NC State basketball rarely has non-conference game vs. defending champ

Playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference, NC State men’s basketball is no stranger to competing against the highest ranked, highest achieving and most decorated teams in the country. Multiple times through the years, the Wolfpack has hosted or played against defending national champions from North Carolina, Duke, Maryland or Virginia.

However, there have only been a few games since the inception of the NCAA tournament in 1939 in which NC State has faced a non-conference opponent that is the reigning national champion.

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That will be the case next Wednesday when head coach Kevin Keatts and his revamped and undefeated squad faces Kansas, which won its fourth NCAA title in March by beating North Carolina in New Orleans.

The Wolfpack and Jayhawks will square off at noon in the Battle 4 Atlantis in Paradise Bay, Bahamas. (State hosts Elon in its fourth home game of the regular season Saturday at 1 p.m. in PNC Arena.)

Wednesday’s game will be the sixth overall time NC State has played a defending NCAA champion, dating back to head coach Everett Case’s second season at NC State when his reigning Southern Conference and newly renamed Wolfpack faced Holy Cross in the Sugar Bowl Classic in New Orleans.

The year before, Case’s inaugural team had beaten the Crusaders in Indianapolis, with freshman Bob Cousy of New York City sitting on the bench. It was the first of three consecutive losses for Holy Cross, which then went on to win 23 straight games, including a 58-47 victory over Oklahoma in the ninth-annual NCAA tournament.

In New Orleans, as part of Sugar Bowl Week 1947, Cousy was firmly entrenched as a sophomore starter for the Crusaders, just as much as sophomore Dick Dickey was a mainstay in the Wolfpack’s backcourt.

The game ended tied at 50 at the end of regulation, but Cousy, the ball-handling wizard from New York, finished the game with 21 points and led his team to a 56-51 victory over Case’s squad.

Eight years later, Case and his NC State basketball team faced another defending champion when La Salle came to visit at Reynolds Coliseum. All-American Tom Gola was the captain of head coach Ken Loeffler’s squad, while the Wolfpack was led by junior Vic Molodet.

Before the game, Loeffler claimed his team had never lost to a team playing zone defense, which was just enough reason for Case to have his team play a 2-1-2 zone throughout the game.

When the Wolfpack won 76-73, Loeffler was furious with official Phil Fox. The coach was so mad he walked out the front door of Reynolds and then followed the railroad tracks to his team’s downtown hotel.

Afterwards, La Salle terminated its annual home-and-home series with Case’s Wolfpack.

The third and fourth games were against the most defending of all the champions: John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins, which had won seven straight national titles before the 1973-74 season. The Bruins captured the made-for-television game against David Thompson, Tommy Burleson, Monte Towe and the gang in St. Louis in the third game of the campaign, but NC State came back at the end of the season to beat Wooden’s team that featured Bill Walton and Keith Wilkes in double-overtime in the NCAA Tournament semifinals.

Two days later, Norm Sloan’s Wolfpack won the school’s first team title in any sport.

NC State, under the guidance of head coach Jim Valvano, lost to defending champion Louisville in 1987, a year after handing the Cardinals their final loss of the 1985-86 season in Reynolds Coliseum. The Cards then won the rest of their games to claim their second of three national titles.

Finally, Herb Sendek’s 2005 team defeated defending champion Connecticut in the second round of the NCAA Tournament in Worcester, Massachusetts, the game in which senior Julius Hodge famously scored a layup over the top of Huskies forward Ed Nelson, the player who beat out Hodge for the 2002 ACC Freshman of the Year when he was in his first season at Georgia Tech before transferring to UConn.

Hodge did a one-man storm of the court after the 65-62 victory, while Sendek celebrated his last NCAA Tournament victory with NC State basketball.

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at [email protected].