College Basketball

Newspaper articles about college basketball tell the stories of champions and in some cases, of legendary disappointment. From basketball's invention in 1892 to the madness of March, newspaper articles tell us the story of a game with humble beginnings that grew into a national obsession. From its first recorded game in 1893 to the legendary games of the NCAA tournament, College Basketball has provided generations of Americans with their own piece of sports history.

The first intercollegiate basketball game was held on February 9, 1895, with the Minnesota School of Agriculture defeating Hamline College by a score of 9-3. On January 18, 1896, the first game featuring the now standard five-man format was played between the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa, with Chicago winning 15 to 12. With the turn of the 20th century came a dramatic rise in the number of college basketball teams, which led to the formation of college conferences. In 1906, a national body was formed to govern eligibility requirements for college athletics. Initially called the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, the group became the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). And by the end of the 1930s the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) and the NCAA Tournament were formed, increasing the popularity of college basketball.

CollegeBasketballArchive.com contains newspaper articles covering all of the great moments in the history of the college game. From the first NCAA Champion, the University of Oregon, to the 2005 champion University of North Carolina, the archive contains exciting accounts of every NCAA tournament. The archive also includes articles on legendary coaches like John Wooden and Jim Valvano as well as great players such as Bill Walton and Michael Jordan.

CollegeBasketballArchive.com is a free service of NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the largest newspaper database available online. Whether you're looking for articles about more recent players such as Christian Laettner, Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan and Emeka Okafor or older newspapers accounts from the early days of the NCAA Tournament, the archive can easily be searched for any topic in the history of college basketball. Click on the timeline above to look at newspapers in chronological order, view the history section for a brief history of College Basketball or you can begin searching newspaper articles with your own key words.