I dove down the rabbit hole of looking up NCAA Champions and realized I had never looked into the 1944 Utah team. Pretty interesting. It was a completely different world. Here’s the wiki page for that team: Utah 1944 Wiki
The schedule was nuts. They basically played a bunch of military teams, played Dow Chemical, etc. No BYU, no Utah State (probably Utah Ag College back then). (Granted we were in the thick of WW2 at the time, so that probably impacted things).
Utah also played in both the NIT and NCAA Tourney, having lost to Kentucky in the NIT (because of course we did) and Arkansas players were injured in a car accident and they withdrew so Utah filled the spot. I don’t know which tourney was more prestigious back then.
I also noticed that no Pac schools (I think the PCC back then?) played in either tourney. Anyone know how college basketball worked back then? Were conferences individually contracted to different tourneys?
Anyway, pretty interesting stuff.
Colorado @ 
Utah 
.
