“RHODY GETS RAMMED” and “DREAM SEASON ON THE BANKS”

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732. DUKE BLUE DEVILS VS RHODE ISLAND RAMS

NCAA TOURNAMENT

EAST REGIONAL SEMIFINAL

MARCH 24, 1988

BRENDAN BYRNE ARENA

QUALITY OF PLAY—7.27

DRAMA—7.44

STAR POWER—7.46

CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—8.25

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—7.19

LOCAL IMPACT—6.82

TOTAL: 44.43

“RHODY GETS RAMMED”

The University of Rhode Island Rams hoops team in 1988 was coached by “Turnaround Tom” Penders, who was just beginning to build his reputation as a quick builder of programs. Born along the Housatonic River in Connecticut, Penders played hoops at UConn before becoming a familiar figure in mini-major NYC coaching, working at Columbia and Fordham before taking the job with URI in 1986.

By ’88 Turnaround Tom had the unfancied cagers from the Biggest Little State in the Union in the NCAA Tournament, coming in second place in the Atlantic Ten behind Temple but earning an at-large bid as an 11-seed with 25-6 record. They were paced by seniors Tom Garrick and Carlton “Silk” Owens, who formed an elite veteran backcourt, the key to any long tourney run. With Kenny Green, they also had a strong rim protector. But like most mid-majors they weren’t deep.

Still, Garrick and Owens led the Rams past #6 Missouri in the first round, with Garrick somehow scoring 29 points even though he started 1-10 from the field. Silk chipped in with 24 in the upset.

In the round of 32 Rhode Island was responsible for one of the more crushing losses in my lifetime, when the Rams upset my #3 Syracuse Orangemen behind the shooting of Garrick, who had 28 points. Garrick’s father was blind but was at the Smith Center in Chapel Hill to “watch” the game, and the CBS cameras cut to him seemingly after every URI basket. I had an unhealthy and ridiculous animus toward the blind for several years after that…

With the win Rhode Island broke the school record for victories in a season (28), and advanced to challenge the two-seed in the East, Duke. The Blue Devils were at that point still just beginning to rev up into their status as an annual powerhouse under Coach K, Mike Krzyzewski. They were led by superstar forward Danny Ferry (“One of the dirtiest players we ever played against” according to Owens), and rolled ten deep with quality players. URI would have to counter with grit.

“They’re going to have to drag us off the floor!” Penders screamed at his players before the game, held on Thursday night, March 24, 1988, at the East regional site in the Meadowlands. The NYC-area would eventually become a Duke stronghold in tournament play, but for this one the crowd mainly sided with the Rams, hoping for the big upset.

“Rhody" usually ran teams up and down to win, but it was hobbled early when the refs called three early fouls on Garrick. “How in the world can you call three quick fouls on the best player?” Owens asked, rhetorically, in what would become a regular refrain about Duke getting the break from the whistle. Penders left him in the game out of necessity. “Tom’s smart enough to play with three fouls,” he said. “And frankly, we were in danger of letting the game get away from us. It was a calculated risk.”

Indeed, URI was quickly down 18-5, Duke was playing slow and easy (the shot clock was 45 seconds long in those days) and running through Ferry, who was seeking to get Green in foul trouble as well. But a turnaround began when the two bigs sparred briefly over a loose ball, with Green yapping at Ferry, and URI responded by rallying to take a brief lead before Duke got a late hoop to take a 38-37 halftime lead.

The physical play ratcheted up in the second half. Green and Ferry nearly came to blows while rasslin’ for a rebound midway through the half. “We went for it and then the next thing I knew he was on top of me,” said Ferry. “After that, I don’t remember…It was a hard game.”

“They did a lot of stuff to us,” said Green simply.

The key sequence came with Duke ahead by three with four minutes left. The Devils came up with a pair of offensive rebounds to reset the shot clock in order to melt the game. Then point guard Quin Snyder, now coaching the Atlanta Hawks, dimed a perfect bounce pass to Robert Brickey, who jammed one home for a 66-61 lead with two minutes to go.

URI rallied, and a late dunk by Green cut it back to two. But Duke did what devilish teams do—make their free throws late. They kept their noses in front into the dying seconds, with Brickey converting a critical one-and-one with 13 seconds left to make it 73-69. Silk Owens canned a three with seven seconds left to cut it to a one-point game, but with URI out of timeouts Duke was able to play keep away and run out the clock.

At the buzzer, players from both teams sprawled to the floor, spent with exhaustion, anguish and relief.

“It was tough out there,” said a relieved Coach K. “It was emotional.”

Duke slipped away with a 73-72 win. Rhody’s dream season was over.

