1973 a season of 'forgotten' success

Twenty-seven wins.

One ACC championship.

No losses.

Zero chance of a national championship.

That was the situation the 1972-1973 men's basketball team found itself in as NCAA violations in the recruitment of eventual three-time ACC Player of the Year David Thompson sidelined the program from postseason play despite its unblemished record.

UCLA, en route to its seventh consecutive national championship, never had to face the No. 2 Wolfpack. It's an opportunity then-sophomore point guard Monte Towe would have loved to have, a match-up with the six-time defending national champions.

But he acknowledges it may have gone like the team's December 1973 loss to the Bruins, an 84-66 blowout the following season.

"That might have happened to us when we were sophomores. Who knows? But we might have beaten them too. I'd take our chances," Towe said. "Any time you go on the floor and you've got David Thompson and Tommy Burleson, you've got a chance to win. That's what I found out."

Len Elmore, who played for Maryland from 1972-1974, echoed that idea.

"There's no question they would have had a shot. They were probably the best team in the country that year," Elmore said. "They were better than UCLA. And they obviously were a little bit better than us."

Starting with the 27-0 campaign in '73 and running through the end of the 1974 national championship season, the team won 57 of 58 games. The program also became the only team to post back-to-back undefeated ACC records in league history.

It all started in '73 though, when the team welcomed Thompson, Towe and Tim Stoddard -- all sophomores -- to the varsity team. The three had spent the previous season on the freshman team, as freshmen had been ineligible to play on varsity up to that point.

Towe said the team even surprised itself by going undefeated in '73.

"As young guys are, we felt like we could be pretty good. We played every day over in Carmichael Gym, and during the summertime we played against the guys from Carolina, Duke," Towe said. "There was a lot of talk about 'we could be pretty good,' but we hadn't done it. And so for us to come out and do it was another thing."

The violations, penalty The NCAA violations that led to the team's ineligibility for postseason play stemmed from a few nights Thompson stayed for free in the dorm of some friends working a basketball camp and a pick-up game in which assistant coach Eddie Biedenbach played with Thompson. Thompson said the NCAA treated it like he had been given a tryout.

"They considered that a tryout, which I think is really stupid. I'd already signed with the school," Thompson said. "Why would they have to try out me? I was one of the best players in the country. It was just little nit-picky stuff."

But Elmore said State might have gotten lucky with the length of its ineligibility for postseason play.

"I think it's pretty fortunate from a timing perspective that we weren't playing in today's environment because they would have probably been on probation and missed postseason tournaments for a lot longer," Elmore said.

As it was, the team would only be sidelined from NCAA Tournament play for one season -- the 1972-1973 campaign.

Motivation Players from the 1973 team, including current associate head coach Towe, said the one-year postseason ban was motivation.

"We felt like we had been treated unjustly, so as coach Sloan would always say, 'Something has to motivate you.' If that motivated us, so be it," Towe said. "We did what we had in front of us, and we ran the table."

Burleson noted the year of no postseason served as a catalyst in creating the desire that helped the team prepare for its national title run in 1974.

"It was just a year that God was showing us patience, where we had to be patient. It just made us want that national championship that much more by it being omitted, denied the opportunity to go to the NCAAs and play for it," Burleson said. "So it was just a part of a big process."

Making room for Thompson Going into the '73 season, then-junior 7-foot-4-inch center Tommy Burleson was coming off a year in which he was a first team All-ACC selection, scoring 21.3 points per game and pulling down 14 rebounds per contest. But with Thompson moving up from the freshman team, the team was going to have a new first option.

Burleson knew it was for the best of the team. After all, he'd spent the 1972 summer Olympics bragging to his teammates about a freshman at N.C. State who was better than anyone on the national team.

When coach Norm Sloan called Burleson into his office to discuss the new game plan of working the offense around Thompson, Burleson wasn't upset for long.

"When coach Sloan mentioned it to me, it only stung for maybe five minutes until I realized what he was going for," Burleson said.

Thompson would go on to lead the team in scoring in 1973 with 24.7 points per game, while Burleson pulled in a team-high 12 rebounds per contest.

A defining moment Starting in '73 and going through 1974, State would defeat Maryland six times in a row. The first of those came on Jan. 14, 1973, Super Bowl Sunday, when No. 3 N.C. State knocked off No. 2 Maryland 87-85 on a buzzer-beating tip-in by Thompson.

"I just remember Cole Field House being the biggest place I felt like I'd ever been in in my life," Towe said. "And there was more Maryland fans than I'd ever seen people before in that building, and we were able to beat them 87-85."

Burleson said the victory was a turning point where the team realized just how good it could be.

"When you start beating the [second]-ranked team in the nation on their own court, then you realize you've got a good team," Burleson said. "The thing of it was we had no weaknesses."

But even as the team piled up victories, it stayed focused game-by-game, according to then-sophomore Stoddard.