We’re going to look at the four Final Fours Wisconsin has been a part of during this week, which would have been Final Four week had the coronavirus not entered — and disrupted — all of our lives. These Final Four quick views won’t focus solely on Wisconsin, but will deal with the larger context of college basketball and the programs which joined the Badgers in the Final Four.
Let’s start with Wisconsin’s first Final Four in 1941. The brand of the Final Four name wasn’t established back then. The NCAA Tournament was a humble eight-team gathering which was barely getting off the ground. The NIT was a more prestigious tournament at this point. It was founded one year before the NCAAs — in 1938, whereas the NCAAs were founded in 1939. It was held in New York, which was a natural drawing card. Big college football games — neutral-site games, I should clarify — from that era of American history were sometimes played in Yankee Stadium.
When Wisconsin won the 1941 national championship, it was not a banner-headline event which raced across the country and created a sensation. It is true that some very important people in the larger history of college basketball won national championships in the early years of the NCAA Tournament: Hank Iba at Oklahoma A&M (later named Oklahoma State), Dean Smith as a player at Kansas in 1952, Adolph Rupp at Kentucky, beginning in the late 1940s. Yet, the NCAA Tournament was still a very limited event with limited reach.
It began to grow in stature when Wilt Chamberlain and Kansas met North Carolina in the 1957 national championship game. The racially-integrated champions from Cincinnati and Loyola of Chicago in the early 1960s helped make college basketball look a lot more like America. The Texas Western win over Kentucky in the 1966 title game furthered the movement toward integration of the sport throughout the country. The arrival of television and the UCLA dynasty led to the UCLA-Houston regular-season showdown in the Astrodome in 1968, which began to massively lift the profile of major college basketball, which took off from there and then soared into the stratosphere with the Bird-Magic 1979 title game between Indiana State and Michigan State.
Back in 1941, the NCAA Tournament was obscure, the Final Four not yet a name which easily entered the American sports lexicon. Wisconsin’s championship can therefore be diminished as a measure of importance… but it doesn’t have to be.
This remains Wisconsin’s only national championship in men’s basketball. It should be a huge point of pride for the Badgers, something whose memory we continue to keep alive — today, 79 years after the fact, and 79 years later in the year 2099, when our grandchildren will keep this story going.
The 1941 Final Four had Washington State, Pittsburgh, and Arkansas. In this foursome, one can identify two programs which have rarely lived up to this 1941 moment. Washington State and Pitt have not returned to the Final Four since 1941. Arkansas had a brilliant period of roughly 25 years from the mid-1970s through the very early 2000s, but the Hogs have struggled over the past 15 seasons.
It is notable that of these four programs, Wisconsin — due to its last 25 years of excellence — is now comparable to Arkansas. The Razorbacks still have a fuller overall resume as a program, but Wisconsin’s relentless consistency is narrowing that gap as we speak.
If Wisconsin’s next 10 years are close to its last 10 years, and Arkansas doesn’t noticeably improve, the Badgers will become the most accomplished program of the four teams at the 1941 Final Four.