I’m sure you all remember the last time Carolina and Texas A&M met in the NCAA tournament. The year was 1980, and Carolina had not won an NCAA tournament game since going to the national championship game against Marquette in 1977.
This is the first bitter Carolina NCAA disappointment I remember. I do remember that loss to Marquette, but the San Francisco (1978) and Penn (1979) losses are not vivid in my mind. I guess because Carolina hadn’t won a tournament game since ’77, though, I focused more on this game. I remember being in my living room and bitterly advancing Texas A&M in my bracket.
I didn’t really remember anything about the game itself, though. (I was a kid, after all.) Thankfully, KBTX-TV in Bryan, Texas, dug up some video from the game, and it’s amazing just for the overwhelming 1980ness of it. It’s clearly just the video they saved to edit into a highlight package, so it has a heavy Texas A&M flavor, but it’s still well worth watching.
Carolina was the No. 3 seed in the Midwest that year. The tournament had just expanded to 48 teams, which meant the top four seeds got byes to the second round. Texas A&M beat Bradley 55-53 to advance to play Carolina, the No. 3 seed in the Midwest. Unfortunately for Carolina, the game was in Denton, Texas, the home of North Texas and a gym known as the Super Pit (to differentiate it from New Mexico’s completely pedestrian Pit, I suppose?).
It was a weird stretch in Carolina basketball history. Phil Ford arrived in the mid-70s to knock N.C. State off its perch as the national champion and back to back ACC champions, and by all rights should have won a national championship in 1977.
And in 1981, Carolina returned to the national championship game, losing to Indiana on the day President Reagan was shot, with a team that featured Jimmy Black, Matt Doherty, Sam Perkins, James Worthy and Al Wood. Sub in Michael Jordan for Al Wood and you have the team that won Dean Smith’s first national championship in 1982.
In between, though, Carolina lost its opening game in three straight years. In 1978, Carolina lost to San Francisco, a disappointing end to Ford’s career. It followed that up with the oft-remembered Black Sunday loss to Penn in 1979. (Carolina was the No. 1 seed in the East that year, and Duke was the No. 2, and they lost to Penn and St. John’s in back to back games at Reynolds Coliseum on March 11, 1979.)
Which brings us to 1980. Carolina came into the tournament 21-7 after finishing second in the ACC regular season and losing to Duke in the tournament championship game. Texas A&M was 22-7.
You don’t really care about the details of the game, but check out the stats. It was a bizarre game that featured a scoreless overtime, and an amazing 36 fouls called against Carolina with four players fouling out and Texas A&M going 30-for-48 from the free throw line.
To hit the high points from Carolina’s perspective, Jimmy Black had a shot to win it in regulation. He missed, and the game went to overtime tied 53-53. Carolina got the ball and held it for several minutes, with Black missing a layup with 1:15 left. Texas A&M got the rebound and held for the last shot, missing it and creating the rare scoreless overtime.
So the teams went to a second overtime with the same 53-53 score, and according to The Daily Tar Heel game story, the Tar Heels missed shots and Texas A&M jumped out to a lead. Carolina then started fouling, and Texas A&M made its free throws, leading to a strange 78-61 final score. Texas A&M outscored Carolina 25-8 in the second overtime.
It always seemed that poor shooting was Carolina’s undoing when it stumbled in the NCAA tournament, and this game was no exception. The Tar Heels shot 36 percent, and while the Aggies didn’t light it up they did shoot 46 percent. Al Wood was Carolina’s leading scorer with 26 points, but that team’s second-leading scorer, forward Mike O’Koren, went 5-for-13 from the field and finished with 11 points, though he did grab 18 rebounds.
One other footnote for that team: It was James Worthy’s freshman year, and you might remember that he was awesome. But he broke his foot in the team’s 14th game, against Maryland, and missed the rest of the season. In the annals of Carolina seasons dented by injury, that’s right up there. Not with Kenny Smith and Kendall Marshall maybe, but definitely in the top 10.
This is the game story from The Daily Tar Heel from March 10, 1980, by staff writer Reid Tuvim:
DENTON, Tex.—The folks in this part of the country are fond of telling Aggie jokes, like How many Aggies does it take to screw in a light bulb? and the such.
But the North Carolina Tar Heels found playing Texas A&M not very funny Sunday afternoon when the Aggies knocked UNC out of the NCAA Tournament with a 78-61 double overtime win.
This is the third straight year Carolina has been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, and the loss keeps the five seniors Dave Colescott, Mike O’Koren, John Virgil, Jeff Wolf and Rich Yonakor from going out the way they came in with a trip to the Final Four.
“(I feel) empty,” a composed Virgil said in the locker room. “Three straight years we’ve come into the tournament and just couldn’t get off the ground.
“We were strong mentally, we said, No way the same thing would happen,'” said Virgil, who scored 11 points. “But it’s been a great four years.”
“(Losing the past two years) was in the back of our minds,” said forward Al Wood, high scorer for Carolina with 26 points. “We had real high hopes at the beginning of the season.
“We’d get things going for a while and then something went wrong. That was the way it was the whole season.”
That was the story of this game, also. Neither team had things going in the first half, with the Aggies leading 30-29 at intermission.
“We were happy to be down only one at halftime,” said O’Koren, who also scored 11 points.
Carolina went on top immediately in the second half when Wood hit a short jumper to make it 31-30. With just more than 16 minutes left, the Heels went to Four Corners, up 36-35. It was an almost disastrous decision. The Aggies went on to outscore UNC 16-2, over the next 8 1/2 minutes to build a 51-38 lead with only 7:25 left.
But Carolina fought back to tie at 53-53 on Wood’s 18-foot jumper with 1:50 remaining. UNC regained possession and went back to Four Corners with 1:10 left, but the Heels’ Jimmy Black missed a long shot at the buzzer.
The Aggies got the tip-off in the first overtime, but UNC got the ball back and went into the Four Corners. Carolina ran the clock down until, with 1:15 left. Black missed a lay-up. A&M held the ball for the final shot, but missed in the waning seconds and the score stood 53-53 after the first extra period.
In the second overtime, the Heels got good shots but watched most of them bound into the hands of Aggie rebounders. The last two minutes of the game were spent watching the Aggies parade to the foul line to widen the final margin.
“I though we had pretty good percentage shots,” Virgil said, “But they didn’t fall. When you’re down and get only one shot, you’re in trouble.”
O’Koren agreed, saying, “I thought we were playing good fundamental ball, but the shots weren’t falling. We really didn’t get going.”
Carolina’s move to go into the Four Corners so early in the second half was dictated primarily by the sticky 3-2 zone defense the Aggies played against Carolina for the major part of the game.
“They brought a bigger guy out in the middle and they really packed it in,” O’Koren said.
Virgil was confident that the move would salt the game away for Carolina. “I thought the game was ours at that point. We all feel confident in the Four Corners.”
Texas A&M only hit on two of 10 first half free throws, but were 28 of 38 from the line in the second half and the overtimes. Carolina was whistled for 36 fouls in the contest. O’Koren, in his last game as a Tar Heel, was a key figure in the second-half rally that got Carolina back into the game. O’Koren also had 18 rebounds for Carolina.
“It was a great disappointment,” said O’Koren, “I’ll think about this for a while, but life will go on.”
It was a long plane ride back to Greensboro from Denton for the Carolina players Sunday night. And you can bet that no one but no one was telling any Aggie jokes.