Significant games can be great, and great games can be significant, but they don’t always overlap — far from it. The 1982 NCAA Tournament national championship game (North Carolina 63, Georgetown 62) is quite possibly the greatest basketball game Dean Smith ever coached in, and it’s on the short list of the most significant games graced by the icon’s presence on a bench. However, when you look at the nine other selections on this list, you’re not going to consistently see great games.
These 10 contests were hugely influential in shaping college basketball and American basketball — mostly at the University of North Carolina, yes, but also for the other coaches and programs whose histories intersected with the Tar Heels’ journey through the pages of time.
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10 – 1994 NCAA TOURNAMENT SECOND ROUND:
BOSTON COLLEGE 75, NORTH CAROLINA 72
Dean Smith had just won his second national title in 1993, so on one level, a loss the next year in the NCAA tournament shouldn’t seem like a big deal. However, this loss came before the Sweet 16, marking the end of one of the great streaks in American sports: 13 straight Sweet 16s for Smith and North Carolina.
Sports fans of a certain age remember a Cleveland Indian third baseman named Ken Keltner, who stopped Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak with slick fielding on one day in 1941. On a March afternoon in Landover, Maryland, in 1994, Jim O’Brien and Boston College stopped Dean’s 13-year run as a Sweet 16 team.
Before 1975, the NCAA tournament never fielded more than 25 teams, because power conferences did not allow at-large teams. Schools had to win their regular-season or conference tournament titles in order to make the NCAA field. It was only after the 1974 ACC Tournament final between North Carolina State and Maryland — a classic contest in which the loser (Maryland) failed to earn an NCAA berth — that the Big Dance began to welcome at-large teams and expand to 32 teams. This embrace of expansion continued through 1985, when the NCAA tournament became a 64-team event.
Why is this background detail relevant? Most of this 13-year Sweet 16 streak encompassed the era of the 64-team field, making it genuinely impressive that North Carolina remained that consistent in March — though not typically a Final Four team over the length of that same streak. It was a thunderbolt, truly one of the great upsets in college basketball history, when Boston College won this game in 1994.
One other thing this result did: It denied North Carolina the chance to repeat — something many experts thought would happen — after archrival Duke had in fact won back-to-back titles in 1991 and 1992.
Yes, this game really was that significant.
9 – 1968 NCAA TOURNAMENT NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME:
UCLA 78, NORTH CAROLINA 55
This game was significant more for a North Carolina opponent than for Smith and his own program. UCLA’s dynasty truly began to take off with the second of seven straight titles under John Wooden. If 1967 was an isolated title, the following season let the college basketball world know that the Bruins were a truly entrenched power.
The game was significant from North Carolina’s perspective in that it was Smith’s first national title game. This game would foil and frustrate Smith three times before he finally broke through, magnifying how hard it is to win even one national title in a single-elimination tournament.
8 – 1991 NCAA TOURNAMENT EAST REGIONAL FINAL:
NORTH CAROLINA 75, TEMPLE 72
This might also rate as a curious selection, but after reading the explanation, let’s see what you think:
Though always a Sweet 16 team in the years between 1982 and 1991, North Carolina had not made a Final Four since its national title season in ’82. This was the East Regional final game that sent the Tar Heels back to college basketball’s showcase event. It was a massive relief for the program, and it ushered in the final immensely fruitful period of Smith’s career. North Carolina made four Final Fours from 1991 through 1997 under Smith. His ability to win and recruit at the highest level near the end of his 36-year run in Chapel Hill serves as a final, shining testament to his greatness as a tactician and people person. He related to the modern athlete and to a form of college basketball which was very different from the non-shot-clock, non-three-point-shot game which ceased to exist once the 1985-1986 season began.
This game is also significant because it marked one of several instances in which Temple’s John Chaney, one of the greatest coaches never to make a single Final Four, fell just short of the prize his career deserved.
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Al McGuire winning a national title in his last game as a coach certainly rated as a beautiful and memorable moment in college basketball history… but few losses weighed on Dean Smith more than that one in 1977. Smith’s North Carolina teams then crashed out of the NCAA tournament early in 1978, 1979, and 1980. This made his 1981 and 1982 seasons hugely important within the larger course of his career.
7 – 1977 NCAA TOURNAMENT NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME:
MARQUETTE 67, NORTH CAROLINA 59
This is an example of a game that is significant for its winner and its loser in relatively equal measure. This was Al McGuire’s last game before he formed the greatest college basketball announcing team of all time, with Dick Enberg and Billy Packer for NBC. McGuire’s tearful victory is etched in the mind’s eye as one of college basketball’s most poignant moments. Yet, this game also stands out as a contest in which Smith’s four-corners offense backfired on him. The stinging pain of criticism lingered with Smith, and in subsequent years, North Carolina endured one of its more difficult periods of a generally successful era. The failures of the late 1970s, though, made the 1982 national title that much more redemptive a moment for a coach and his program.
