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The 1979 NCAA Division I Basketball Championship Game was the final of the 1979 NCAA Division I basketball tournament and determined the national champion for the 1978–79 season. [a] The game was held on March 26, at the Special Events Center (now the Jon M. Huntsman Center) at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. [5] [6]
The 1979 NCAA Division I basketball tournament involved 40 schools playing in single-elimination play to determine the national champion of men's NCAA Division I college basketball. It began on March 9 and ended with the championship game on March 26 in Salt Lake City. A total of 40 games were played, including a national third-place game.
The 1978–79 NCAA Division I men's basketball season began in November 1978, progressed through the regular season and conference tournaments, and concluded with the 1979 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament championship game on March 26, 1979, at the Special Events Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.
In 1979, the NCAA tournament championship game was the most-watched game in the history of the sport, in no small part because of Indiana State star Larry Bird. Bird was not a one-man show, but the unheralded Sycamores rode him to a 33–0 record heading into the title game.
Oregon won the inaugural tournament, defeating Ohio State 46–33 in the first championship game. Before the 1941 tournament, control of the event was given to the NCAA. [11] In the early years of the tournament, it was considered less important than the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), a New York City-based event.
That 1979 NIT championship game was won by IU after a 20-foot jump shot by Butch Carter with :04 seconds left, enabled Indiana to edge Purdue, 53-52. The game featured the two teams that would go ...
The NBC network broadcast college basketball games in some shape or form between 1969 and 1998. From 1969 to 1981, [1] NBC covered the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament. It became the first major network to broadcast the championship game, at a cost of more than US$500,000 in 1969.
Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Larry Bird were rivals on the basketball court but unlikely friends off of it. After Johnson's Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird's Indiana State Sycamores in the 1979 NCAA championship game, Johnson would be drafted first in the 1979 NBA draft by the Los Angeles Lakers.