Big Ten’s Wayne Duke instrumental in development of NCAA tournament

College basketball fans should give thanks to Wayne Duke during the Final Four this weekend. And that goes tenfold for college coaches and administrators. He was a driving force in making the NCAA tournament what it is today, and in the process, helped put millions — make that billions — of dollars in university pockets.

Duke, 88, passed away Wednesday. The Big Ten commissioner from 1971 through 1989, Duke had a profound impact on college sports.

Duke’s successor, Jim Delany, hardly makes an understatement in saying, “Wayne was a giant in the world of college athletics administration during times of great change.”

The modern NCAA basketball tournament is one of his greatest legacies. As the first employee of the newly formed NCAA in the early ’50s, Duke, fresh from graduating from Iowa, actually wrote the first manual governing the administration of the tournament.

Then after becoming commissioner of the Big Eight at 34 in 1963, he was instrumental in transforming the NCAA tournament when he took over the Big Ten in the early ’70s.

Forget about office pools and wall-to-wall TV games. Back then, the NCAA tournament was mostly a mom-and-pop affair, barely registering as a major sporting event. The tournament field had only 25 teams in 1971, all conference champions and independents —second-place meant sitting on the sidelines. Most games only aired on a regional TV basis until the Final Four.

When Duke joined the tournament committee in 1975, a position he held through 1981, the field expanded to 32 teams that year, allowing conference at-large teams for the first time, and then to 48 teams by 1980. It also began seeding the brackets in 1978.

Of more importance, the tournament was going big time. It hits its peak with the 1979 Michigan State-Indiana State final featuring Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. The game did a 24.1 rating on NBC, still the highest rating ever for a college or professional basketball telecast.

“The tournament grew because of the strategies he had,” said Mark Rudner, Big Ten senior associate commissioner. “He was Mr. NCAA tournament.”

Duke faced perhaps the biggest challenge in tournament history when President Ronald Reagan was shot hours before the 1981 Indiana-North Carolina final in Philadelphia. The decision fell on Duke to decide whether to postpone the game. Thirty minutes before tipoff, he opted to go ahead after receiving assurances that the president’s condition was stable.

“I thought we had done right,” Duke told the Associated Press in 2003. “Somehow, during the game, it came to us that Reagan had spoken from his hospital bed and said, ‘All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.'”

Duke eventually was recognized for his work with the NCAA tournament by being inducted to the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor in 2010.

“We had a summer meeting where more conferences were included as automatic qualifiers, and the Ohio Valley Conference was one of them,” Duke once said. “When the meeting ended I saw the president of Tennessee Tech, a member of the Ohio Valley Conference, standing around waiting to talk to me. He said he waited around so he could thank me for opening up the tournament. He said, ‘it means we are somebody.’ I have never forgotten that.”

Duke’s contributions to the Big Ten also were considerable. In the 1970s, he pushed for teams other than the conference champion to be able to play in bowl games. He governed during a period when women finally were given greater opportunity to play college sports. And he negotiated mega-TV deals for the Big Ten that were unimaginable when he took over as commissioner in 1971.

After leaving the Big Ten, Duke remained involved in college sports, serving as chairman of the Maui Invitational. The championship trophy is named for him.

Duke also continued to be a fixture at Final Fours for as long as his health allowed. Amid all the hoopla, he will be remembered this weekend in Phoenix. Deservedly so. He helped lay the foundation for the NCAA tournament to become one of the biggest events in sports.

Ed Sherman is a special contributor to the Chicago Tribune.