Back in the mid-1950s, there was no such thing as “Selection Sunday” when it came time for the NCAA to reveal that season’s men’s basketball tournament participants. Or at least no one called it that.
The games weren’t on national television, and publications weren’t allocating huge swaths of space to print the tournament bracket and analyze each of the teams. Former NCAA executive Wayne Duke said in a long-ago interview that NCAA headquarters merely mailed out the bracket and hoped newspapers would use it in some form.
Unlike today, with 68 teams involved, including eight that are in the play-in round, the field had only 24 teams in 1955, with 13 bids going to automatic qualifiers. That left 11 at-large berths to award.
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It therefore shouldn’t have been too terribly difficult for the selection committee to fill out the field with teams having solid credentials.
If so, how did things go so wrong? How did Bradley (7-19) and Oklahoma City (9-17) get to go dancing at the expense of teams that had far better records? Were the selection folks sloshing down margaritas instead of studying the merits of the squads?
Here’s how the infamous Bradley vs. Oklahoma City matchup came to be and how the selection process has grown into a complicated science over the years.
Bradley vs. Oklahoma City: Clash of losing records in 1955 NCAA Tournament
No tournament team before or since has had a record as poor as what Bradley and OKC had — not even those in the play-in games that were introduced in 2001.
This year, for instance, the team with the worst record is Big Sky tourney champion Montana State, which is 17-17.
What’s even more stupefying about the berths received by OKC and Bradley is that they then faced each other in a first-round game — the only meeting between losing teams in the history of the tournament that was first played in 1939.
First-round matchups: Clemson vs. New Mexico | Duke vs. Vermont | NC State vs. Texas Tech | Oregon vs. South Carolina | Michigan State vs. Mississippi State | Auburn vs. Yale | Kansas vs. Samford | Nebraska vs. Texas A&M |
Gonzaga vs. McNeese State
As it turns out, the NCAA’s Wayne Duke said the NCAA handcuffed the selection committee before the season even commenced. In an era when conference runners-up were ineligible for the tournament, it had been predetermined that two independents from Region 5 in the Missouri Valley area would receive at-large invites.
Well, guess what? All five eligible independents wound up with losing records. Thus, Bradley and OKC were picked, leaving such strong regional squads as St. Louis (20-8) and Wichita State (17-9) from the Missouri Valley Conference and Missouri (16-5) from the Big Seven looking on in bewilderment. And maybe some anger.
At least the Braves of Bradley had the pedigree of a championship contender. The previous season, they reached the NCAA title game despite a 15-12 regular-season record. But still, at one point in the 1954-55 season, they were mired in a 14-game losing streak.
Of the eight first-round games in the 1955 tournament, three were played in New York City, two in San Francisco and two on the University of Kentucky campus in Lexington. Bradley and Oklahoma City, meanwhile, tipped off at the 4,000-seat Thunderbird Coliseum in El Reno, Okla., population 11,000.
These teams were matched, Duke said, likely because first-round games were usually between schools from the same general area and played in nearby locales. Also, this was well before teams were seeded.
In that “showdown,” Bradley prevailed over Oklahoma City, 69-65, marking the first time in history a team with a losing record won a game in the main bracket. And it stands as the only time that’s happened.
Losing records are rare in March Madness
There have been nine occasions since 2001 that teams with losing marks in the play-in round earned a victory, but they were promptly ousted in the first round of the main bracket by a No. 1 regional seed. The top seeds won those games by an average margin of 23 points.
The Cinderella Braves, though, weren’t done after their victory over OKC. They then beat Southwest Conference champion SMU 81-79 in the regional semifinals in Manhattan, Kansas, when the Mustangs missed a layup at the buzzer.
In Bradley’s next game, however, Big Seven champ Colorado popped the Braves’ balloon 93-81, which propelled the Buffs to the Final Four. The University of San Francisco, behind future Boston Celtics star Bill Russell, would eventually go on to win the first of their two straight national titles.
The next season, in 1955-56, Duke said the NCAA adopted rules changes that permitted the selection committee to work outside of established parameters when faced with the distasteful choice of having to choose at-large teams with miserable records.
Since then, no at-large berth has been given to a school with a losing record, although 25 times a school that won a conference regular-season title and/or the league tournament with a sub-.500 mark record qualified.
What about March Madness matchups of unbeaten teams?
There hasn’t been one in NCAA Tourney history and there won’t be one this year, either, with every team in this year’s bracket having at least three losses.
The closest there was to a meeting of teams with perfect records occurred in 1976 when Big Ten champ Indiana and independent Rutgers reached the Final Four. Eventual champion Indiana won its national semifinal against UCLA, but Rutgers was bashed by Michigan.
However, the National Invitation Tournament did play host to a meeting of unbeatens at NYC’s old Madison Square Garden in the 1939. In the championship game, Long Island University defeated Loyola (Ill.) 44-32.
Invitation to Big Dance not always cherished
In the formative years of the NCAA Tournament, it wasn’t uncommon for nationally ranked teams to decline an invitation to play in the postseason event and instead compete in the NIT.
The last school to spurn an NCAA invite was Marquette in 1970, and that caused a ripple through the organization.
Coach Al McGuire had fumed that his eighth-ranked Warriors should not be placed in the Midwest Regional in Fort Worth, Texas, but instead in the Mideast at Dayton, Ohio. Marquette therefore opted to play in the NIT in New York and the Warriors went on to win that title.
Two years earlier, Army, guided by future Indiana coach Bobby Knight, also decided to bypass the NCAA Tournament. Knight reportedly said he thought the Cadets, led on the court by Mike Krzyzewski, had a better chance to win the NIT than try to compete with Lou Alcindor-led UCLA. Army, though, was ousted in the first round.
Since Marquette’s snub, the NCAA has issued invitations with a mandatory attendance clause.
But that’s not the case with the NIT. St. John’s, Oklahoma and Pitt all just declined invites for this year’s tournament. North Carolina turned one down last year.
