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1980 NCAA Division I basketball tournament
 | |||||
| Season | 1979–80 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teams | 48 | ||||
| Finals site | Market Square Arena Indianapolis, Indiana | ||||
| Champions | Louisville Cardinals (1st title, 1st title game, 4th Final Four) | ||||
| Runner-up | UCLA Bruins (Vacated) (11th title game, 14th Final Four) | ||||
| Semifinalists |
| ||||
| Winning coach | Denny Crum (1st title) | ||||
| MOP | Darrell Griffith (Louisville) | ||||
| Attendance | 321,260 | ||||
| Top scorer | Joe Barry Carroll (Purdue) (160 points) | ||||
| |||||
The 1980 NCAA Division I basketball tournament involved 48 schools playing in single-elimination play to determine the national champion of men's NCAA Division I college basketball. It began on March 6, 1980, and ended with the championship game on March 24 at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis. A total of 48 games were played, including a national third-place game.
Louisville, coached by Denny Crum, won the national title with a 59–54 victory in the final game over UCLA, coached by Larry Brown. Darrell Griffith of Louisville was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player.
Structurally speaking, this was the first tournament of the modern era.[1] For the first time:
- An unlimited number of at-large teams could come from any conference. (From 1975 to 1979, conferences were allowed only one at-large entry.)
- The bracket was seeded to make each region as evenly competitive as possible. (Previously, geographic considerations had trumped this.)
- All teams were seeded solely based on the subjective judgment of the committee. (In 1979, seeding was partially based on the prior performance of a conference winner's conference.)
In this, the second year the tournament field was seeded, no #1 seed reached the Final Four. Since then, it has happened three other times, in 2006, 2011, and 2023. Purdue University's next Final Four appearance after this year would occur in 2024. Five coaches from teams in the Eastern bracket (Jim Boeheim, John Thompson, Lute Olson, Rick Pitino and Rollie Massimino) would later win their first (and in Pitino's case, the first of more than one) national championship.
UCLA would forfeit its second place in the standings in 1980 after players representing the school were declared ineligible by the NCAA.[2]
- ^ "NCAA 2008 Final 4 – San Antonio". Archived from the original on August 28, 2008. Retrieved March 6, 2009.
- ^ U.C.L.A. ON PROBATION IN BASKETBALL – New York Times (UPI) December 9, 1981
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