25th Anniversary: 1979 Final Four

Twenty-five years ago, basketball percolated on the state of Utah's front burner.

For the first time, four local college teams — Utah, BYU, Utah State and Weber State — advanced to the NCAA tournament, a feat not duplicated for two-plus decades. The NBA's New Orleans Jazz had announced a move to Utah. And players sporting bell-bottom warm-ups, skin-tight tank tops, short shorts and knee-high tube socks could step out with $30-plus footwear like Nike's Franchise, Converse's All-Star II, adidas' Americana or Spalding's "Ron Boone" line.

Oh, and Salt Lake City was host to the 1979 Final Four — March 24 and 26 at the University of Utah's Special Events Center.

Simply put, the 41st NCAA Basketball Championship introduced a two-man twin bill — a Magic show and a Bird act — and a title contest steeped in legacy and certainly unequaled in national interest.

No matter that the four-team field hailed from east of the Mississippi, without a Kentucky, UCLA, Notre Dame or any other perennial powerhouse among the bunch. It did include something for everybody:

• Indiana State, ranked No. 1 in both the AP and UPI polls, looked to be only the ninth team to conclude an undefeated season with the national title.

• Michigan State, rallying from a midseason slump, won 10 of its final 11 regular-season games and earned a share of the Big Ten crown.

• DePaul, a high-octane independent, was coached by sentimental favorite Ray Meyer, who in the same season that he reached the Final Four was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame and started pulling a Social Security check.

• Pennsylvania served as the proverbial "Cinderella," the ninth-seeded Ivy League team in a 40-team tournament, with regions that went 10 seeds deep.

• At the forefront were Indiana State's Larry Bird and Michigan State's Earvin "Magic" Johnson, a ballyhooed duo of triple-threat consensus all-Americans (Bird was also player of the year that season). They could shoot, they could rebound, they could take a game over — and they also put the flash back in the pass, combining flair with accuracy.

The tournament and the site

Of the previous 40 Final Fours, only Greensboro, N.C., in 1974 was a smaller host city than Salt Lake City. The first on-campus Final Four site since Maryland in 1970, the 10-year-old, 15,000-seat Special Events Center provided an intimate championship setting. By 1979, the NCAA no longer awarded Final Fours to arenas smaller than 17,000, with its move to domed stadiums yet to come.