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After Wolfpack baseball got Covid’d out of the College World Series, there’s been a lot of talk about NC State stuff.
We talked about that already Saturday night - a virus isn’t NC State stuff, vaccines, no such thing as NC State stuff, etc.
But we feel bad for you guys so we thought we’d highlight perhaps the most magical NCAA run in history, as Jim Valvano’s Wolfpack ran through the NCAA field in 1983 to win the title over an amazing Houston squad.
NC State didn’t get too many breathers in this tournament. The Pack barely survived Pepperdine 69-67, beat UNLV by one, 71-70, then got a breather against Utah, winning 75-56 before knocking out Ralph Sampson’s Virginia, 63-62 to get to the Final Four.
In Albuquerque, NC State beat Georgia 67-60 and then Houston on Lorenzo Charles’ amazing last-second dunk, 54-52.
That’s a total of 32 points for the entire tournament which works out to an average of 5.2 ppg. However, if you toss out Utah, then it comes out to an average winning margin of 2.6.
And keep in mind that State was a good but hardly great team. The favorites were Virginia, St. John’s, Louisville and Houston, and in the semifinals, Houston amazed the world with its Phi Slamma Jamma attack, so much so that some of the Louisville players jumped up to check the replays.
Didn't matter. State won and entirely deserved it. No one even thought of NC State stuff until years later and now it’s time to think of NC State magic again.