2003 Top 50 List: Yes
Dan Collins List: Yes
Billy Cunningham and Jeff Mullins represent another group of players who are very difficult to distinguish. Mullins was one year ahead. Each made first team All-ACC three times. Each was ACC Player of the Year as a senior. Mullins did slightly better in All-America balloting. There’s just not much to separate them. Their NBA careers were pretty similar too; Cunningham is a Hall of Famer and Mullins is not, but Mullins was a really good player too. As I wrote about under the Pete Brennan/Lee Shaffer/Lou Pucillo post, Mullins and Cunningham were the first two ACC players to achieve stardom in the NBA.
Mullins’ teams, of course, were much more successful. The 1963 and 1964 Duke teams both won the ACC Tournament and went to the Final Four. In a sense, the most impressive thing about Mullins’ career is the success of the 1964 team after the departure of Art Heyman. It would have been an obvious time for the program to drop a bit, but they didn’t miss a beat, making it all the way to the national championship game and finishing third in the final poll. Mullins played in eight career NCAA Tournament games, averaging 25 points and eight rebounds and shooting 54% from the field. His 43-point outburst against Villanova in the regional semifinal in 1964 is still the most ever scored by an ACC player in an NCAA Tournament game. (The other ACC players to score 40 in an NCAA Tournament game? David Thompson, 1974; Rodney Monroe, 1989; Dennis Scott, 1990). One-and-dones aside, Mullins is the only player in ACC history to score in double figures in every game in his career.
By contrast, Cunningham’s teams were pretty ordinary. As pointed out in the Bob Lewis post, it wasn’t until 1967 that the Dean Smith Tar Heels broke out. But Cunningham was a sensation. He ranks third all-time in rebounding average and ninth in scoring. (Len Chappell and Dickie Hemric are the only other players in the top 10 in both categories.) Cunningham and Chappell are the only players to lead the league in scoring and rebounding twice. Cunningham, Tom Owens, Dale Davis, and Tim Duncan are the only players to lead the league in rebounding three times.
When did the ACC become an elite basketball conference? Sports Reference rates conferences via the Simple Rating System, which uses margin of victory and strength of schedule to rate individual teams, then adds up teams to get conference ratings. Here are the ACC’s ratings year by year:
- 1954 – 12th of 18
- 1955 – 8th of 18
- 1956 – 4th of 18
- 1957 – 6th of 18
- 1958 – 6th of 18
- 1959 – 7th of 18
- 1960 – 5th of 18
- 1961 – 6th of 18
- 1962 – 5th of 18
- 1963 – 6th of 17
- 1964 – 6th of 17
- 1965 – 6th of 17
- 1966 – 2nd of 18
- 1967 – 3rd of 18
- 1968 – 7th of 18
- 1969 – 4th of 19
- 1970 – 2nd of 19
- 1971 – 2nd of 19
- 1972 – 1st of 19
- 1973 – 1st of 19
Then the ACC ranks first or second every year until 1991-92. So something turned a corner in the late ‘60s, and by the early 1970s, the ACC was established the best basketball conference in the country.
Now, I should point out that the ACC still had really good teams in the earliest years. There was the UNC national championship team in 1957; then there were Final Four teams in 1962 (Wake), 1963, 1964, and 1966 (all Duke). But the depth of quality wasn’t what it eventually became.
What changed? Two things. One, the non-North Carolina schools started to step it up. In the first 12 years or so of the league, Duke, UNC, NC State, and Wake Forest were good; Clemson, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia were, as a group, pretty terrible. But South Carolina hired Frank McGuire in 1964; Maryland hired Lefty Driesell in 1969; and even Clemson and Virginia started to be more competitive.
But the second and probably more influential factor was integration. In the 1950s and most of the 1960s, the ACC and SEC were at a competitive disadvantage compared to other conferences which had already integrated. In the late 1960s, that started to change with Charlie Scott, Charlie Davis, Ed Leftwich, Bob McAdoo, and Len Elmore, among others. By 1974, three All-ACC first teamers (Elmore, David Thompson, and John Lucas) were black.