Can the 24-0 Ohio State Buckeyes be the first team since 1975-76 to win 'em all?
Bobby Knight stood before a Senior Day crowd at Indiana University's Assembly Hall in 1976 and made a prediction.
"Take a good look at these kids," he said, "because you're never going to see the likes of them again."
The coach meant the talent, drive and unity of a senior class amid a 32-0 season.
It's been a long time -- as evidenced by Indiana coach Bobby's Knight's plaid jacket -- since a men's basketball team won the NCAA Tournament with a perfect record. Knight and players Scott May, center, and Quinn Buckner helped the Hoosiers do it in 1976.
In retrospect, Knight also foreshadowed the next 35 years of college basketball. His 1975-76 Hoosiers were the most recent Division I team to go undefeated.
No one has done it since.
This season, Ohio State is 24-0 and ranked No. 1 in the nation heading into a game at No. 13 Wisconsin on Saturday afternoon. The Buckeyes' run stirs memories of that special Indiana season, and conjecture about whether a team will ever go unbeaten again.
"This one could make it," said Billy Packer, who called college basketball games on television for nearly 40 years.
"Could," he said, because the Badgers are especially tough at home; and, Packer says, the top-ranked Buckeyes would likely have to beat two teams from the rugged Big East Conference in the NCAA Tournament.
Knight's Indiana team survived a brutal schedule: powers UCLA and St. John twice, Kentucky, Notre Dame, Marquette and Big Ten rival Michigan three times, including the NCAA championship game.
As difficult as it is to go unbeaten in any era, the consensus is the feat is harder today.
•The depth of talent is more spread across the board, said Tom Abernethy, a senior forward on that record-setting Indiana team. Abernethy, who founded and runs a basketball academy near Indianapolis, said that when he played, the nation's best players were concentrated on maybe a dozen rosters. Now, with greater parity, even smaller, so-called "midmajor" schools are able to pull off an upset on any given night.
•Then there's the seemingly endless media attention and sports talk on cable television, the Internet and radio -- not to mention the chatter posted on Twitter and Facebook by the players themselves -- that didn't exist or wasn't nearly as fierce in the '70s.
"That type of scrutiny and pressure, if you will," said CBS college basketball analyst Clark Kellogg, ". . . I think adds to the difficulty because that can be a major distraction."
As it was, Knight shielded his players from the media. Interview requests were channeled through him.
"He just protected us," said Quinn Buckner, Knight's point guard and captain. "That was by design."
•And then there's the other big distraction -- the siren called the NBA. Today's best college players stick around for a season, or maybe two, before chasing the big paycheck.
While Packer predicted another team could go undefeated someday, he said today's rosters don't come close in talent. The 1975-76 Alabama team that Indiana edged in the regional semifinals, for instance, featured no fewer than four future NBA players.
The undefeated Indiana team was built on essentially one unbelievably gifted recruiting class that developed together -- seniors Buckner, Abernethy, Sandusky's Scott May and Bobby Wilkerson, plus junior Kent Benson at center.
All but Abernethy (a third-round pick) were selected in the first round of the 1976 NBA Draft. And Benson was chosen first overall the following year. All played in the NBA at least five seasons.
So what does it take to run the table?
Retired Michigan coach Johnny Orr pondered the question. His team lost to Indiana three times that season, including the NCAA title game.
"You gotta be lucky. You gotta be damn good," he said. "They were both, boy."
That, and steadfast to win. Heartbreak will do that to a team.
The 1974-75 IU team was one that some still say was even better -- deeper, with more pure shooters. But May, a junior forward and one of the team's top scorers, broke his left forearm late in the season, forcing Knight to adjust the lineup and his substitutions.
Without May at full strength, No. 2 Kentucky upset unbeaten and top-ranked Indiana, 92-90, in the 1975 NCAA Tournament regional finals. The 31-1 finish was an open wound that took an entire season to heal.
"We made a commitment that day, that night after the game, we were never going to lose another game," said Wilkerson, who now runs an apparel and water manufacturing firm in the Washington, D.C., area.
The returning starters stayed on campus through the summer, playing basketball.
"We always played together," Wilkerson said. "We never played against each other."
Playing and hanging out together brought them even closer, on and off the court. By the time they were seniors, they knew each other so well that Buckner and Wilkerson would switch players on defense without so much as a word. Wilkerson, who had stamina to burn, would see Buckner bent over, grabbing his shorts to catch his breath, and immediately take Buckner's man.
They also bought into Knight's concept of team and accepted their roles.
Buckner, a two-time Illinois state champion in high school, and Wilkerson, a 6-7 guard and the team's most athletic player, could easily have been scoring machines. But neither averaged double figures in college. Buckner, now a television analyst and communications executive with the Indiana Pacers, ran the floor. Wilkerson covered the opponent's best guard and could play any position when needed.
"I think Bobby [Wilkerson] had to sacrifice the most," Buckner said. "We just had to keep talking about how it was in the best interest of the team."
Indiana held the No. 1 ranking wire to wire, meaning the Hoosiers played week in and week out with a target on their back. The seniors from that team say they never felt pressure, even as the victories mounted, because of their experience the previous season.
"We had been through it," said May, who now owns and manages about 1,500 apartments near the Indiana campus. "We knew what it was like to be tested, so it didn't really bother us."
They also say Knight (who couldn't be reached for this story) simply didn't allow them to lose focus or take an opponent lightly. In fact, Ohio State, Knight's alma mater, was a miserable 6-20 (2-16 in the Big Ten) that season, but gave Indiana fits in a 66-64 conference-opening loss at St. John Arena in Columbus.
"If coach Knight caught you drifting off, he'd get on you," Buckner said. "He'd bring you right back down to earth, and it wasn't always pleasant, either."
And, yes, they were lucky.
Although Wilkerson suffered a concussion early in the NCAA championship game, Indiana stayed relatively injury-free that season. The Hoosiers also survived several scares, including overtime wins over Kentucky in the season's fourth game and in the second meeting with Michigan. In that one, Benson went up for a rebound and the ball bounced off his hand and into the basket to tie the game at the buzzer.
"They won as much on discipline, dedication and competitiveness as anything else," said retired basketball coach Bob Weltlitch, an Ohio State grad and one of Knight's Indiana assistants.
Does Ohio State have enough going for it to stay perfect?
Kellogg said he's leaning toward "no," but he thinks the Buckeyes, his former college team, have a shot at escaping the Big Ten unbeaten, not just because of talent, but team harmony.
"They have the intangibles," he said. "They're resilient, they're confident in one another and they seem to take an air of, 'We can get it done on the road.' "
A road to perfection that stops next in Madison, Wisconsin.
