Sweet: Pack Men’s Hoops Still Going

In college athletics, there’s no particular relevance to historical stats or trends for current teams. Unless of course you can use them in your favor.

There’s not much to favor in the rivalry between NC State and Louisville, a pair of newly minted ACC foes who meet on Friday at 7:37 p.m. in the NCAA Championship’s Sweet 16 round in Syracuse, New York. (To watch the game with your fellow Wolfpack fans on campus, head over to the Talley Student Union on Friday evening.) It’s the second time in four years that the Wolfpack has advanced to a regional semifinal under fourth-year head coach Mark Gottfried.

The Wolfpack holds a slight edge, 9-8, in the infrequent series with the Cardinals, thanks to a 74-65 upset over the No. 9 Cards in Louisville on Valentine’s Day, though there were two times in history that the teams faced each other regularly. For three years prior to the formation of the ACC (1950-52), coaches Everett Case and Bernard “Peck” Hickman scheduled a trio of home-and-home matchups at newly opened Reynolds Coliseum and Louisville’s Jefferson County Armory.

And in the 1980s, legendary coaches Jim Valvano and Denny Crum played seven times over six consecutive years, at Reynolds and Freedom Hall. In 1986, the Wolfpack handed the Cards the last of seven losses that season, 76-64, in Raleigh in early February. Crum’s team won its next 17 games, including wins over UNC and Duke in the tournament, to take the second of the school’s three NCAA titles.

The Wolfpack has won three in a row in the series and four of the last five, dating back to the win in 1986.

So, as Gottfried and his team prepare to leave for the tournament’s second weekend, following victories over LSU and top-seeded Villanova in Pittsburgh in the first and second rounds, here are a few other nuggets to chew on.

• NC State has never lost a tournament game to Louisville. This will be the fourth time the two infrequent rivals have faced each other in a tournament game — though the other three were in-season, holiday events that weren’t exactly on the magnitude of March Madness. One of them, though, was awfully close: On Dec. 29, 1958, NC State trailed Louisville in the opening round of the greatest Dixie Classic tournament ever played. Led by All-American Don Goldstein, the Cardinals were up by six with less than two minutes to play, when State’s Dan Engelhardt led his team back to tie the game in the final moments. State won 67-61 in overtime, then went on to beat Cincinnati and its All-American Oscar Robertson and Michigan State and its All-American Johnny Green over the next two days to claim the holiday tournament title. The Wolfpack was ineligible for the tournament that year, but both Cincinnati and Louisville advanced to the Final Four. In 1978, guard Clyde Austin and forward Kendal “Tiny” Pinder led the Wolfpack to a win over Louisville in the 1978 Sea Wolf Classic in Anchorage, Alaska, with both contributing 15 points in the title game. Austin was named the tournament’s most valuable player. In 1987, Valvano took the Wolfpack to Honolulu, Hawaii, where it faced Louisville in the semifinals. A halftime pep talk by Valvano inspired his listless team, which beat the Cards 80-75 in the semis and then Arizona State the next night in the finals.

• The Wolfpack hasn’t won a Sweet 16 game since 1986, when Valvano led his team to a second consecutive berth in the Elite Eight with a 70-66 win over Iowa State in Kansas City. It’s been to the Sweet 16 three times since then, losing to Georgetown in the regional semifinals in East Rutherford, N.J., in 1989 (don’t even); to Wisconsin in Syracuse in 2005; and to Kansas in 2013 in St. Louis.

• This will be just the fourth time that two active ACC members have faced each other in the NCAA Tournament. Used to be, the NCAA mandated that two teams from the same conference couldn’t meet until the regional finals, but that rule was abandoned a few years back when the ACC expanded to include all 345 NCAA Division I basketball teams. Or something like that. “For years, the rule [for the selection committee] was that you couldn’t have two conference teams meet until the Elite Eight,” Wolfpack coach Mark Gottfried said Tuesday. “With the number of teams in each league now, you are going to end up with this situation more often. It can’t really be avoided. We are playing against a really good team that happens to be from our league. It’s part of the turf now in the megaconferences we have.” The other meetings were in 1981 when North Carolina beat Virginia in the national semifinals; in 1983 when Valvano’s Wolfpack beat Virginia in the West Region finals; and in 2002 when Duke beat Maryland in the national semifinals.

• This is NC State’s third trip to Syracuse’s Carrier Dome for the NCAA Tournament. In 1987, the ACC-champion Wolfpack lost to Florida, coached by NC State alum and former head coach Norm Sloan, in the first round of the tournament. In 2005, after beating defending national champion Connecticut to advance to the Sweet 16, the Wolfpack lost to Wisconsin in the East region semifinals.