University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Hoosier Dome Hysteria
March 30, 2016 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
No matter what happens on Saturday night in Houston, it's almost impossible that it could be any weirder than what occurred in Indianapolis 25 years ago today.
Even before the ball was tipped that evening, it was one of the most intriguing Final Fours in history. The 1991 Final Four featured UNLV, which entered the game 34-0 and carrying the title of defending national champions. The Runnin' Rebels were loaded. Nationally, they were the centerpiece.
Remember the hype that accompanied Kentucky's almost undefeated season last year? Now imagine they had entered the Final Four as the defending champion, playing a rematch in the national semifinal against the team they throttled in the championship game the year before.
Jerry Tarkanian's team was not a national darling. On the way to the Hoosier Dome, I vividly remember having this discussion with my uncle:
Him: “Who are you going for in the second game?” It matched UNLV against Duke.
Me: “Are you kidding?”
Him: “I just don't think I can root for UNLV. They are everything that is wrong with college basketball.”
Me: “Yeah, but the other team is Duke.”
That settled it for me. Nationally, though, Duke wasn't yet the Duke we know today. In the UNLV game, for much of the country, they were the likable, plucky, underdog alternative to the Rebel behemoth.
For Carolina fans, though, that was the undercard. The Tar Heels faced Kansas in the day's first game. Pick your storyline: it was a senior-laden UNC team led by the core of King Rice, Pete Chilcutt, and Rick Fox, who had gotten Dean Smith back to the Final Four for the first time since 1982. There was also the prospect of an near-armageddon national title game against Duke, a team the Tar Heels had just beaten by 22 points in the ACC Tournament championship game three weeks earlier. Seriously, just imagine it: we were one game away from Carolina facing Duke for the national title.
And then there was the reunion with Kansas coach Roy Williams, who was in just his third season after getting the job with the Jayhawks while serving as Carolina's third assistant. Williams had done a tremendous job in Lawrence, but for most UNC fans, he was probably closer to being a calendar salesman and Dean Smith TV show tape delivery man than the Naismith Hall of Famer.
It was 1991, so every Kansas game wasn't televised. The number-one song in the country was Gloria Estefan's "Coming Out of the Dark" and we were only a month removed from C&C Music Factory "Gonna Make You Sweat," which you still hear at some games. The top movies of the year so far were "Home Alone" and "Silence of the Lambs." We probably thought we were awash in culture, but we didn't yet have blanket college basketball coverage. Kansas was that place Dean Smith went to school.
What became obvious very soon after the game began—with many fans in the Carolina section wearing white stickers with blue numbers that read “97.4,” a reference to Smith's graduation rate at Carolina—was that Williams had a very tough, competitive team. They didn't have stars, as KU's leading scorers were Adonis Jordan, Mark Randall and Richard Scott. But they were committed to playing Williams' style, and built a 43-34 halftime lead.
The Tar Heels, meanwhile, were enduring the type of dome shooting slump that also plagued them in 1995, 1997, 1998 and 2000. Fox had one of the worst shooting days of his career, hitting just 5-of-22 field goals and missing 13 shots in the second half alone. Hubert Davis kept Carolina in it with 25 points, mostly on silky jumpers, and George Lynch added 13. For the game, though, Smith's club hit just 38.4 percent from the field.
How frustrating a day was it? After Chilcutt picked up his third foul with 2:58 left in the first half, Smith collected an uncharacteristic technical foul from official Pete Pavia—it was the first technical called on a head coach in the Final Four in ten years.
That was the prelude that became relevant late in the game. Carolina trimmed the deficit to just 58-57 with seven minutes left, but Kansas fought back again, building a 76-71 lead with the ball with 35 seconds left. That's when Fox fouled out of the game, and Smith began to walk substitute Kenny Harris to the scorer's table. “How much time?” he asked Pavia, a reference to how long he had to make the substitution. Smith later admitted he was simply trying to ice the Kansas free throw shooter (this was before the days when every time a player receives five fouls, there's an impromptu team huddle at the bench).
Pavia's response was to call another technical foul—notching his fourth big-name ejection in the past year. Within the last 14 months, he had ejected John Thompson, Jim Calhoun and Billy Tubbs (earlier in the week in the NIT title game). With the Duke fans in the Hoosier Dome roaring, Smith left the court only after shaking hands with everyone on the Kansas bench, leaving an incensed Bill Guthridge to direct things on the UNC sideline.
The Jayhawks won, 79-73. Much of the postgame discussion focused on Smith's ejection, the third of his career and only the second ejection of a head coach in Final Four history (the first was Al McGuire in 1974). Within a couple of hours, the night had gotten even stranger, as Duke upset UNLV.
The night was not a total loss. Part of the 1991 team—including Lynch, Eric Montross, Derrick Phelps and Brian Reese—would return to the Final Four in 1993, and their initial experience was beneficial in propelling them to the national title.
