The 1943 NCAA basketball tournament involved eight schools playing in

single-elimination A single-elimination, knockout, or sudden death tournament is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of each match-up is immediately eliminated from the tournament. Each winner will play another in the next round, until the final matc ...

play to determine the national champion of men's

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Division I

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. It began on March 24, 1943, and ended with the championship game on March 30 in

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. A total of nine games were played, including a third place game in each region. Top-ranked

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declined to participate in the NCAA tournament or NIT after three of its starters were drafted into the

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, coached by Everett Shelton, won the national title with a 46–34 victory in the final game over Georgetown, coached by

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of Wyoming was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player. The Cowboys were the first team in the 5-year history of the tournament to win after making a previous appearance in the tournament, having appeared in the 1941 tournament.

Locations

Only two venues hosted the 1943 tournament:

Regionals

;March 24 and 25 :East Regional,

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;March 26 and 27 :West Regional, Municipal Auditorium,

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Championship Game

;March 30: :

For the third straight year, the Municipal Auditorium was the site of the West regional games, but unlike the previous two years, it was not the site of the championship game. This honor fell for the first time to the Madison Square Garden in New York, the country's most prestigious arena at the time. The Garden also hosted the East Regional for the first time, ending a streak of three straight years of it being west of the Appalachians and four straight years of being on a college campus (although the arena did, at the time, host many of the local college teams as an alternate venue). This marked the first of seven times in eight years that the tournament did not feature any college arenas, the only seven times to date for this to happen. The same span saw the same venues used every year except

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, when

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hosted the championship game.

Teams

Bracket

Regional third place

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:1943 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament

Ncaa The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. It also organizes the athletic programs of colleges an ...