College Basketball
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This NCAA basketball trivia quiz has 98 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 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Pacific Northwest school won the first NCAA men's basketball tournament in 1939?
Oregon
Oregon beat Ohio State 46-33 to win an event of just eight teams, a field the NCAA has since stretched to 76 from 2027.
Q 02From 2011 to 2026, how many teams, including the First Four, were in the NCAA men's tournament field?
68
68 teams filled the bracket once the First Four arrived in 2011, and that very year VCU went from a First Four game in Dayton all the way to the Final Four.
Q 03Which coach holds the record for the most NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championships?
John Wooden
John Wooden won ten titles at UCLA, seven of them in a row from 1967 to 1973, yet all ten came in his final 12 seasons after 15 years there without one.
Q 04Freshman Michael Jordan hit the winning shot in the 1982 NCAA final for which school?
North Carolina
North Carolina won 63-62 on his jump shot with 15 seconds left, which gave coach Dean Smith a first title after three lost finals.
Q 05Which Notre Dame guard set the NCAA men's tournament single-game scoring record with 61 points in 1970?
Austin Carr
Austin Carr poured in 61 as Notre Dame beat Ohio 112-82, yet the Irish lost their next two games that March.
Q 06Which university's athletic teams are famously known as the 'Jayhawks'?
Kansas
Kansas borrowed the name from the jayhawkers, free-state guerrillas who fought pro-slavery raiders from Missouri in the 1850s; a bird of that name was said to exist, but no evidence of one survives.
Q 07Before entering the NBA, which superstar played college basketball at Duke University?
Zion Williamson
Zion Williamson burst clean through his Nike shoe in the opening minute of a 2019 rivalry game and sprained his knee, and Nike's market value fell by more than a billion dollars the next day.
Q 08Which coach passed Tara VanDerveer in November 2024 as the winningest head coach in college basketball history?
Geno Auriemma
Geno Auriemma earned win 1,217 that night, every one at the same school, yet his first team there went 12-15 in 1985-86, the only losing season he has had.
Q 09What seed were Villanova's 1985 champions, the lowest ever to win the NCAA men's title?
No. 8
No. 8 Villanova missed only one shot in the second half to edge defending champion Georgetown 66-64, a night still known as 'The Perfect Game'.
Q 10How is regulation time divided in a men's college basketball game?
Two 20-minute halves
Two 20-minute halves keep the shape of James Naismith's original 1891 rules, which called for two 15-minute halves, while the NBA plays four 12-minute quarters.
Q 11How is regulation time divided in a women's college basketball game?
Four 10-minute quarters
Four 10-minute quarters replaced two halves in 2015-16, and the foul count changed with them: a fifth team foul in any quarter now means two free throws.
Q 12Which freshman led Syracuse to the 2003 NCAA men's title in his only college season?
Carmelo Anthony
Carmelo Anthony gave coach Jim Boeheim his first title in his 27th season at Syracuse, after Boeheim's teams had lost the finals of 1987 and 1996.
Q 13The University of Kentucky's athletic teams are known by what feline nickname?
Wildcats
Wildcats stuck after a 6-2 football win at Illinois in 1909, when the head of the university's military department told students the team had 'fought like wildcats'.
Q 21Who is the all-time leading scorer in Division I men's basketball, at 44.2 points 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
Caitlin Clark finished on 3,951 points, and her last game, the 2024 final, drew 18.9 million viewers, about four million more than the men's final and more than any NBA game in five years.
Q 23Which women's coach retired from Tennessee in 2012 with 1,098 wins, then a college record?
Pat Summitt
Q 14Basketball was invented in the winter of 1891 at a YMCA training school in which Massachusetts city?
Springfield
Springfield is where James Naismith nailed two peach baskets to the gym balcony rail in December 1891, with the bottoms left in, so someone had to fish the ball out after every score.
Q 15Which school, where Amos Alonzo Stagg ran athletics, beat Iowa in 1896 in what is often called the first five-a-side college game?
Chicago
Chicago won 15-12 in Iowa City, and Stagg knew the game from its birth: in 1892 he had played in its first public match, scoring the faculty team's only basket.
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 won both of college basketball's major national tournaments in 1950, a double never repeated?
CCNY
CCNY beat Bradley in both finals at Madison Square Garden, 69-61 and then 71-68 ten days later, 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
Kentucky's all-white squad lost 72-65 to a Texas Western side that started five Black players, the first champions to do so, and the whole team now sits in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Q 19The NCAA's dunking ban of 1967 to 1976 was widely seen as aimed at which UCLA centre?
Lew Alcindor
Lew Alcindor had just led UCLA to a 30-0 title when the dunk was outlawed, and the ban changed little: his team lost two games in the next two seasons and won both championships.
Q 20How many consecutive games did UCLA win in its record men's streak?
88
88 wins ran between two defeats in the same building: Notre Dame beat UCLA 89-82 in South Bend in January 1971 and ended the run there 71-70 in January 1974.
Pat Summitt took over in 1974 and won eight national titles, and she stepped down a season after revealing a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
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 25Which forward was the women's Final Four's Most Outstanding Player every year from 2013 to 2016?
Breanna Stewart
Breanna Stewart's first came as a freshman in 2013, when her team had lost to Notre Dame three times that season and then beat them 83-65 in the national semifinal.
Q 26How long is the shot clock in NCAA basketball?
30 seconds
30 seconds applies to men and women alike, but the men took the long way there: their clock started at 45, fell to 35 in 1993-94, and reached 30 in 2015-16 after scoring sank to near-record lows.
Q 27Which mid-major lost the 2010 NCAA final to Duke when Gordon Hayward's half-court heave bounced off the rim?
Butler
Butler was a fifth seed playing in its home city, and the 61-59 loss proved no fluke: a year later it reached the national final again.
Q 28The NCAA men's three-point arc moved back in 2019-20 to match the line used where?
The Olympics
At the Olympics the arc is 22 feet 1¾ inches, and the NCAA men moved out to it from 20 feet 9 inches to slow a boom in three-point shooting and open the lane for drives.
Q 29How much time does an NCAA team have to advance the ball past midcourt?
10 seconds
10 seconds came late to the women's college game: until 2013-14 it was the only level of basketball in the world with no backcourt count, so teams could dawdle for as long as the shot clock let them.
Q 30Since 2021, college players may earn endorsement money under rules with what three-letter abbreviation?
NIL
NIL stands for name, image and likeness; California passed the first state law allowing such deals in 2019, signed on a show from LeBron James's media company, and the NCAA dropped its own ban on 1 July 2021.