Georgia’s first Big Dance could scarcely have gone better. The year was 1983, and the Bulldogs beat Virginia Commonwealth on James Banks’ basket (on which Lamar Heard might have been called for offensive goaltending but was not); then St. John’s, which had Chris Mullin and had just won the Big East tournament, and then, beggaring belief, the reigning NCAA titlist.
Near the end of the East Regional championship game, Georgia publicist Claude Felton turned to a deputy and said: “Are we really beating North Carolina to go to the Final Four?”
Yes indeed. Georgia beat the North Carolina of Dean Smith and Michael Jordan — and also Sam Perkins, who conceded before the game that he wasn’t sure of Georgia’s conference affiliation — and booked passage to Albuquerque, N.M.
Such a feat should have brought Hugh Durham’s program, which made its run the year after Dominique Wilkins left for the NBA, glory beyond measure. But Georgia’s saga was trumped by a better story. North Carolina State, as coached by Jim Valvano, dismissed the Bulldogs in a dull semifinal, and by the time the day’s second semi — the Houston-Louisville dunkathon — was complete, the SEC upstarts were rendered footnotes from some football school.
And not just by the folks who bore witness in The Pit. Back home, Georgia’s Final Four become the tree falling in the deserted forest. Home attendance dropped from 6,692 per game in 1982-83 to 6,429 in 1983-84. (But hey, the football team in Year 1 without Herschel would go 10-1-1 in 1983 and beat Texas in the Cotton Bowl!)
Georgia won one more NCAA tournament game under Durham, who was dismissed in March 1995. What should have been a program-changing run changed nothing. More than three decades later, Bulldogs basketball still struggles to dig a foothold in the sporting landscape.
Georgia Tech fared a bit better with its first Final Four excursion, which came in 1990 amid nine consecutive NCAA tournament appearances made by the Yellow Jackets under Bobby Cremins. That trip to Denver served as an affirmation, not an afterthought.
A second Final Four surge — in 2004 under Paul Hewitt, who succeeded Cremins in 2000 — included five hairbreadth victories and yielded a berth opposite Connecticut in the national championship game, but it brought little carry-over. Hewitt’s Jackets wouldn’t reach Round 3 of another NCAA, and the never-ending rollover contract he signed in April 2004 became an example of how not to reward sudden success.
So yes, since you asked, not all Final Four trips are created equal. Tech got good mileage from its first, less from its second. Georgia’s Final Four was all but forgotten the moment the defeated Bulldogs left the floor in Albuquerque.
About the Author
