Talk:1978 NCAA Division I basketball tournament

First great job on doing the brackets to thoses working on that but I have a question I noticed this on a few pages the number of games played vs  teams involoved. "involved 32 schools playing in single-elimination play to determine the national champion of men's NCAA Division I college basketball. It began on March 11, 1978, and ended with the championship game on March 27 in St. Louis, Missouri. A total of 32 games were played"

if 32 teams are playing in the tourny and it is single elimation it would be 31 games ( unless there was some 3rd place game played as well?) Smith03 01:03, 26 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes, there was a third place game. In some cases, there were 2-3 third place games (one national, 1-2 regional). If you look at the "Teams" section, you'll notice that one team finished third and another finished fourth. You can extrapolate the score of the third place game from that information. A future revision to the brackets will include third place games, but at this point, Template:4RoundBracket-Byes doesn't support them. User:Zzyzx11 and I are discussing this problem. --Dantheox 02:26, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

1978 Seeding
For decades the NCAA Tournament was a very regional thing, and regions often had varying numbers of teams in one year. In the late seventies though there was a move to make the regions more even, culminating with seeding being introduced after the 1976 tournament due to the unfairness of some of that tournament's first round matchups. In 1977, the committee declined to use the seeding power, but in 1978 they did use it. It was a very nascent and complex seeding style that only lasted for one year, and in 1979 the familiar seeding that we have today began.

Almost no one ever mentions the 1978 seeding and I've never to this day seen a chart of it. The only proof I have of its existence are some contemporary newspaper articles I dug up on Lexis-Nexis. The articles are frustratingly vague in their descriptions of the system, and I've had to piece things together from what little the articles reveal. As best I can determine

Each region consists of two groups of teams seeded 1-4, the automatic qualifyers and the at-larges. Several smaller conferences with automatic bids had their winners designated "at large" for seeding purposes. The 16 conferences designated automatic qualifyers for the purposes of seeding were: Big Ten, Ohio Valley, Mid-American, SEC, Pacific-8, Big Sky, West Coast, WAC, ACC, Ivy League, Southern, Eastern 8, Big 8, Southwest, Missouri Valley, and Metro.

The sixteen "automatic qualifyers" were seeded according to their conference's record in the last five tournaments. I am not sure how this shakes out for the Metro or Eastern 8, since they were relatively new, or if this record counts third place games or not.

As for the sixteen "at larges," they were seeded according to their "competitive record." I'm not sure what "competitive record" is supposed to mean. It doesn't appear to be W-L PCT because the seedings don't make sense using that method. The only thing we know for a fact is that Marquette was the number 1 at large in its bracket, the rest is just conjecture.

All this said, here is my best reconstruction of how the seeding went at 1978. Please note that I made dozens of conjectures and may be way off on a lot of them.

1AQ MI St

3AL Providence

4AQ Western KY

2AL Syracuse

3AQ Miami

1AL Marquette

2AQ Kentucky

4AL Florida St

1AQ UCLA

3AL Kansas

4AQ Weber St

2AL Arkansas

3AQ San Fran

1AL UNC

2AQ New Mexico

4AL Cal St Fullerton

1AQ Duke

3AL Rhode Island

4AQ Penn

2AL St. Bonaventure

3AQ Furman

1AL Indiana

2AQ Villanova

4AL La Salle

1AQ Missouri

3AL Utah

4AQ Houston

2AL Notre Dame

3AQ Creighton

1AL DePaul

2AQ Louisville

4AL St. John's

72.84.234.111 22:04, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Having examined the microfilm for several March 6, 1978 newspapers, I have been unable to find any confirmation of the seeding conjectures above. Most newspapers print the bracket but none have any seeds listed on them. The conjectures look reasonable but until any hard proof can be found they'll have to stay on the talk page 141.161.92.207 23:05, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

OK, a Syracuse Post-Standard article from March 4, 1978 confirms the automatic qualifier seeds (found on the free college basketball collection on NewspaperArchive). A Washington Post article from March 6 confirms Marquette's seed. As for the other 15 at-large's, they were seeded by the judgment of the committee based on W/L record, strength of schedule, et al. I have yet to find a definitive listing of the seed of the other 15 at-large's, but the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming (plus, I have a suspicion that short of official NCAA documents buried deep in archives somewhere, there is no available record of what seed each team was. Consider that even into the mid-eighties, seeds were often ignored in newspaper coverage). First, if you do consider the records, rankings, and such of the at-large teams, the proposed seeding above makes more sense than any other. Second, newspaper articles of March 6, describing the field's selection always list the at-large teams of each region in the proposed seeding order (as opposed to the order they appear in the bracket, alphabetical order, AP poll order, W/L record order, etc). Finally, given that Marquette is a 1 seed, playing a 3 automatic qualifier seed, the seed difference of 2 in each first round game is the only configuration that makes sense, and it conforms to the proposed seeds above.

In any event, I'm more than 99% sure my proposed seeding is correct, and if anyone wishes to look into the matter further, I suspect they will come to the same conclusions I did about the lost seeding. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.228.50.119 (talk) 23:14, 27 March 2008 (UTC)