Record: 29-6, 10-4 (2nd place)
ACC Tournament: Won
NCAA Tournament: Lost in Final Four
Final AP Ranking: 4
All-ACC Players: Rick Fox (1st), Pete Chilcutt (3rd)
All-Americans: None
This is a fascinating team. The first thing that strikes you about the roster is the lack of a superstar. Rick Fox was the best player, and he was very good, but there’s no Worthy, no Jordan, no Jamison here. Then there’s just the sheer number of players. They returned five key guys from the year before (Fox, Pete Chilcutt, King Rice, Hubert Davis, George Lynch). They had a monster recruiting class – Eric Montross, Derrick Phelps, Brian Reese, Clifford Rozier, Kevin Salvadori, and Pat Sullivan – many of whom were ready to play as freshmen. Throw in some decent sophomores (Henrik Rodl, Kenny Harris, Matt Wenstrom), and you had 14 guys who were legitimately competing for playing time.
And Dean kept trying stuff, all year long. Nobody started every game, and 13 different players started at least one game. (Challenge: find another college basketball team, anywhere, ever, where 13 different guys started a game during the season.) Scott Cherry, Kenny Harris, and Pat Sullivan each started a game. Nobody started every game. Ultimately there were 10 guys who averaged 9 minutes a game or more: Fox, Chilcutt, Rice, Davis, Lynch, Montross, Phelps, Reese, Rozier, and Rodl. Dean was still playing around with the lineup in the tournament. Montross started the first round game but was supplanted by Lynch in the remaining games. The one guy who didn’t work out was Rozier. The highly touted recruit fell out of the tournament rotation and transferred to Louisville after the season.
They had a lot of skilled players. Fox was versatile and skilled and an underrated defender, Davis was a great shooter, Lynch was the leading rebounder and interior defensive anchor, Chilcutt was sneaky good, Rodl was a deft passer, Phelps was a great perimeter defender. Dean figured out how to put them all in positions to be successful.
A few other observations about this team. One, this was the year that State and Carolina played on back-to-back nights in early February. Their first scheduled game in January had been postponed and preempted by President Bush’s address to the nation announcing the opening of the Gulf War. State won the first game 97-91 behind 37 from Rodney Monroe and 28 from Tom Gugliotta. Carolina won the rematch 92-70.
Another observation is that this was Carolina’s first Final Four since 1982. Since then, they’d had a run of great teams that ultimately didn’t get it done in the NCAAs. What changed? Mostly their luck. After several years where they kept running into other great teams in the bracket, in 1991 everything fell their way. The #2, #4, #5, and #7 seeds in Carolina’s region lost in the first round, and there were other upsets later. As a result, the Tar Heels didn’t have to beat higher than a #9 seed to make the Final Four.
The Final Four was full of compelling storylines. UNC and Kansas, two blueblood programs, the Jayhawks just three years removed from a national championship run under Larry Brown, Roy Williams facing Coach Smith and Carolina for the first time, Smith back in the Final Four after coming up short so many times. The other semifinal was the Duke-UNLV rematch with all that entailed. Then, in the unlikely event that Duke beat UNLV, there was the possibility of a Duke-Carolina final. In the end, Kansas and Duke flipped the script. The Tar Heels couldn’t overcome a dismal shooting performance, and their season was over.
I’m not sure how a team whose best players were Rick Fox and Pete Chilcutt managed to be one of the 50 best teams in ACC history, but I think about it this way. Duke won the national championship, and I don’t see that Duke is very far ahead of this team. Duke did sweep them in the regular season, but the Tar Heels crushed them in the ACC Tournament final and wound up ranked higher in the polls. Duke obviously gets lots of credit for winning it all and beating UNLV, but an ACC title, a #1 seed, a #4 national ranking, and a Final Four run are too much to leave out.