2003 Top 50 List: No
Dan Collins List: Yes
Trivia question: Three players have been voted ACC Player of the Year unanimously. Who are they?
Trivia answer: David Thompson, 1975; Josh Howard, 2003; Tyler Hansbrough, 2008.
The 2003 Wake Forest team is one of the unexpected breakthrough seasons in ACC history. The Deacons program had been mired in the middle of the conference standings in the post-Tim Duncan era:
1999: 7-9 under Odom
2000: 7-9 under Odom
2001: 8-8 under Odom
2002: 9-7 under Skip Prosser
Prosser had a good recruiting class coming in in 2003, but no one expected them to do much. They were picked to finish sixth in the ACC in preseason polls. Their best returning player was Howard, a third team All-ACC performer who was thought of as a solid player but not an exceptional one.
The first sign that things were different was on December 4, when the Deacons, behind 31 points from Howard, went to Wisconsin and pulled off a 90-80 victory in the Big Ten challenge. Howard had big game after big game, asserting himself as the best player in the ACC, and Wake Forest went on to finish 13-3 in the ACC and to a Top 10 ranking. Howard brought home everything: the scoring title, ACC Player of the Year, and first team All-America.
Howard’s great season seems to have been quite unexpected. I was trying to think of similar situations, where an established player suddenly took a quantum leap forward to become one of the best players in the country. The best comparisons I could come up with were Chris Carrawell, Nolan Smith, and Brice Johnson. Brice Johnson is probably the best comparison; like Howard, he was third team All-ACC as a junior, then took a huge step forward as a senior to be first team All-America. But Howard was better, I think.
Howard was a very good player on the Dallas Mavericks teams of the 2000s. He and Jerry Stackhouse were integral parts of the 2006 team that lost in the finals to the D-Wade/Shaq-led Miami Heat.