Courtesy USA Today

(March 27, 2009) Anybody will tell you that the 1979 NCAA men's basketball title game was a classic, a watershed, a turning point for college basketball.
Except maybe if you were sitting courtside when Michigan State's Earvin Johnson — not yet widely know as "Magic" — squared off against Indiana State's Larry Bird.

"It's almost sacrosanct to refer to it as one of the great games of all time," says CBS' Dick Enberg, who called the 1979 game on NBC with Billy Packer and the late Al McGuire. "But had Magic and Bird been NBA busts, I don't think we'd look back on it as a great game. It was not a great final. As I left, I had the same feelings as after Super Bowl blowouts — that it wasn't very exciting."

Enberg suggests McGuire wasn't exactly wowed, either. At dinner afterward, he lied down in a booth and went to sleep: "That's how excited Al was."

Packer, who called 34 Final Fours before leaving CBS last year, also says the game got better after its final buzzer. "It was one of the poorer finals games I ever broadcast," he says. "What Bird-Magic eventually became made that game, not the other way around. That's the real world."

Viewers can decide for themselves as ESPN2 re-airs the game Friday (7 p.m. ET) and Sunday (2 p.m. ET) and includes current interviews with Enberg and players in the game.

The game drew 24.1% of U.S. TV households, which is the highest rating ever for college basketball — and double last year's Memphis-Kansas title-game rating. But Enberg suggests college basketball's appeal really pivoted 11 years before, when he called Elvin Hayes' Houston team upsetting Lew Alcindor's top-ranked UCLA team in the first basketball game on prime-time TV.

"That was the launching pad," Enbreg says.