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1944 Utah National Championship Basketball Team

Welcome to Ute Hub Forums Utah Utes Sports Basketball (Men) 1944 Utah National Championship Basketball Team

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    • #240795
      2
      AlohaUte
      Participant

      I dove down the rabbit hole of looking up NCAA Champions and realized I had never looked into the 1944 Utah team. Pretty interesting. It was a completely different world. Here’s the wiki page for that team: Utah 1944 Wiki

      The schedule was nuts. They basically played a bunch of military teams, played Dow Chemical, etc. No BYU, no Utah State (probably Utah Ag College back then). (Granted we were in the thick of WW2 at the time, so that probably impacted things).

      Utah also played in both the NIT and NCAA Tourney, having lost to Kentucky in the NIT (because of course we did) and Arkansas players were injured in a car accident and they withdrew so Utah filled the spot. I don’t know which tourney was more prestigious back then.

      I also noticed that no Pac schools (I think the PCC back then?) played in either tourney. Anyone know how college basketball worked back then? Were conferences individually contracted to different tourneys?

      Anyway, pretty interesting stuff.

    • #240800
      2
      utefansince79
      Participant

      Blitz Kids is a good book that tells the story of this team.

    • #240816
      UtahPilot47
      Participant

      The NIT was a more prestigious tournament than the NCAA back in the 40’s.

    • #240818
      Hamburger-Gravy
      Participant

      The NIT started in 1938 and the NCAA started in 1939. From what I’ve read, the first few years the NIT was definitely preferred, as there was more money involved and they played at Madison Square Garden.

      The NCAA caught up a bit money-wise and started also playing at MSG in 1943. I’ve seen different arguments about the tourneys’ prestige levels in the mid-late 40s, but I don’t think the difference was as big as some people think (Either way, Utah also won the NIT in 1947 over Kentucky).

      Starting in the 1950’s, the NCAA required the top 10 conference champs to play in the NCAA tourney, and the NCAA slowly pulled away from the NIT over the next couple of decades. The NIT was still pretty prestigious into the 1970s.

    • #240819
      Hamburger-Gravy
      Participant

      Regarding the selection process, I read somewhere that the NCAA only fielded 8 teams in the early days–they tried to get the best team they could from 8 different regions of the country.

      The NIT field was a bit larger, and they just tried to invite the best teams regardless of location.

      If no PCC teams played in the 1944 post-season, it probably means that there just wasn’t a dominant PCC team that year.

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