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This NCAA basketball trivia quiz has 49 free questions with answers and covers the college game from its 1891 invention in a Springfield gym to the NIL era: the birth of the NIT and the NCAA Tournament, Texas Western's 1966 upset, the Alcindor dunk ban, UCLA's 88-game streak, Pistol Pete Maravich's 44 points a game, and the modern records of Caitlin Clark, Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma's UConn dynasty. It also tests the rules and the places: the 30-second shot clock, the three-point line's odd history, the ten-second backcourt count, Cameron Indoor and Allen Fieldhouse, plus a good dose of March Madness lore. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a casual bracket-filler; the rest will stretch a die-hard fan of men's or women's college hoops. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, mostly Wikipedia, and each question shows its citation. For a tournament-only round, try our March Madness quiz.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In what year was the first NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament held?
1939
The inaugural NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament took place in 1939, featuring eight teams, with the University of Oregon emerging as the first champion.
Q 02From 2011 to 2026, how many teams, including the First Four, were in the NCAA men's tournament field?
68
The field grew to 68 teams in 2011 when the First Four was added in Dayton, Ohio: eight teams play four play-in games before the round of 64.
Q 03Which coach holds the record for the most NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championships?
John Wooden
John Wooden won ten NCAA titles at UCLA, including seven in a row from 1967 to 1973; Mike Krzyzewski is a distant second with five.
Q 04Which university's men's basketball program has won the most NCAA Division I National Championships?
UCLA
UCLA has won 11 NCAA men's titles, the most of any programme, ten of them under John Wooden; Kentucky is next with eight, then UConn and North Carolina on six each.
Q 05Who holds the record for most points by a single player in an NCAA Men's Division I Tournament game?
Austin Carr
Austin Carr of Notre Dame scored 61 points against Ohio in 1970, the single-game tournament record; his 41.3-point average over seven tournament games is also a record.
Q 06Which university's athletic teams are famously known as the 'Jayhawks'?
Kansas
The University of Kansas athletic teams are known as the Jayhawks, a name with historical roots stemming from the pre-Civil War era in Kansas.
Q 07Before entering the NBA, which superstar played college basketball at Duke University?
Zion Williamson
Zion Williamson spent one season at Duke, sweeping ACC Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year in 2019 before New Orleans took him first overall in that year's draft.
Q 08Which coach passed Tara VanDerveer in November 2024 as the winningest head coach in college basketball history?
Geno Auriemma
VanDerveer had herself passed Pat Summitt in 2020 and Mike Krzyzewski in January 2024; Auriemma also holds the record of 12 Division I titles.
Q 09What bracket line were Villanova's 1985 champions, the lowest ever to win the NCAA men's title?
No. 8
Villanova won the 1985 title as a No. 8 seed, beating top-seeded Georgetown 66-64 in Lexington under coach Rollie Massimino.
Q 10What is the standard length of a men's college basketball game (regulation play)?
Two 20-minute halves
NCAA men's games are played as two 20-minute halves with a 15-minute halftime, whereas the NBA plays four 12-minute quarters.
Q 11What is the standard length of a women's college basketball game (regulation play)?
Four 10-minute quarters
NCAA women's games switched to four 10-minute quarters in 2015-16, matching the FIBA format, while the men's college game retained two 20-minute halves.
Q 12Which rule was universally adopted by the NCAA in 1986, significantly impacting offensive strategy?
Three-point line
The NCAA adopted the three-point line for all of Division I in 1986-87, set at 19 feet 9 inches, after years of conference-by-conference experiments.
Q 13The University of Kentucky's athletic teams are known by what feline nickname?
Wildcats
Q 21Who is the all-time leading scorer in NCAA Division I men's basketball, with 3,667 points at 44.2 a game?
Pete Maravich
Pete Maravich scored his 3,667 points in three LSU seasons from 1967 to 1970, with no three-point line, no shot clock and no freshman eligibility.
