I’m about 18 months removed from the completion of my ACC 100 Greatest Players series. As I was working on that series, I became interested in the question: what are the greatest teams in ACC history?
This topic doesn’t need much of an introduction, but I do want to say a few things. First, I decided on 50 teams. There’s no magic to that. There have been about 700 teams in league history. 50 teams means we are looking at the top 7% or so. 50 means we have room for all the national championship teams, most of the Final Four teams, most of the 30+ win teams, and a good number of the ACC Tournament champions. The idea is to draw the line such that any team that one might conceive as truly great is included, but a team that was merely good but didn’t do anything genuinely memorable is not. If I erred, it was probably on the side of having too many teams rather than too few.
Secondly, I decided to look at each team-year individually. Sometimes you have great teams – let’s say NC State 1972-73 and 1973-74 – where they have a two- or even a three-year period of excellence that is built around a common core of players. One way to do it would be to consider those groups as one team. Is it possible to draw meaningful distinctions between NC State 1973 and 1974?
Well, as a matter of fact it is, and ultimately I was led to the conclusion that the only fair way to do it is to consider each team-year individually. No team is exactly the same from one year to the next. For example, you know the 1973 and 1974 NC State teams were built around David Thompson, Monte Towe, and Tom Burleson; but the fourth- and fifth-leading scorers on the 1973 team were seniors Rick Holdt and Joe Cafferky. In 1974, Holdt and Cafferky were graduated and replaced by newcomers Phil Spence and Mo Rivers. Not the same team.
You find similar situations with other teams. 1967-1969 North Carolina kind of looks like one team, but when you look at the stars, the ’67 team had Bob Lewis and Larry Miller, the ’68 team had Larry Miller and Charlie Scott, and in ’69 Miller was gone. Not the same team. 1981 Virginia had Jeff Lamp and Lee Raker; 1982 Virginia had Jim Miller and Tim Mullen; 1983 Virginia added Rick Carlisle and subtracted Jeff Jones. Even Duke from 1991 to 1992 – about as close to coming back with the exact same team as I could find – swapped out Greg Koubek for Cherokee Parks.
Unfortunately for me, that approach requires that I draw some very fine distinctions among those team-years. The 1967-1969 North Carolina teams had virtually identical results. How do you distinguish among those teams? I’ve done the best I could.
Finally, a word about how I approached comparing teams from different eras. In short, each team was considered in the context of its own era. In other words, I didn’t try to figure out whether 1957 North Carolina would beat 2015 Duke if they could meet in some basketball fantasy world. My answer is a) no, they wouldn’t and b) who cares? It’s completely irrelevant to how we evaluate 1957 North Carolina. Every team is situated in a particular time and context, and their objective is to beat the teams they are actually playing, not some hypothetical team from 60 years later.
With that, let’s get on to the list.