6 – 1981 NCAA TOURNAMENT NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME:
INDIANA 63, NORTH CAROLINA 50
The significance of this game will vary, perhaps more than any other one on this list. Older fans would be able to tell you why: President Ronald Reagan had been shot earlier that day, calling to mind still-fresh national wounds from the assassinations of 1968 and the first Kennedy assassination in 1963. There was plenty of discussion about whether this game should have been played on Monday night or not.
It’s safe to say that Smith never coached a game under more unusual circumstances than this. Perhaps you’d discount the importance of this game precisely because something far more important was taking place in the country. On the other hand, this was one of two games — the 1984 East Regional semifinal being the other — in which Bob Knight, another giant of the coaching profession, got the better of Smith in high-stakes March poker. As great as Smith was, there’s an argument to be made that Bob Knight was better as a coach. It’s based on those two wins from the first half of the 1980s.
5 – 1976 SUMMER OLYMPIC GOLD MEDAL BASKETBALL GAME:
UNITED STATES 95, YUGOSLAVIA 74
The searing pain of Munich never went away for U.S.A. Basketball — it never will, either.
This victory four years later in Montreal, though, marked a clear and decisive restoration for the United States and its basketball brand on the global stage. Smith authored this redemptive moment in American hoops history.
4 – 1967 ACC TOURNAMENT QUARTERFINAL:
NORTH CAROLINA 56, NORTH CAROLINA STATE 53
Until 1975, ACC teams had to win the conference tournament to make the NCAA tournament. Therefore, in order for Smith to make his first Final Four at North Carolina, he had to win the ACC tournament. That detail alone tells you why an ACC quarterfinal became more significant than you might realize — quarterfinals today are important for seed lines and bubble-team inclusion, but not nearly as important as they were back in the sixties.
Here’s the deeper story behind this game, however: The first 13 ACC tournaments were held at Reynolds Coliseum, home of the North Carolina State Wolfpack. Today’s generations of ACC fans recognize Greensboro as the normal site for the ACC tournament, but 1967 was the first year of the Greensboro era. With N.C. State having been the only prior host of the tournament, there was an extra bit of psychological pressure on North Carolina’s shoulders, since the Tar Heels knew that they were finally playing the Wolfpack outside of Raleigh.
This turned out to be North Carolina’s closest shave in the 1967 ACC Tournament. The Heels made the NCAAs, reached their first Smith-era Final Four, and never looked back.
3 – 1990 NCAA TOURNAMENT SECOND ROUND:
NORTH CAROLINA 79, OKLAHOMA 77
One of the great streaks in the history of college basketball — 13 straight Sweet 16 appearances — would never have existed under Smith’s watch if this result had not occurred. North Carolina was the 8 seed, and an opponent — Oklahoma — was a No. 1 seed, marking a true reversal of roles relative to the larger sweep of college basketball history.
Yet, a last-second basket by future NBA pro — and world champion — Rick Fox carried the Tar Heels to an upset and the most improbable Sweet 16 appearance in this remarkable run from 1981 through 1993. The balance of the 1980s brought forth many frustrations for Smith and UNC, several times as a No. 1 seed. This time, UNC toppled a top seed and balanced out the scales a little bit.
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Dean Smith cut down the nets in New Orleans twice, not once. His first title came in 1982, but his Superdome sequel unfolded in 1993 against Michigan.
2 – 1993 NCAA TOURNAMENT NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME:
NORTH CAROLINA 77, MICHIGAN 71
The first championship is always the one you remember and cherish the most, but winning a second title enables you to know that you weren’t just a one-hit or one-season wonder. This is what happened to Smith’s career on the night Chris Webber called “The Timeout.”
1 – 1982 NCAA TOURNAMENT NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME:
NORTH CAROLINA 63, GEORGETOWN 62
The battle between the Tar Heels and John Thompson’s Hoyas — now a third of a century ago — featured several high-quality NBA players: Sleepy Floyd, Patrick Ewing, a fellow named Jordan, James Worthy, and Sam Perkins in particular. The show put on by the two teams represents one of college basketball’s best-played games… this under suffocating pressure in the Superdome, which hosted over 61,000 fans, a record crowd for a basketball game at the time.
The game was decided in an unforgettable two-pronged fashion — first by Michael Jordan’s jumper, then by Fred Brown’s wrong-way pass in the final five seconds — but more than that, it gave Smith the national title that had eluded him over the course of six previous Final Fours and three prior national title games.
The most significant game Dean Smith ever coached was very likely the best game he also coached as well.
