A rules meeting in a hotel, and a name changed four years later.

The NCAA began as an argument about football. English Wikipedia says the association dates its formation to two conferences at the White House convened by President Theodore Roosevelt, called in response to injuries and deaths in college football that had led some colleges to drop the sport. After those meetings, Henry MacCracken, chancellor of New York University, organised a gathering of colleges to change the playing rules, and a follow-up meeting was held on 28 December 1905 at the Murray Hill Hotel in New York City.

The institutions at that meeting became charter members of a body with a long name: the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, or IAAUS. Wikipedia says the IAAUS was officially established on 31 March 1906 and took its present name, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, in 1910. The four initials that now sit on courts, programmes and broadcast graphics date from that renaming.

For its early years the association worked as a discussion group and a rules-making body rather than an organiser of events. Wikipedia says more rules committees were formed over time and that the NCAA began holding national championships in 1921, with track and field, and added a basketball championship in 1939. The local historian Tom Emery, writing for Shaw Local News in March 2025, dates the opening edition of the men’s basketball tournament to the same year, with the title game played at Northwestern on 27 March 1939.

The association later reorganised itself by level. Wikipedia says that until the 1956–57 academic year the NCAA was a single division; that year it split into a University Division and a College Division. In August 1973 a special convention adopted the present structure of Division I, Division II and Division III, with the College Division dividing between schools that offered athletic scholarships and those that did not. The division names became part of the brand in their own right, appearing on championship logos and in the titles of each tournament.

The NCAA had no full-time administrator until 1951, when Wikipedia says Walter Byers was appointed executive director. He held the post until 1988, and in 1998 the title was changed to president.

Chicago, Kansas City, the Kansas suburbs, then Indianapolis.

The association’s home moved several times. Wikipedia says that in July 1955 Byers moved the headquarters from the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago, where its offices had been shared with the Big Ten Conference, to the Fairfax Building in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. The move was meant to separate the NCAA from the influence of any single conference and to keep it central. The Fairfax was a block from Municipal Auditorium, which had already hosted men’s basketball Final Four games in the early 1940s and hosted more of them after the move.

The offices kept moving within the Kansas City area. Wikipedia says the NCAA went to the Midland Theatre building in 1964, to a purpose-built office on Shawnee Mission Parkway in suburban Mission, Kansas, in 1973, and farther south to Overland Park, Kansas, in 1989. The association was unhappy with the suburban site, which was a long drive from Kansas City International Airport and was not drawing visitors to its new visitors’ centre.

In 1997 the NCAA asked cities to bid for a new headquarters. Wikipedia says the two finalists were Kansas City and Indianapolis. Kansas City offered a downtown site near Crown Center, with a visitors’ centre in Union Station; Indianapolis argued that it was more central to the membership and pointed to its larger stadium. In 1999 the NCAA moved its staff to a four-storey building in White River State Park, on the west edge of downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, beside the NCAA Hall of Champions.

The initials have also travelled as a licence. Wikipedia says that from 1998 to 2013 Electronic Arts held a licence to use NCAA branding in college sports video games, including the NCAA Football series and a basketball series originally titled NCAA March Madness. Team rights were licensed separately, through the schools and agencies such as the Collegiate Licensing Company, so the NCAA licence mainly let EA include the Division I men’s basketball tournament. The NCAA withdrew the licence amid lawsuits over the use of player likenesses, and EA revived the football series in 2024 under a new name, EA Sports College Football.

Initials, divisions and tournament names.

A multi-sport event or federation identity has to hold together a programme of very different competitions under one sign. The mark may appear on a start banner, a finish arch, a bib number, a medal ribbon, a television graphic and a souvenir cap, often in the same week and in different host cities. That pushes designers toward a compact symbol that can be stamped in one colour, and a wordmark that stays legible when it is shrunk onto a lanyard or stretched across a gantry.

Single letters and short monograms are a common answer. A letter can be cut from tape, stencilled onto a ramp or embroidered on a sleeve, and it reads at speed. Finish-line imagery is another resource: the arch, the tape and the clock give an event a stage that photographers return to every year, and the identity is often designed to sit on that stage.

Federations carry a second layer. A governing body may hold the rights to a competition name while host cities create their own edition emblems, so the parent mark has to sit comfortably beside a changing local design. Organisers often keep the core symbol stable and let colour, city name and year do the changing.

An Illinois essay in 1939, a CBS broadcast in 1982.

The phrase now owned by the NCAA did not begin with it. Tom Emery, in his Shaw Local News column of 31 March 2025, writes that Henry Van Arsdale Porter, a former coach from central Illinois, is widely credited with coining “March Madness” in 1939, while he was assistant executive secretary of the Illinois High School Association. Porter edited the association’s monthly magazine, and in March 1939 he wrote a short article under that title about the IHSA’s state tournament and its travelling fans. Emery notes that Porter used the words in a literary sense rather than as sports slang, and that he returned to the idea in 1942 with a poem titled “Basketball Ides of March.”

Emery adds an Indiana footnote. He says research has found the phrase in a subhead in a newspaper in Rushville, Indiana, on 11 March 1931, followed by uses in other Indiana papers during the 1930s, though the Indiana high school association never registered it as a trade mark. By the end of the 1940s, Emery writes, the IHSA was using “March Madness” as a nickname for its own state basketball tournament.

Television carried the words to college basketball. Emery writes that the CBS broadcaster Brent Musburger applied the term to the NCAA tournament in 1982, and that it soon became a common shorthand for the whole event. Ownership followed. In 1996 the IHSA sued to stop GTE, an NCAA corporate sponsor, from distributing a video game called “March Madness,” and the matter was settled when the IHSA and the NCAA formed a joint venture, the March Madness Athletic Association, to hold the trade mark rights. Emery reports that the NCAA was assigned full ownership of the mark in 2012.

The dates line up as a sequence: initials adopted in 1910, division names fixed in 1973, Indianapolis chosen in 1999, and a tournament nickname from Illinois held jointly from 1996 and by the NCAA alone from 2012.

For a design guide, the NCAA shows how an association’s four initials can work as a plain institutional mark while a borrowed phrase does the emotional work. Compare the Olympic Games, built on a fixed symbol and changing host identities, and FIFA, another governing body that runs a named flagship tournament. For this guide we use disc blue and court white with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NCAA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.