National championships in men's college basketball

A national championship at the highest level of men's college basketball, currently NCAA Division I, is a designation awarded annually to the best college basketball team in the United States. The national championship is currently won by the champion of the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, a single-elimination tournament played to determine the men's Division I basketball champion. The NCAA tournament was first played in 1939, 40 to 50 years after the first college basketball games in the 1890s following the game's invention by James Naismith.

Prior to the establishment and sustained success of the annual NCAA tournament, the national collegiate basketball title was considered a "mythical national championship". Much like national championships in college football, national championships in college basketball were claimed by schools, named by sportswriters, awarded by various organizations, and won on the court in occasional intersectional post-season games between conference or regional champions.

The National Invitation Tournament (NIT) was established in 1938, one year before the NCAA tournament. During the early years of the two tournaments the NIT and NCAA competed against each other, giving rise to debate over their relative prowess. During the next two decades the relative status of the two tournaments was unclear, and thus some years produced disputed national championship claims between the tournament winners. In 1950, the City College of New York became the first and only team to complete the "grand slam" of college basketball by winning the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same year. The NIT and NCAA champions played each other four times in post-tournament competition to settle the title; in all four cases the NCAA champion was victorious.

Through shrewd competitive actions the NCAA positioned its tournament to match and then surpass the NIT. Fallout from the 1951 point-shaving scandal severely damaged the reputation of the NIT and basketball in New York City; the NCAA seized the initiative by abandoning scandal-plagued Madison Square Garden and expanding its tournament field to include more conference champions. The UCLA dynasty under head coach John Wooden, who won 10 national championships in the NCAA tournament between 1964 and 1975, further cemented the NCAA's dominance as did the tournament's expansion to 32 and then 64 teams. The "March Madness" phenomenon grew with prime-time network coverage of championship games and ESPN's coverage of the early rounds, leaving the NCAA contest as the clear top post-season tournament and sole determiner of the national championship.