When Bobby Knight, Quinn Buckner, Scott May and the rest of the 1975-76 Indiana Hoosiers cut down the nets on March 29, 1976 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia, there was no way of knowing that some 39 years later we’d still be talking about their accomplishment as the greatest in the history of the sport.
Thirty-two and zip. The last Division I basketball team to go undefeated. The greatest college team ever assembled. And one of the best examples college basketball has ever seen of the melding of elite talent and a selfless philosophy.
That last part – elite talent plus selfless attitude equals success – also happens to be the best way to describe this year’s Kentucky Wildcats, which tip off in the SEC tournament on Friday at 31-0, nine wins away from becoming the first team since the Gerald Ford administration to run the table.
Depending on your point of view, an undefeated Kentucky team would actually surpass that Indiana team as college basketball's greatest ever. After all, a team has to play eight more games now to go unbeaten, and the scrutiny in today’s media-saturated world far surpasses what Indiana players had to go through four decades ago.
To put into a bit of perspective how long it has been since a team went wire-to-wire: On March 29, 1976, the Academy Awards were going on in Los Angeles at the same time as the national title game. A 38-year-old Jack Nicholson won his first Oscar, for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” (Nicholson is now 77.) Gas cost 59 cents a gallon. It was the year Steve Jobs formed Apple Computer Company. Future Kentucky coach John Calipari was a teenager.
And, if you talk with members of that team we remember as one of college hoops’ greatest of all time, perhaps the most amazing part of that season is it wasn’t their best.
“The year before was the better team,” said Jim Crews, a reserve on the undefeated team who is now head coach at St. Louis University. “I don’t think anyone disputes that in our group.”
The year before, Indiana had torn through the regular season and the Big Ten tournament undefeated as well. It just wasn’t winning squeakers as it did so often during the undefeated year; those Hoosiers were obliterating their opponents by 20 or 25 points. But then May broke his arm, and in an Elite Eight game against – who else? – Kentucky, he was limited to only seven minutes. Indiana’s undefeated season ended in a 92-90 heartbreaker.
There are many lessons this year's Kentucky team can take from the Indiana team that later broke through with the perfect record. First is the idea of putting team over the talent. If there’s one accomplishment by Calipari that’s most impressive, it’s taking a roster with nine McDonald’s All-Americans and making everyone copacetic with a platoon system that limits future NBA lottery picks to 20 minutes a game. (Kentucky’s leading scorer, Aaron Harrison, averages only 11.2 points; no top 25 team has a leading scorer with such a low scoring average.)
“What Coach Knight stressed and taught was sacrifice,” said Tom Abernethy, who as a senior started at forward for the undefeated Indiana team. “Giving up your own glory for betterment of the team.”
Then there’s the idea of tuning out all the noise and relentlessly focusing on getting better. It’s exponentially more difficult these days to tune out the noise, with 24-hour news cycles and Twitter and endless debate about sports teams. But that’s not to say Indiana didn’t hear that noise back in 1976. As with Kentucky this season, there was plenty of whispering about the possibility of undefeated before the first game was even played.
“Coach Knight wasn’t asking us to play against the opposition,” said Buckner, the team’s point guard. “It was us playing against ourselves. Trying to get better and not fall in to all the outside influences. It was about concentration and playing to your potential.”
These things sound pretty simple, the ultimate sports cliché: Take it day by day, game by game. Focus on practicing your hardest and your best. Then the wins will come.
But this is really the most difficult part of the job for a coach like Calipari, who is chasing something historic: The only way to be able to achieve this sort of history is to avoid focusing on the magnitude of it.
“Coach Knight’s ability to do that is what makes any coach a great coach,” said Buckner, now a television analyst with the Indiana Pacers. “Same with Bill Belichick, Gregg Popovich. Phil Jackson. You target on ultimately what’s missing and you get better every time you step on the court. It’s hard to do it over a long period of time. If you’re not practicing that thought process, it’s not unlike a muscle – you gotta practice it. You gotta get better every time."
But if you look past the next game – if you focus on your toughest test being five games down the road instead of that very night – you’re in trouble. The Indiana team had a vague sense, as they were going through their undefeated run, that they were chasing something great.
But they had no idea their run could be something historic.
“One person knew it: Coach Knight,” Buckner said. “We didn’t have any concept. You didn’t think of yourself that way. That’s going past the result. You got really young guys turning into men. The last thing they think about is looking at their team as the greatest that ever played.”
All these lessons from the nation’s last undefeated team are well and good and applicable to this Kentucky bunch. But there’s another element, too, one that’s harder to put a finger on: the element of chance.
In December 1975, Indiana beat Notre Dame by three. Two days after New Year’s, the Hoosiers beat Ohio State on the road by a bucket. In February, Michigan came to Bloomington, and that was one game Crews thought Indiana probably should have lost – but it made a comeback and won by five.
The year before there weren’t many close games at all for the Hoosiers. But during the undefeated season, six of Indiana’s wins were by five points or fewer.
Since SEC play started this season, Kentucky has won one overtime game and one double-overtime game. The Wildcats beat Florida by seven on the road in a game that was close until the final minute and beat LSU by two their next time out. An eight-point win at Georgia felt close until the end, too.
Perhaps these are examples of a team that simply plays its best when its back is against the wall.
Bob Knight knew the Hoosiers were doing something historic in 1976, but his players really didn't.
Or perhaps it’s something harder to pinpoint, something that really is like catching lightning in a bottle. The coin flip landing on heads every single time.
Maybe it’s magic. Maybe it’s luck. Maybe it’s destiny.
“You have to be really good, but you have to get some luck,” Crews said. “Rarely does luck not play into championships. What (Kentucky) needs to do is ignore it. Enjoy each other. It just depends on what the goal is, whether the goal is a national championship or whether the goal is undefeated. The world is not going to come to an end if they get beat.”
What Kentucky has already done this season is remarkable, entering its conference tournament undefeated. But the Wildcats are only a bit past three-fourths of the way to the goal. That goal only gets tougher in the next few weeks. Tougher competition. Every opponent fighting for its life. And an even bigger magnifying glass, if that’s possible.
“What you call it is a target on your back, and the more you win, the bigger the target gets,” Abernethy said. “All the crowds come and hope to see the undefeated team get knocked off. There’s pressure in that you’re going to get best shots from the players you’re playing against and the fans cheering against you.”
But get through the gauntlet of the next month of March Madness, and we’ll be celebrating this group as the greatest college basketball team since 1976, and perhaps the greatest of all time.
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
