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Mr. Carril designed a half-court offense demanding constant motion by all five players, with disciplined passing and quick cuts to the basket for open shots. The goal was to spread the floor, wind down the shot clock and wear down defenders until they made a mistake - or a Princeton player wriggled free for a layup or a jump shot.

"The main thing is to get a good shot every time down the floor," said Mr. Carril, who was inspired by the unselfish play of Bill Russell's Boston Celtics of the 1960s. "If that's old-fashioned, then I'm guilty."

During Mr. Carril's time at Princeton, his team won the National Invitational Tournament in 1975, notched 13 Ivy League titles, earned 11 NCAA tournament berths, and ambushed basketball powers such as UCLA, Indiana, and Duke. He was the only Division I men's coach to win more than 500 games (most of them against Ivy League teams) without the benefit of athletic scholarships, and in 1997, he was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

"We went into every game thinking we had an advantage no matter who we were playing, because we were incredibly well prepared," Matt Eastwick, one of Mr. Carril's former players, told the Go Princeton Tigers website in 2007. "Isn't that the mark of a great coach?"

Yet the most famous game Mr. Carril coached was one that Princeton lost.

In the first round of the 1989 NCAA tournament, his 16th-seeded Tigers played Georgetown, the No. 1 seed, a team anchored by 6-foot-10 Alonzo Mourning and 7-foot-2 Dikembe Mutombo, both future NBA Hall of Famers.

To simulate their towering presences at practices, Mr. Carril told his assistants to hold up brooms for his much smaller players to shoot over. During pregame warm-ups, ESPN announcer Mike Gorman said Princeton, a 23-point underdog with no players taller than 6-foot-8, looked like a high school team that had stumbled into the wrong gym.

But Princeton's zone defense forced the Hoyas to settle for outside shots, while the Tigers ran the backdoor, with players rushing toward the ball and then cutting behind their defenders' backs to the basket for easy layups. At halftime, Princeton had a shocking eight-point lead. Georgetown came back in the second half and won by a single point, 50-49, but the game was seen as vindication for small schools and changed the nature of the NCAA tournament.

Until then, first-round games were relegated to cable TV. But the prospect of more David vs. Goliath barnburners helped persuade CBS to sign a seven-year $1 billion deal with the NCAA to televise every game of the tournament, transforming college basketball's March Madness into a cultural phenomenon rivaling the Super Bowl.

Before the game, NCAA officials considered revoking automatic bids for weaker conferences because their teams were often blown out. Princeton's riveting near victory quashed those discussions and opened the door for future upsets by small fry such as Middle Tennessee State, Florida Gulf Coast, Northern Iowa, and the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Sports Illustrated dubbed Princeton-Georgetown "The Game that Saved March Madness."

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