“Hey Grandpa! Tell us about Selection Sunday when you were a kid.”
“We was so poor, we could only afford six days each week and it all took place on Saturdays back then. Why, Doctor Naismith hadn’t even invented the 3-point line!”
Okay, so it wasn’t that bad for older generations when the NCAA Tournament was very much in the shadows of the sports world, but there are still many gamblers among the living who undoubtedly called 1-900 lines to pay for early spreads and totals in the field of 32…or fewer.
Brackets are Now for Everyone
It may sound cliché, but they really were simpler times, and those simpler times were not as long ago as some might think as the evolution to the Selection Sunday we know today directly coinciding with the growth and development of the internet and the top NCAAB sportsbooks.
One way to gauge just how much of an impact Selection Sunday has on the nation is to look at the number of brackets filled out these days compared to 40 years ago: In 2023, an estimated 53 million brackets were filled out; in 1983, there weren’t 53 million people who even knew there was an NCAA Tournament.
Thanks to the internet, top U.S. sportsbooks have seen a huge explosion in potential customers – especially as more states add sports gambling – who are anxious to do something besides just fill out a bracket.
🔮 NEW BRACKET PREDICTION 🔮@TheAndyKatz gives his latest bracket, with less than 1 month until Selection Sunday ‼️ pic.twitter.com/bOG01Yy62G
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) February 20, 2024
Increased Size of Field Adds to Tourney Interest
The idea of an evening broadcast – much less a full day – devoted solely on telling the nation which schools made it to the Big Dance would have been laughable when the event first began and only eight teams were invited.
Even just 50 years ago when it was a Field of 25 for the 1974 tournament, such a production was unnecessary, in part because the 1974 event still only allowed one representative per conference.
Beginning in 1975, multiple teams from the same league or conference were invited, and by the end of the 1970s, the field had grown to 40.
Thank you Coach! Knight led his teams to three NCAA championships, one National Invitation Tournament (NIT) championship, and 11 Big Ten Conference championships at Indiana. His Hoosiers 1975–76 team went undefeated during the regular season and won the 1976 NCAA tournament. pic.twitter.com/1Sto0feeq8
— Mr. Ryburn (@RybsITPE) November 1, 2023
Still, there was no demand for a big reveal to be broadcast to a national television audience. The selections that were made were generally discovered by reading the sports sections of big city newspapers the following morning, and calling those 1-900 numbers for opening NCAAB odds.
Pair of Cinderellas Make Their Marks
Two events in the early 1980s sparked interest in college basketball overall, and that added attention from both fans and bettors helped fuel March Madness and added demand for Selection Sunday.
The first took place on December 22, 1982 when little Chaminade upset Ralph Sampson and the top-ranked Virginia Cavaliers, who were simply on their way home from a tournament in Tokyo and looking to kill some time – and another opponent – in Hawaii.
Thanks to the time difference between the Hawaiian Islands and the US mainland, it took a couple of days before most of the country even knew of the colossal upset.
A little more than five months later, Jim Valvano and North Carolina State pulled off another huge upset by taking down Houston in the 1983 NCAA Tournament.
Together, the Silverswords and Wolfpack championed the underdogs to awaken a sleepy college hoops scene, and the new interest in the sport had a relatively new 24-hour sports channel in ESPN to help push the game to new heights.
Vitale Part of Early Studio Shows
Despite having been around since before WWII, the real birth of the NCAA Men’s Tournament came in 1985.
It must be remembered that seeding for the tournament was still relatively new to the event when the field was expanded to 64 in 1985, marking the first season without byes or play-in games and coming in the heyday of the Big East which placed three teams in the Final Four that year.
One of the first Selection Sunday shows took place in 1986, airing on ESPN and featuring Bob Ley with Dick Vitale. Spoiler alert: Vitale picked Duke.
That 1986 tournament was the first time a shot clock was used, and the game had another huge change the next season when the 1987 tournament was the first to use the 3-point line.
Selection Sunday Morphs Into Bracketology
The tournament continues to evolve with each passing event. Sometimes, the evolution is in bringing back something from days gone by, like the play-in games that have been marketed as First Four since the field was expanded to 68 in 2011.
And while Selection Sunday remains a single day on the calendar, the build-up to the tournament field reveal has in many ways been lessened by Joe Lunardi’s daily updates to bracketology.
While the teams that get in are a big part of discussions on Selection Sunday, teams that are snubbed often make for the most heated debate, and thus begins the true madness of March as brackets are being printed and filed within minutes of the field’s announcement.
— Joe Lunardi (@ESPNLunardi) February 21, 2024
