2003 Top 50 List: Yes
Dan Collins List: Yes
I feel like I have Ferry a little bit overrated here, but dang, the résumé is just too impressive. He was a two-time ACC Player of the Year, and the votes were not close. As a senior, Ferry and Arizona’s Sean Elliott split the national Player of the Year awards, with Ferry snagging the UPI/Naismith and the USBWA, and Elliott getting the others. He played on three Final Four teams. In both his junior and senior years, Duke was a #2 seed and beat a #1 seed to make the Final Four. Ferry was Most Outstanding Player of the East region both times. He was ACC Tournament Most Outstanding Player as a junior. He is the only player in ACC history with 2,000 points, 500 assists, and 1,000 rebounds.
The other thing he has going for him is, if you look back at those late 1980s Duke teams, he wasn’t surrounded by overwhelming talent. These were not the Duke teams of the early 90s, or the late 90s/early 00s. This was the Duke of Kevin Strickland, Robert Brickey, Quin Snyder, and Phil Henderson. Those guys were good players, but it was Ferry’s team, and he got them to the Final Four, twice in a row.
The one thing I guess you could say against him is, his competition for ACC Player of the Year was a little weak in Tom Hammonds and JR Reid. Had he come along a little earlier, he would’ve had to deal with Johnny Dawkins and Horace Grant. Had he come along a little later, he would’ve had to deal with Dennis Scott and Kenny Anderson. Maybe he wouldn’t have won those two ACC POY awards. But that’s not his fault; he could only play against the guys who were in the league at that time. Hammonds and Reid are both Top 100 players and he was way ahead of them.
My gut says Ferry should be down in the 20-25 range, but the more I look at his accomplishments, I can’t justify it. The bottom line is, he accomplished more than the guys he’s ahead of. He had one of the great careers in the history of the ACC.
Ferry’s 58-point outburst against Miami in 1988 still stands as the record for points in a game by an ACC player. What I didn’t know until recently is that Ferry hit 19 straight shots in the game, which would be an NCAA record – except it was interrupted by an errant alley oop attempt that hit the rim and was counted as a missed shot.
I’d like to be one of their other four guys. Everybody is trying to guard Ferry. By the time you think you’ve got him stopped, he lays it off to somebody else. If he ain’t the player of the year, I want to see who is. – Miami coach Bill Foster, quoted in Game of My Life by Alwyn Featherston