Q 22Which Iowa guard became NCAA Division I's all-time leading scorer, men's or women's, in 2024?
Caitlin Clark
She also set the Division I women's records for career and single-season points and three-pointers.
Q 23Which women's coach retired from Tennessee in 2012 with 1,098 wins, then a college record?
Pat Summitt
The University of Kentucky's athletic teams are famously known as the Wildcats, a nickname adopted after a football game in 1909.
Q 14Basketball was invented in the winter of 1891 at a YMCA training school in which Massachusetts city?
Springfield
James Naismith devised the game at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, nailing peach baskets to the gym balcony; the first game is dated 21 December 1891.
Q 15Which Amos Alonzo Stagg-coached school played Iowa in the first five-a-side intercollegiate game in 1896?
Chicago
Stagg's University of Chicago beat Iowa 15-12 on 18 January 1896; because the Iowa side was a YMCA team, some historians instead credit an 1897 Yale-Penn game as the first true college match.
Q 16Which tournament, launched at Madison Square Garden in 1938, was for years more prestigious than the NCAA's?
The NIT
The NIT was first played at Madison Square Garden in 1938, a year before the NCAA tournament, and its Garden stage made it the more coveted title into the 1950s.
Q 17Which school is the only one ever to win the NIT and NCAA titles in the same season, in 1950?
CCNY
CCNY beat Bradley in both 1950 finals, 69-61 for the NIT and 71-68 for the NCAA, before a point-shaving scandal the next year gutted the programme.
Q 18Which all-white powerhouse coached by Adolph Rupp did Texas Western beat for the 1966 national title?
Kentucky
The 72-65 win, later dramatised in 'Glory Road', pushed major programmes to recruit Black players.
Q 19Which UCLA centre's dominance led the NCAA to ban dunking from 1967 to 1976?
Lew Alcindor
Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, won three straight national titles and three straight tournament Most Outstanding Player awards at UCLA from 1967 to 1969 despite the ban.
Q 20How many consecutive games did John Wooden's UCLA win in its record men's streak?
88
UCLA won 88 straight games between January 1971 and January 1974, when Notre Dame ended the streak 71-70 in South Bend.
Pat Summitt coached Tennessee for 38 seasons, never missing an NCAA Tournament or posting a losing year, and won eight national titles.
Q 24The longest winning streak in college basketball history, at 111 games, belongs to which programme?
UConn's Huskies
UConn's Huskies won 111 straight from November 2014 until Morgan William's overtime buzzer-beater for Mississippi State in the 2017 Final Four.
Q 25How many NCAA Division I titles had the UConn women won by the end of the 2024-25 season?
12
That includes a women's-record four in a row from 2013 to 2016; the 12th came in 2025.
Q 26How long is the shot clock in NCAA basketball?
30 seconds
Both NCAA men's and women's games use a 30-second shot clock; the men's game cut it from 35 seconds in 2015-16, while the NBA and WNBA use 24.
Q 27Which league first used the three-point line in 1980-81, before the NCAA adopted it nationally?
The Southern
The Southern Conference introduced a 22-foot three-point line in 1980-81, with Western Carolina's Ronnie Carr hitting the first one; other conferences then trialled different distances until the NCAA went national in 1986-87.
Q 28In 2019-20 the NCAA men's three-point arc was moved out to match which body's distance?
FIBA
The NCAA men's arc moved out to the FIBA distance of 22 feet 1¾ inches in 2019-20, from 20 feet 9 inches; the women's game followed in 2021-22.
Q 29How much time does an NCAA team have to advance the ball past midcourt?
10 seconds
The NBA and WNBA allow only 8; the women's college game only added the 10-second rule in 2013-14.
Q 30Who was the first 'one-and-done' player drafted in 2006, going fourth overall out of LSU?
Tyrus Thomas
Tyrus Thomas, a redshirt freshman at LSU, went fourth overall in 2006 and landed with Chicago in a draft-night trade, the first draft under the NBA's 19-year-old age rule.