ECAC Men's Basketball Tournaments

The ECAC Men's Basketball Tournaments are postseason college basketball tournaments organized by the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC).

Despite its name, the ECAC is not a traditional athletic conference, but rather a loosely organized sports federation for colleges and universities in the northeastern United States. Among other things, it organizes end-of-season college basketball tournaments for member schools which are not members of a traditional conference, or which do not otherwise have access to such a tournament. At various times, it has organized end-of-season basketball tournaments at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I, Division II, and Division III levels.

From 1975 to 1982, the ECAC organized annual regional end-of-season men's basketball tournaments for independent Division I ECAC member colleges and universities in the Northeastern United States. The winner of each regional tournament was declared the ECAC regional champion for the season and received an automatic bid in the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament.

Before 1975, the ECAC had not organized such tournaments for Division I schools; the NCAA Tournament invited only one team per Division I conference and accommodated independents with a limited number of at-large bids. In 1975, however, the NCAA Tournament's field expanded to 32 teams, including the champions of end-of-season conference tournaments, who received automatic bids. Although a number of at-large bids still existed, the process for selecting the field for the 1975 NCAA Tournament included many second-place conference teams and threatened to exclude independent schools in the northeastern United States, which had no end-of-season conference tournament to play in and therefore no automatic bids. With no conventional athletic conferences yet in existence in the Northeast, the ECAC began to organize its Division I basketball tournaments in 1975, allowing Northeastern independents to retain their independent status while still having an opportunity to play in an end-of-season tournament offering an automatic bid. The ECAC Division I tournaments thus assured that at least some Northeastern colleges and universities would receive NCAA Tournament bids.

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