Record: 32-0, 14-0 (1st place)
ACC Tournament: Won
NCAA Tournament: Won
Final AP Ranking: 1
All-ACC Players: Lennie Rosenbluth (ACC POY), Tommy Kearns (1st), Pete Brennan (2nd)
All-Americans: Lennie Rosenbluth (National POY)
Now we come to the three teams with the strongest claims on being the greatest ACC basketball team ever: 1957 North Carolina, 1974 NC State, and 1992 Duke.
Coming into the 1957 season, things were looking up for Frank McGuire. He had been steadily building the program, funneling player after player from New York down south to build his roster. The 1956 team had been ranked as high as fourth nationally. The core of that team – Lennie Rosenbluth, Pete Brennan, Joe Quigg, and Tommy Kearns – was back in 1957. The Tar Heels were ranked sixth in the preseason poll.
Coach McGuire knew he had a good team and created a challenging non-conference schedule. Just before Christmas, they traveled north to play NYU, Dartmouth, and Holy Cross on back-to-back-to-back nights. Then, just after Christmas, they swept through the Dixie Classic, beating a very good Utah team, ninth-ranked Duke, and a tough Wake Forest team. A January 15 win over NC State brought the Tar Heels to 15-0 and a #1 ranking in the polls.
It was the next two games that took things from “they’re having a great season” to “maybe this is a team of destiny”. At Maryland, the Tar Heels trailed late but took advantage of a free throw miss to force overtime, eventually winning 65-61 in double OT. In the next game, Duke clawed back from an eight-point deficit to tie the game with 21 seconds left. Unfortunately for them, the Woollen Gym scoreboard was a little slow to update, and Duke’s Bobby Joe Harris thought the Blue Devils were still down two. He intentionally fouled Kearns, who sank two free throws to give the Tar Heels the winning margin.
From there, the biggest tests were three more tough games with Wake Forest, with the Tar Heels winning by three and five in the regular season and two in the semifinals of the ACC Tournament. With an easy win over South Carolina in the final, the they entered the NCAA Tournament at 26-0.
One gets the impression that McGuire hated the pressure that came with being undefeated and would have been perfectly happy with a loss somewhere along the way. According to ACC Basketball: An Illustrated History, McGuire said, “I don’t know how we keep winning… our kids are feeling the pressure building up from our winning streak. I think we’d be a better ballclub if we got knocked off in a couple of games. There’s no such thing as an undefeated season in basketball.”
Turns out, there is. It just takes back-to-back triple overtime wins in the Final Four.
The obvious question to ask is, as the only undefeated national championship team in league history, why isn’t 1957 Carolina #1? After all, they didn’t lose a game. What else could they have done? There is a certain unanswerable logic to that argument.
But the margin between a team that lost zero games and a team that lost one or two is razor-thin. If the Woollen Gym scoreboard operator had been a little quicker, this team might have been 30-1.
It seems that everyone who watched this team felt they had been lucky. NC State coach Everett Case said, “They’ve got a fine ballclub, but I think somebody’ll knock ’em off before the end of the season.” Duke coach Hal Bradley: “Carolina has a fine team… but I don’t think they have a great team. They are experiencing too many scares.” Call that sour grapes if you want, but even McGuire said “It’s uncanny how we could’ve kept our undefeated season going. We were lucky, awfully lucky, all season long in close games.”
In the final analysis, I give a slight edge to 1974 NC State and 1992 Duke. They had an element of dominance that seems lacking from the ’57 Tar Heels, and the ACC they faced was better from top to bottom.
But with each passing year, it seems less likely that another team from the ACC, or perhaps from any conference, will go undefeated again. The 1957 Tar Heels stand alone in the long and illustrious history of ACC basketball.