0 comments by Matt Zemek on 2/11/2015
At one point, the flood of sports giants leaving us wasn’t tilted to one particular sport. Ernie Banks, Billy Casper, Dean Smith — they left large marks on three separate theaters of competition. Now, though, college basketball has lost two larger-than-life figures in less than a week’s time. Following Dean Smith’s passage late Saturday, UNLV […]
Roy Williams and Dean Smith at the 1991 Final Four in Indianapolis (with Jim Delany being way too happy about the moment in the background).
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 2/10/2015
In terms of the consistency, depth and height of coaching achievements, it’s very hard to put Dean Edwards Smith above John Wooden or Mike Krzyzewski on any all-time list in college basketball. Wooden’s championships and Coach K’s combination of national titles with Final Four appearances would almost certainly place them above Smith — maybe not […]
0 comments by Mike Ferguson
Conference play has surpassed the midway point and the NCAA tournament is just more than a month away. The usual suspects like Duke, Kentucky, Louisville, Kansas and Arizona remain in line to contend for a national championship, but as always with March madness comes the aura of unpredictability. While few would be surprised if any […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
It’s a more common kind of task to identify a coach’s greatest games or a team’s most significant moments. However, what about the under-the-radar games which gave rise to a coach’s biggest achievements? For instance: North Carolina State could not have won the 1983 national title with that remarkable win over Houston had it not […]
0 comments by Ryan Palencer
Martin Luther King, Jr. Rosa Parks. Jackie Robinson. Dean Smith. While leading on the court, Dean Smith took an even more impactful leadership role in life as a civil rights leader in a newly desegregated South in the 1960s. Many know that Smith brought in the ACC’s first African-American player in Charlie Scott. What is […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 2/9/2015
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 […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
On Friday, the story hit: The postseason NIT will experiment with a 30-second shot clock, down from the current 35-second clock. It’s also true that the restricted area underneath the basket (governing block-charge calls) will be expanded from three to four feet, but the shot clock is rightly seen as the much bigger story. How […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 2/8/2015
For many Americans, Dean Smith is best known as the man who coached Michael Jordan in college. Smith is, quite simply, the man who mentored one of America’s two greatest team-sport athletes from the 20th century, Babe Ruth being the other. (Muhammad Ali, of course, didn’t play a team sport.) Dean Smith also won 879 […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
Today — Sunday, February 8, 2015 — the men and women who covered North Carolina basketball as beat writers and reporters are remembering Dean Edwards Smith, who died Saturday night at the age of 83. The people who interviewed Dean Smith as part of their jobs, who traveled with him as North Carolina entrenched itself […]
0 comments by Ryan Palencer on 2/7/2015
John Thompson III was worried about the Georgetown students swarming the floor after the Hoyas’ January 15 win over Villanova. It turns out that the Wildcats were just as swarming on both sides of the ball on Saturday, exacting a measure of revenge on Georgetown. Villanova shot lights out from the perimeter, building a large […]
0 comments by Scott
Saturday, February 7, 2015, is a historic day for the ACC. For the first time in league history, there are two games featuring top-10 matchups on the same day. A lot of excitement and hype have visited these two twin occasions, Duke hosting Notre Dame and Virginia hosting Louisville. The Blue Devils were a rather […]
0 comments by Scott
Duke is currently crushing Notre Dame 60-40 midway through the second half. If you haven’t seen the game, the vine up top pretty much sums up how things have gone for the Fighting Irish. We’ll have more coverage of this game later today.
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 2/6/2015
Thursday night in college basketball, a number of exasperating teams stepped on the hardwood. Iowa is playing well this season, but that doesn’t mean the Hawkeyes don’t know how to toy with the emotions of their fan base. A penchant for blown second-half leads is the most central reason this season had been such a […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 2/5/2015
There’s an off-court aspect to yesterday’s big college basketball story, in which Syracuse announced a self-imposed postseason ban. In this space, however, we’ll address an on-court topic connected to Wednesday’s news. As a result of the Orange removing themselves from postseason play, the 2015 ACC Tournament will shrink from a 15-team field to a 14-team […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
There are two main angles to explore in the wake of Wednesday’s announcement that Syracuse men’s basketball program will not participate in any postseason event in 2015. In case you missed it, Syracuse self-imposed a postseason ban in response to an ongoing NCAA investigation into the program. Orange fans can rightly say that the NCAA’s constant, […]
