N.C. State has miracles in its blood

They're not doing it quite like the '83 team did, but they have survived and advanced to the Final Eight.

D.J. Burns

Seven of the eight remaining teams make sense. It would be boring if all eight did. The aberrations give the men’s NCAA tournament its sense of history, its DVR-able moments. This time it’s North Carolina State, 11th seeded, being pulled along a path that was blazed, 41 years ago, by darlings of VHS.

The Wolfpack cruised past second-seeded Marquette in Dallas Friday night. That struck a chord because, in 1974, it had beaten Al McGuire’s Marquette team to win the NCAA championship. It will play Duke, its ACC rival from 27 miles away. Everett Case, State’s first legendary coach, requested to be buried facing U.S. Highway 70, so his spirit could wave to his boys as their bus to Durham rode by.

Duke knocked off top-seeded Houston on Friday, a game that will unfortunately be asterisked because Jamal Shead, the best player in the Big 12, hurt an ankle in the first half and didn’t return. That shouldn’t blot out Duke’s resolve, or the big plays made by Kyle Filipowski and Jeremy Roach.

But what if Houston had won? A State-Houston game would call back the images of 1983 in Albuquerque, when the Wolfpack beat the spectacularly vertical Phi Slama Jama squad to win a national championship, when Lorenzo Charles beat everyone else to Dereck Whittenburg’s airball and dunked it through the hoop, as the oxygen suddenly left The Pit.

So there is no shortage of bread crumbs here. But the ‘24 team has little in common with the ‘83 team, except for the basic uniform design, and the fact that both of them felt it had to win the ACC tournament to qualify for the NCAAs.

In a Whittenberg-produced documentary called “Survive And Advance,” the ‘83 club subscribed to the dreams of coach Jim Valvano, who even had his team practice the ritual of cutting the nets. It squeezed past Wake Forest in the first round of the ACC tournament, then got past North Carolina (Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins) in overtime in the semifinals. In the finals the Wolfpack got past Virginia (Ralph Sampson), 81-78.

Its path to the national title was even more imaginative. The Wolfpack trailed Pepperdine by six points in the final minute. Pepperdine’s best player was Dane Suttle, and he was an 83.5 percent free-thrower, and he went to the line with a four-point lead at the 0:29 mark. But he missed the front end of that one-and-one, and then he missed another, and Pepperdine kept fouling, and State won, 69-67 in overtime.

The Wolfpack then upset UNLV in the second round and dispatched Utah in the round of 16. That matched State up with Virginia again, and it trailed by seven points with seven and a half minutes left, and it somehow slithered into the final minute with a chance to win, and it surrounded Sampson and Othell Wilson at the end. Kevin Mullen was the open man, and when he missed, State was in the Final Four.

A routine win over Georgia in the semifinals (which had prevented a State-Carolina matchup by upsetting the Tar Heels) led to the Houston game, again featuring some bad foul shooting by the favored team, and leading to the original One Shining Moment.

But the ‘83 team was far more credentialed than today’s upset kings. Whittenburg and point guard Sidney Lowe were seniors who had played together for seven years, counting high school. There’s rarely been such a classic passer-shooter guard combination in the history of the tournament.

Thurl Bailey, the power forward, would play 928 NBA games. Charles was a first-round pick. And that team would have made the NCAA field comfortably if Whittenburg hadn’t broken his foot against Virginia in Raleigh, a game in which he scored 27 in the first half. “When it happened, I thought, well, we’re an NIT team so let’s go win that,” said Terry Gannon, the substitute shooter and current golf and Olympic broadcaster. The NCAA bracket was only 52 teams long.

This Wolfpack team is not nearly as credentialed but, paradoxically, has had less difficulty in the postseason. It needed a buzzer three-pointer from Michael O’Connell in the ACC semifinals, to beat Virginia. It had to sweat out an overtime win over Oakland in the second round, but it controlled its 13-point win over Texas Tech and this nine-point win over Marquette. It has D.J. Burns in the middle, a uniquely backloaded lefthander whose game is reminiscent of Zach Randolph’s. Burns is too heavy to perform for very long, but he was too much of a load for North Carolina’s Armando Bacot in the ACC championship game — State’s fifth in five days – and is something of a walking, heavy-breathing conundrum. If you single-cover him, Burns has nimble feet and a soft touch. If you double him, he turns on a remarkable radar system that finds open shooters all over the floor.

Four of the starters, including Burns, are grad transfers. Everyone who plays is either a junior or a senior. Mohamed Diarra is dealing with Ramadan, and the required fasting before sunset. He has 96 rebounds in his last seven games. D.J. Horne, who is from Raleigh, came home from Arizona State. Burns’ first school was Winthrop.

The coach, Kevin Keatts, is not the beloved entertainer Valvano was, and as the Wolfpack lost 10 of its last 14 regular season games, it appeared he would need to change his residence. But because State won the ACC tournament, Keatts got an automatic 2-year contract extension, and this particular March will always be boldfaced on his resume.

This will be Duke’s second appearance in front of the destiny train. Horne led the Wolfpack with 18 points in that 74-69 ACC tournament win. Duke didn’t need that game. N.C. State did. On Sunday, we’ll see if survival and advancement are hereditary traits.