Twenty-seven wins.
One ACC championship.
No losses.
Zero chance of a national championship.
That was the situation the 1972-1973 men’s basketball team found itself in as NCAA violations in the recruitment of eventual three-time ACC Player of the Year David Thompson sidelined the program from postseason play despite its unblemished record.
UCLA, en route to its seventh consecutive national championship, never had to face the No. 2 Wolfpack. It’s an opportunity then-sophomore point guard Monte Towe would have loved to have, a match-up with the six-time defending national champions.
But he acknowledges it may have gone like the team’s December 1973 loss to the Bruins, an 84-66 blowout the following season.
“That might have happened to us when we were sophomores. Who knows? But we might have beaten them too. I’d take our chances,” Towe said. “Any time you go on the floor and you’ve got David Thompson and Tommy Burleson, you’ve got a chance to win. That’s what I found out.”
Len Elmore, who played for Maryland from 1972-1974, echoed that idea.
“There’s no question they would have had a shot. They were probably the best team in the country that year,” Elmore said. “They were better than UCLA. And they obviously were a little bit better than us.”
Starting with the 27-0 campaign in ’73 and running through the end of the 1974 national championship season, the team won 57 of 58 games. The program also became the only team to post back-to-back undefeated ACC records in league history.
It all started in ’73 though, when the team welcomed Thompson, Towe and Tim Stoddard — all sophomores — to the varsity team. The three had spent the previous season on the freshman team, as freshmen had been ineligible to play on varsity up to that point.
Towe said the team even surprised itself by going undefeated in ’73.
“As young guys are, we felt like we could be pretty good. We played every day over in Carmichael Gym, and during the summertime we played against the guys from Carolina, Duke,” Towe said. “There was a lot of talk about ‘we could be pretty good,’ but we hadn’t done it. And so for us to come out and do it was another thing.”
The violations, penaltyThe NCAA violations that led to the team’s ineligibility for postseason play stemmed from a few nights Thompson stayed for free in the dorm of some friends working a basketball camp and a pick-up game in which assistant coach Eddie Biedenbach played with Thompson. Thompson said the NCAA treated it like he had been given a tryout.
“They considered that a tryout, which I think is really stupid. I’d already signed with the school,” Thompson said. “Why would they have to try out me? I was one of the best players in the country. It was just little nit-picky stuff.”
But Elmore said State might have gotten lucky with the length of its ineligibility for postseason play.
“I think it’s pretty fortunate from a timing perspective that we weren’t playing in today’s environment because they would have probably been on probation and missed postseason tournaments for a lot longer,” Elmore said.
As it was, the team would only be sidelined from NCAA Tournament play for one season — the 1972-1973 campaign.
MotivationPlayers from the 1973 team, including current associate head coach Towe, said the one-year postseason ban was motivation.
“We felt like we had been treated unjustly, so as coach Sloan would always say, ‘Something has to motivate you.’ If that motivated us, so be it,” Towe said. “We did what we had in front of us, and we ran the table.”
Burleson noted the year of no postseason served as a catalyst in creating the desire that helped the team prepare for its national title run in 1974.
“It was just a year that God was showing us patience, where we had to be patient. It just made us want that national championship that much more by it being omitted, denied the opportunity to go to the NCAAs and play for it,” Burleson said. “So it was just a part of a big process.”
Making room for ThompsonGoing into the ’73 season, then-junior 7-foot-4-inch center Tommy Burleson was coming off a year in which he was a first team All-ACC selection, scoring 21.3 points per game and pulling down 14 rebounds per contest. But with Thompson moving up from the freshman team, the team was going to have a new first option.
Burleson knew it was for the best of the team. After all, he’d spent the 1972 summer Olympics bragging to his teammates about a freshman at N.C. State who was better than anyone on the national team.
When coach Norm Sloan called Burleson into his office to discuss the new game plan of working the offense around Thompson, Burleson wasn’t upset for long.
“When coach Sloan mentioned it to me, it only stung for maybe five minutes until I realized what he was going for,” Burleson said.
