A Persistent Myth

1983 ACC Tournament MVP Sidney Lowe and his teammates.

This is an excerpt from my 2008 book "When March Went Mad: A Celebration of NC State's 1982-83 NCAA Championship" that long ago dispelled the myth that Jim Valvano and his team would not have received a bid into the 1983 NCAA tournament without beating Virginia in the title game. It includes scuttle before, during and after the tournament and memories from long ago. The book is available at
resale sites and used book stores, but is currently out of print in the current market. If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this one, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep posts like this free of ads.

TIM PEELER
"When March Went Mad," © 2008

A myth that has persisted over the last 40 years is that the Wolfpack needed to win the 1983 Atlantic Coast Conference tournament or it would not have gotten an invitation to the NCAA Tournament, something not that is not remotely true. Late-season wins over North Carolina, Duke and Wake Forest and Whittenburg’s return to the lineup put Valvano’s team in good position as far as the NCAA Selection Committee was concerned, despite the 10 regular-season losses. Valvano was a little worried about getting into the tournament, but only if his team lost the opener against Wake Forest.

The way the coach had it figured, both Virginia and North Carolina were locks for the national tournament, even if neither won the ACC Championship. That seemed unlikely for most of the fans and media that showed up for the tournament – they all assumed that the storyline for the weekend would be whether or not the defending conference- and national-champion Tar Heels could prevent Virginia All-America Ralph Sampson from getting the elusive ACC title that he was thought to be his birthright when he arrived in Charlottesville four years earlier. For Valvano, the league tournament was about securing one of the four bids he thought the ACC would earn to the NCAA Tournament. The league had never sent more than that into Big Dance, and he didn’t expect this year to be any different, even if the field had just been expanded from 48 to 52 teams. Valvano believed that Maryland, with 20 regular-season wins and a third-place finish in the final ACC standings, would also join the Cavaliers and Tar Heels in the Big Dance, despite being upset in the first round of the ACC Tournament by Georgia Tech. That left the league’s likely final spot between NC State, which had lost two of its last three games, and the slumping Demon Deacons, which had lost four in a row at the end of the regular season. The main difference between the two teams was the regular-season finale in Reynolds Coliseum, a 130-89 rout in which the Wolfpack set an ACC record for the most points scored in a league game.

So when Lorenzo Charles hit a free throw with three seconds to play to give the Wolfpack a 71-70 victory and its 18th win of the season, Valvano believed his team had secured the league’s fourth NCAA bid. One more win would make it a certainty, in Valvano’s mind, but he knew that beating North Carolina would be more difficult.

The Tar Heels, a big winner over Clemson in the first round of the 1983 tournament, eliminated NC State in each of Valvano’s previous trips to the ACC Tournament, games that were not close. The Tar Heels won 69-54 in a first-round game in Landover, Maryland, in Valvano’s ACC Tournament debut in 1981 and 58-46 in a semifinal game in 1982 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Not much was known about the selection process back then, since the NCAA had only been seeding teams in the tournament since 1979. There was no daily discussion of a team’s ratings percentage index (RPI), the NET, no strength-of-schedule formulas, no talk about how a team performed in its final 10 games before the NCAA Tournament, no discussion of the concessions the selection committee made for teams who had an injured player return to the lineup. If there had been, the Wolfpack would have been a shoo-in, based on its brutal non-conference schedule. “I wish we could have won more games,” Valvano told the N&O’s Joe Tiede the week before the ACC Tournament. “[But] we haven’t lost to anybody who wasn’t somebody.”

Considering the larger field, Whittenburg’s return and the team’s mini-hot streak, there was no question that the Wolfpack belonged in the field after winning just one ACC Tournament game. The myth that Valvano and his team needed to win the ACC Tournament has been perpetuated over the years because some people believe it makes the Wolfpack’s Cinderella story better. Frankly, the story is good enough as it is.

“I do recall that going into the tournament, NC State did have some more work to do,” Dave Gavitt told me in a 2007 telephone interview. Gavitt, a Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame member as the founder of the Big East, was the Selection Committee chairman for the 1983 NCAA Tournament. “I don’t think we ever got to the point in the deliberations that people in the room felt they had to [win the ACC] to get into the tournament,” he said. “Their total body of work over the course of that season was impressive. What happened in those years was that the ACC, the Big East and the Big Ten were so strong that even some losses didn’t hurt you because of who you were losing to.”

The Wolfpack also had a not-so-secret weapon in the room during the selection process: then-Metro Conference Commissioner Vic Bubas, a former NC State player and assistant coach under Everett Case and the former head coach at Duke. In 1949, Bubas scored the first points in the history of Reynolds Coliseum. Though he left the room for the vote, Bubas informally enlightened his fellow committee members about the Wolfpack’s trials and triumphs during the course of the season, especially since Metro-champion Memphis State had played the Wolfpack earlier in the year.

Following the Wolfpack’s 91-84 overtime win over the Tar Heels, Valvano told his team that there was an easy way to remove all doubt about its NCAA-worthiness. Since its inception in 1953, the ACC used its post-season league tournament to crown a champion and determine who received the league’s automatic bid into the national tournament. In the old days, when only one team per conference was invited to the NCAAs, the league tournament was imbued with a fingernail-biting tension that reached its peak in 1974, when NC State beat Maryland 103-100 in overtime in what is still regarded as the greatest ACC game ever played. By 1980, the NCAA opened the field to an unlimited number of teams per conference, though the ACC Tournament winner still received the league’s automatic invitation. What Valvano told his team just before they headed to the court to play the Cavaliers for the championship game was this: “Guys, I’ll tell you what – if we win this game, we are definitely in.”

Maybe that's where the memories of some have decided to turn myth in to fact.

Getting into the big tournament was not something the players thought about as much as winning the ACC title, something NC State had done eight previous times. They were just trying to stay on the roll that had begun against the Demon Deacons in the regular-season finale. “We didn’t think a lot,” Whittenburg said. “Coaches have a certain thought process during that time. Fans have a completely different thought process. As kids, we didn’t think a whole lot about it. We just went out and played and moved on to the next game. We were awaiting our instructions, just like in the military. We knew what we had to do. We just went out and played.”

They also knew how important winning a championship was to their coach: in each of his first three years at NC State, Valvano made his players practice cutting down the nets and carrying him off the court on their shoulders. Just in case they won a championship together.

“He was a dreamer, and he made us share his dream,” Thurl Bailey said.