AFTERMATH:

Duke reached the Final Four after beating Temple in the regional final, but in Kansas City they had the misfortune of facing Danny Manning and Kansas. Backed by a hugely partisan home crowd Danny and the Miracles took out the Devils by seven, fronted by Manning’s 25 points and ten rebounds. KU then bested Oklahoma to win the championship.

Penders parlayed his run to the brink of the Elite Eight into accepting a rich contract at Texas, where he had a successful if controversial career. He also coached at GW and Houston, taking all to the tournament. He is one of only three coaches to reach the Sweet Sixteen three times with double-digit seeds, including those ’88 Rams. Ten years later, the 1998 Rams went one round better, reaching the Elite Eight behind another great senior backcourt, Cuttino Mobley and Tyson Wheeler, before falling to Stanford.

WHAT THEY SAID:

“Duke did what it had to do. No more, no less…the Blue Devils advanced without a trace of showmanship or a hint of spontaneity. Yawn if you want, but Duke is a real threat.”

—Filip Bondy, New York Daily News

FURTHER READING:

Runnin’ Rams by William Woodward

VIDEO:

731. RUTGERS SCARLET KNIGHTS VS ST. BONAVENTURE BONNIES

MARCH 1, 1976

COLLEGE AVENUE GYMNASIUM

QUALITY OF PLAY—7.64

DRAMA—7.75

STAR POWER—6.45

CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—8.00

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—7.90

LOCAL IMPACT—6.66

TOTAL: 44.44

“DREAM SEASON ON THE BANKS”

Rutgers University has been playing basketball in New Brunswick, New Jersey, since the dawn of the 20th Century (Rutgers lost their first-ever game to NYU 38-16 back in ’06—who can forget that one?). Despite the lengthy experience, Rutgers hoops has had little success over the years. Other than a 1967 run to the NIT semifinals, the Scarlet Knights have been a virtual non-entity in postseason play, despite the proximity to the talent pool in NYC and playing at the Division I level for all that time. You’d think they’d have fallen into a decent team or two occasionally over the years, even by accident, but it never seems to happen. Even the 2024-25 squad, which somehow (“somehow” meaning “with boatloads of cash”) enticed a pair of NBA lottery picks (Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper) to Jersey, couldn’t finish over .500.

But there was one glorious exception to this epoch of hardwood futility. It came in the Bicentennial winter of 1976, when the spirit of excellent basketball at last found its way to the banks of the Piscataway River.

The key element was a smooth-shooting swingman, a Brooklyn boy named Phil “The Thrill” Sellers, a prep star from Jefferson High in East New York who couldn’t get into Notre Dame due to poor grades. Instead, he spent a year at a Rutgers adjunct called Livingston College, where he was convinced to stay in New Brunswick by a Scarlet Knights assistant coach named Dick Vitale. Sellers had an immediate impact in 1973, leading the Knights to the NIT, and in 1975 was third-team All-American, averaging 23 points per game, as Rutgers made its first-ever NCAA tournament appearance. He won the Haggerty Award as the best player in the NYC area, a triumph he would repeat in ’76.

With Sellers now a senior, the Knights had high hopes to build upon the previous season’s toe-dip into national prominence. Dickie V. was gone to take over Detroit Mercy’s program, but Rutgers head coach Tom Young did a superb job without the PTPer (Prime Time Paisan) on his bench.

“Tom Young turned us boys into young men and I give Tom a lot of credit,” Sellers said.

Young installed a wide-open, high-octane full-court press attack that was anathema in the era of no three-point line, no shot clock, and no dunking. Nevertheless, the Knights, who also featured “Fast Eddie” Jordan and Mike “Dip” Dabney, a top recruit out of the Garden State, topped 100 points 11 times, averaged 93 points per game, and ran most opponents out of the College Avenue Gym, a 2800-seat pit known as the “Barn.”

“The year before, we had a good year and lost in the first round of the N.C.A.A.s to Louisville,” Young recalled to the Times in 2015. “We played a pretty good game, so we knew going into the season we were going to be pretty good. But no one envisioned the scenario of going undefeated.”

Well, not no one. A student named Alan Venook, who covered the team for the Daily Targum student paper, predicted a special year ahead. “This could be an undefeated season,” he wrote.

Amazingly enough, he was right.

An early season romp over ranked Boston College in Chestnut Hill served notice the Knights were to be reckoned with in the brand new ECAC Metro conference. Ten wins before the calendar flipped to 1976 built the buzz, and a January scalding of Fordham built it louder.

“We never really got caught up in the undefeated season stuff, because we just expected to win,” said Mark Conlin, a backup point guard. “Night after night, we would slay people.”

