1979 NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament

The 1979 NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament involved 40 schools playing in single-elimination play to determine the national champion of men's NCAA Division I college basketball. It began on March 9 and ended with the championship game on March 26 in Salt Lake City. A total of 40 games were played, including a national third-place game. This was the tournament's only edition with forty teams; the previous year's had 32,[1] and it expanded to 48 in 1980.

1979 NCAA Division I
Basketball Tournament

Season	1978–79
Teams	40
Finals site	Special Events Center Salt Lake City, Utah
Champions	Michigan State Spartans (1st title, 1st title game, 2nd Final Four)
Runner-up	Indiana State Sycamores (1st title game, 1st Final Four)
Semifinalists	DePaul Blue Demons (2nd Final Four) Penn Quakers (1st Final Four)
Winning coach	Jud Heathcote (1st title)
MOP	Magic Johnson (Michigan State)
Attendance	262,101
Top scorer	Tony Price Penn (142 points)
NCAA Division I Men's Tournaments «1978 1980»

Michigan State, coached by Jud Heathcote, won the national title with a 75–64 victory in the final game over Indiana State, coached by Bill Hodges.[2] Indiana State came into the game undefeated, but couldn't extend their winning streak. Magic Johnson of Michigan State was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player.[3][4] Michigan State's victory over Indiana State was its first over a top-ranked team, and remained its only victory over a number one ranked team until 2007 (Wisconsin).[5]

The final game marked the beginning of the rivalry between future Hall of Famers Johnson and Larry Bird. As of 2016, it remains the highest-rated game in the history of televised college basketball.[6] Both Johnson and Bird would enter the NBA in the fall of 1979, and the rivalry between them and their teams (respectively, the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics) was a major factor in the league's renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s. The game also led to the "modern era" of college basketball, as it introduced a nationwide audience to a sport that was once relegated to second-class status in the sports world.

With the loss in the championship game, Indiana State has finished as the national runner-up in the NAIA (1946, 1948), NCAA Division II (1968), and NCAA Division I (1979) tournaments, making them the only school to do so.

This was the first tournament in which all teams were seeded by the Division I Basketball Committee.[1] The top six seeds in each regional received byes to the second round, while seeds 7–10 played in the first round.

It is also notable as the last Final Four played in an on-campus arena, at the University of Utah. (The most recent tournament to be held on a university's premises (i.e. not on the university's main campus, but on a satellite or branch campus) was in 1983, as the University of New Mexico (UNM) hosted that year's tournament in The Pit (then officially known as University Arena), which is located on the UNM South Campus.) It has, however, been played in a team's regular off-campus home arena two times since then: in 1985 at Rupp Arena, Kentucky's home court, and in 1996 at Continental Airlines Arena, then Seton Hall's home court. Given the use of domed stadiums for Final Fours for the foreseeable future, it is likely this will be the last Final Four on a college campus. This tournament was the last until the 2019 tournament to see two finalists playing for the national championship for the first time.

This was the first NCAA tournament where three officials were assigned to all games. Several conferences, including the Big Ten and Southeastern, used three officials for its regular season games prior to the NCAA adopting it universally.