Thompson would go on to lead the team in scoring in 1973 with 24.7 points per game, while Burleson pulled in a team-high 12 rebounds per contest.
A defining momentStarting in ’73 and going through 1974, State would defeat Maryland six times in a row. The first of those came on Jan. 14, 1973, Super Bowl Sunday, when No. 3 N.C. State knocked off No. 2 Maryland 87-85 on a buzzer-beating tip-in by Thompson.
“I just remember Cole Field House being the biggest place I felt like I’d ever been in in my life,” Towe said. “And there was more Maryland fans than I’d ever seen people before in that building, and we were able to beat them 87-85.”
Burleson said the victory was a turning point where the team realized just how good it could be.
“When you start beating the [second]-ranked team in the nation on their own court, then you realize you’ve got a good team,” Burleson said. “The thing of it was we had no weaknesses.”
But even as the team piled up victories, it stayed focused game-by-game, according to then-sophomore Stoddard.
“It was tough enough just going out back then and winning a game, let alone trying to think too far in advance,” Stoddard said. “There were just too many good teams. You couldn’t overlook anybody.”
That’s part of why Elmore said he couldn’t believe the Pack was able to go undefeated, including a 12-0 mark in the ACC.
“I was surprised that they were able to run the table simply because they beat us three times. If you look at the scores, like I said, it wasn’t much of a margin.”
But it all came down to Thompson.
“David Thompson was usually the difference. We had some great players on our team, but we had a difficult matchup with Thompson,” Elmore said. “Our bigger guys weren’t quick enough, and our smaller guys weren’t big enough.”
As for that monumental win in Cole Field House on Super Sunday, Thompson said it set the stage for the special things to follow.
“We went out, showed the country what North Carolina State had. That game kind of put us on the map, really, as a national power,” Thompson said. “And we were able to prepare from there and go on and have a great two seasons in a row.”
A springboard for 1974Towe said people knew about N.C. State by the time the ’74 season rolled around because of what the program did in ’73.
“Nobody was real sure who we were, and then after that year they knew exactly who David Thompson and North Carolina State and Norm Sloan [were],” Towe said. “We had run to the top of the table.”
And according to Burleson, the team was ready to build off the undefeated season and get the title it couldn’t pursue a season earlier.
“It definitely set the tone for ’74 because being denied, it made us just that much more hungry to get that win,” he said.
The team, of course, claimed the championship in 1974 after a 30-1 campaign, giving the program a two-year record of 57-1, for a two-year winning percentage unmatched in the ACC’s 54-year history.
“I just know that if you line up 58 times and you win 57, you’ve done about everything you can do,” Towe said. “It can’t get much better than that.”
He said the atmosphere created by the basketball team’s success those two seasons was amazing.
“If you were a student at North Carolina State at that time, I would say it had to be one of the best times of your life. I don’t care if you were a player or whether you’re here just going to school and enjoying what was going on,” Towe said. “Hillsborough Street was very vibrant. It was electrifying. Reynolds Coliseum, you talk about loud and hot, the run of home wins, it was just a great time to be a part of N.C. State.”
A forgotten seasonMuch of the focus this season is centered around the 25th anniversary of State’s last national championship in 1983, when current coach Sidney Lowe was a senior point guard. And plenty of State fans know about the 1974 championship.
With all the attention paid to those seasons, 1973 can get lost in the shuffle.
Joe Cafferky, a senior guard on the ’73 team, gets it from time to time.
“I still have people asking me if I was on the championship team,” Cafferky said. “They forget about the year before that.”
But he can’t understand why the ’73 group isn’t mentioned in the discussion of best all-time ACC teams with squads such as Duke’s from the early 1990s.
“Who’s going to cover Thompson? Who was going to cover Monte or Burleson?” Cafferky said. “There was no way they could beat us.”
Towe said he saw Cafferky for the first time in years this summer, and Cafferky was wearing the ring the school gave the players to honor their undefeated season that year.
“It’s kind of a somewhat forgotten team, but not by the people that were here, not by the guys who lived it,” Towe said.