The Barn got so crowded and so loud that games had to be stopped periodically to clean the court of paint chips that fell from the ceiling. Opponent after opponent fell to the relentless Rutgers attack. A pair of games had to be moved to Madison Square Garden to accommodate interest in the Knights. The Rutgers players didn’t fit the mold of the average buzz-cut wearing hoopsters of the era. These guys sported Afros and long beards, and talked openly about late nights and epic beer consumption. They were hard not to fall in love with.

Come March, Rutgers was 25-0 and ranked third in the country, with one last regular season game left. The opponent on Monday night, March 1, 1976, at the Barn was St. Bonaventure, another modest program that had recently surged into the national picture behind big man Bob Lanier. The Bonnies had regressed since their seismic run to the 1970 Final Four, but were still strong, led by forward Greg Sanders, who would be drafted by the Knicks.

The first half was tight, with the Bonnies playing inspired ball, hitting tough shots, clamping down on the RU run game, and holding a 39-37 lead at the break. They showed they could be patient and fluster Rutgers’ preference for high-tempo. Sanders and power forward Essie Hollis were proving a handful, especially Hollis, who would finish with 15 points and 21 rebounds, plus four blocks, in a dominant showing in the paint.

“They gave us a hell of a time off the boards,” Young said.

A back and forth contest thrilled the overflow crowd in the second half. Rutgers by six. Bonnies by five. Tied seven times. Then St. Bonaventure went on a 7-0 run with six minutes left. Things were looking grim for the undefeated season. “We had to dig down to our toes and come up with that second wind,” Jordan said.

The stars got the Knights back. Dip Dabney set up a bucket, and drove to score himself, and suddenly it was a one-point game. Dabney then fed the Thrill with a dime off a blocked shot for two and the lead as the Barn went ballistic. The lead exchanged hands right down to the last minute. A Sellers hoop made it 80-79, Knights, giving him 25 points for the game. A free throw tied it, and Rutgers frosh Abdel Anderson converted a key one-and-one to put Rutgers back on top.

With 40 seconds to go it was still 82-80. The Knights tried to run clock, but Dabney had his pocket picked by Bonnies guard Jim Baron, who drove in for the apparent tying layup. However, ref Norm Van Arsdale, a graduate of nearby New Brunswick High, had called Baron for a foul, his whistle drowned out by the unholy din inside the Barn. Dabney made both free throws, giving him 19 points, and it was 84-80.

Was he fouled? “You don’t really expect me to say I wasn’t, do you?" Dabney said after the game.

(EDITOR’S NOTE—It was definitely not a foul)

Rutgers added a late free throw and the Bonnies missed their desperation shots. Rutgers won 85-80. The Barn shook, and the paint chips fell like confetti. Incredibly, the Knights had done it—a perfect 26-0 regular season.

“We almost didn’t have this celebration,” said a relieved Young. “That’s as close as we’ve come to losing all year.”

The students stormed the floor, hung from the baskets even as they were being elevated back up to the ceiling, and then let out their elation by rampaging onto College Avenue, and celebrating long into the night. They swamped the team bus and climbed atop buildings, leaving the players to feel “like rock stars.”

Later that night they rang the bell at Old Queens, the ancient building at the heart of campus, a ritual usually reserved for occasions like V-E Day. For Rutgers basketball, it was every bit as important an event.

AFTERMATH:

Rutgers won the ECAC Metro tournament championship with a tight win over St. Johns to run its record to 28-0, and were seeded second in the East region for the NCAA tournament. The Scarlet Knights slipped past Princeton by a single point in a classic held in Greensboro, NC, then whipped UConn and VMI to reach the Final Four, still unbeaten. They were one of two undefeated teams to reach Philadelphia—Indiana being the other. In the semis, Michigan at last took the Knights out of their rhythm and squashed them, 86-70. Rutgers also lost the third-place game, to UCLA, to finish 31-2, by far their best season ever. Indiana completed the run to the title, and remain the last team to ever win the NCAA championship with an undefeated record.

Phil Sellers is still the all-time leading scorer at Rutgers. His #12 is one of just three jerseys retired by Rutgers. He passed away late in 2023 to a stroke.

WHAT THEY SAID:

“26-0. Think of it. 26 teams came up against the Magnificent Flying Machine, and one by one, Rutgers beat ‘em, destroyed ‘em, outslicked ‘em, outclassed ‘em. It took three months, a lot of lucky breaks, and a touch of heaven. But Rutgers did it. Dead solid perfect.”

—Dave Hirshey, New York Daily News

FURTHER READING:

“Rutgers, That Other Unbeaten Team in the Final Four” by Brendan Prunty, The New York Times

VIDEO: