In the Division III college basketball tournament the two losers in the semifinals face off in a game that determines 3rd place. This is not the case in the Division I tournament. Was there ever a Division I playoff for 3rd place? If so, when was it abandoned and why?
The last consolation game for third place was 1981 for Division I. I don’t know why it was abandoned.
I’m shocked that the Division III tournament still includes a consolation game. I kinda like consolations myself, but they’ve gone by the wayside in Division I post-season play because players don’t want to play in them and (more important) fans don’t want to watch them.
The NCAA abandoned regional consolation games after the 1975 season, the final-round consolation game after the 1981 season, and post-season NIT consolation after the 2003 season.
Consolation games stink. One team gets the dubious honor of third place and the other gets an extra loss tacked on their record. They were unpopular with coaches, players, and fans.
Sadly, in American society, being Third Place (as opposed to Fourth Place out of four) is usually considered a meaningless honor. As it is often stated, Second Place is simply First Loser. We are a win or nothing society in our menality.
Of course, if one looks to world-wide sports, one can see that the dubious honor of Third Place is rapidly becoming less and less desirable. For example, the consolation game in the World Cup often is played with significantly less intensity than any of the games leading up to the final. Indeed, a team like, say Bulgaria will stomp as hard as they can on, say, the Faroe Islands (10-0 if they can manage) during qualifying, but will play a lackluster Third Place game.
True, but to nitpick a bit, sometimes ties in the standings will have to be broken by goals scored so it makes sense to run up the score in the first round of a tournament.
True, but Sweden 4 - 0 Bulgaria shows that Bulgaria wasn’t taking the game seriously. :smack:
The NCAA Division I record for most points in a Final Four game is 58 by Bill Bradley for Princeton against Wichita State in the 1965 third place game. Bradley scored 87 points in Pricenton’s semifinal loss to Michigan.
He was named Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four despite the fact that Gail Goodrich of UCLA scored 42 points in the final against Michigan.
Times were a bit different then. The next year, Jerry Chambers of Utah, won the MOP award despite Utah finishing third after Texas Western and Kentucky.
No one from a losing team has won the MOP award since Akeem Olajuown did in 1983.
About the only time consolation games are played is in midseason tournaments when teams travel to a neutral site to get some games in. I don’t even know of any states that have consolation games for high school basketball, mainly because they usually don’t have time for them.
The first statement doesn’t make sense in light of the second. Unless by “Final Four game” you mean the championship game plus the consolation game, but not the semifinals. That’s not what most people think of as a “Final Four game” today.
I think he means he scored 87 in the two games together.
Want to know something bizarre about consolations? In the early days of the NCAA tournament, then as now, four teams would travel to the championship site. But two of them had already been eliminated, and traveled to the host city for the sole purpose of playing in the consolation game!
In 1952 the NCAA suffered an attack of logic and began playing the semifinals and finals in the same city, leading to the Final Four as we know it today.
There was a strong feeling, in the early days, that college basketball games, when played as Special Events in Big Cities, should be offered as double-headers. Before TV time-outs, a game only lasted 80 to 90 minutes, and that was a little lean for a night’s entertainment. When a tournament game didn’t fit naturally into a double-header format–as for example, in the regional and national final games–a consolation was added to provide an undercard.
Nowadays the regional and national finals (and, yes, the play-in game!) are played as singletons, and nobody thinks anything of it.
Freddy, thanks for that insight!!! I always wondered why consolation games were ever seen as a good idea.