square Garden in 1940. Pittsburgh defeated Fordham, 57 to 37, and NYU beat Georgetown, 50 to 27. Since the advent of television, the popularity of college basketball has exploded. March Madness is consistently one of the most watched events of the year and draws over 700,000 fans in person. CBS SportsLine's "NCAA March Madness On Demand" initiative served more than 14 million streams of live online video from the first 56 games of the 2006 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship.