2003 Top 50 List: No
Dan Collins List: Yes
Mike O’Koren and Mitch Kupchak are easily confused – similar first names, New York/New Jersey natives, 1970s UNC big guys who played with Phil Ford. But their games were quite different. Kupchak was more of a classic big man with higher rebounding totals; O’Koren had more of a midrange game and was an excellent passer, leading the Tar Heels in assists as a junior and senior. O’Koren, Danny Ferry, and Gene Banks are the only ACC players with 1500 points, 800 rebounds, and 300 assists.
O’Koren’s freshman year was 1977, the year after Kupchak graduated and Phil Ford’s junior year. After a late January slump, the Tar Heels caught fire, winning their last nine regular season games, winning the ACC Tournament, and advancing to the national championship game where they lost to Marquette. O’Koren quickly established himself as a mainstay in the Tar Heels lineup, and his role increased when center Tommy LaGarde hurt his knee in early February. O’Koren had 31 in the semifinal against UNLV.
As a sophomore, O’Koren was outstanding, averaging 17.3 points on 64% shooting. But that team went out on a sour note, losing to Wake Forest in the ACC Tournament semifinal and then losing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament to the Bill Cartwright-led San Francisco Dons.
O’Koren’s scoring numbers dropped as a junior and a senior. It’s hard to say why, but a good guess is that he wasn’t receiving passes from Phil Ford anymore, and the whole team seems to have gone to a slower tempo without Ford. But O’Koren was still good; he barely missed first team All-ACC in 1979, finishing two points behind teammate Al Wood, and was back on first team as a senior.
O’Koren’s All-America record is interesting. He was never named by the AP, but he was named a lot by the other services. Here is a breakdown of the voting from the four services that were used to determine Consensus All-American:
| Year | AP | UPI | NABC | USBWA |
| 1978 | Nothing | Nothing | 3rd | Nothing |
| 1979 | Nothing | 2nd | 2nd | 2nd |
| 1980 | Nothing | 2nd | 2nd | 2nd |
There are a couple of storylines here. One is, something was rotten in the state of Denmark with the AP voting from 1979 to 1983. They drastically changed their voting methodology in 1979. Prior to 1979, they polled a few hundred sportswriters. In 1979, they reduced it to a panel of seven, who incidentally were from Dallas, Kansas City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and three from New York. And guess what? Right away you see a discontinuity between the way ACC players fared in AP voting versus other services. In addition to O’Koren, Mike Gminski, Albert King, Jim Spanarkel, and Sam Perkins did comparatively worse in AP voting. In addition to the changes in voting membership, the AP voted by position for a few years, I think through 1981. This also is a bad idea; it means that if the two best players in the country are both centers, one of them has to be on second team. By 1984, the AP had gone to a 10-member panel and done away with position-based voting, and the ACC bias seems to disappear. In 1989, they blew it up again, and went to the current system of polling 60-70 sportswriters who make out first/second/third team ballots, for which the AP assigns 5/3/1 points respectively.
In any case, despite the snubs by the AP, O’Koren was a consensus second team All-American twice. However, the other storyline is, looking at his All-ACC voting for those same years, I have to regard those All-America selections with a bit of skepticism. It seems clear that the ACC voters regarded him as a good player, but not as good as Gminski, Spanarkel, King, or even Hawkeye Whitney. So I’m splitting the difference a bit in putting him in this slot. He is ranked lower than any other two-time Consensus All-American, save Eric Montross.
As a postscript, it’s interesting to note that O’Koren, Gminski, King, and Buck Williams all wound up playing for the early-to-mid 1980s New Jersey Nets. The Nets had two first round picks in 1980 and used them on Gminski and O’Koren. They had two more in 1981 and used them on King and Williams. I guess their GM had a thing for the ACC.