IU

'76 IU vs. '15 Kentucky: Different paths to perfection

Zak Keefer
zak.keefer@indystar.com

Even after his team had delivered precisely what he'd demanded of them — utter perfection — Bob Knight never really let on he was entirely satisfied. Such was his nature. This group was so good, he reasoned, that measuring them against the best teams in college basketball that season seemed inadequate.

"You're not playing your opponent," he would drill them. "You're playing to be the best you can be."

Knight had made his ambitions clear the first day his 1975-76 Indiana Hoosiers met for practice. He told them, bluntly, that a Big Ten title was not enough. Even a national championship was not enough. This unit was good enough to win every game it played. That's what Knight expected. That's what Knight demanded.

"I don't think we ever achieved our ultimate potential in his mind," Tom Abernethy, a starting forward on that team, says now. "But we came pretty close."

The Hoosiers' version of pretty close — a flawless 32-0 campaign and a national title — has been the benchmark of college hoops ever since. Knight's Hoosier machine was a team without peer. What no one knew at the time: They'd have to wait four decades to find one.

Here comes mighty Kentucky, untouched at 38-0 this season but certainly tested (just ask Notre Dame). John Calipari's Wildcats will arrive in Indianapolis this week the first undefeated team to reach a Final Four since UNLV came to Indy in 1991. Duke spoiled the Rebels' bid for perfection that year in the national semifinal.

Thus, Knight's Hoosiers have stood for 39 seasons as college basketball's last unbeaten. Two wins and Kentucky will supplant them. They'll finish 40-0 for the first time in history. They'll cement their name — right next to the '76 Hoosiers — among the greatest ever assembled.

They are two teams who reigned in two distinct eras. The possibility of Kentucky's pursuit has swallowed college basketball since November; when Indiana ran the table, it was ho-hum. They became the fifth team to do it in 12 years.

The disparities start with the coaches and trickle down. Knight, of course, would rather lose than break a rule. A third of Calipari's Final Four appearances have been stripped by the NCAA, though he's never been found personally culpable.

In the 1970s, Knight's players didn't suit up for AAU teams. They didn't spend their summer months on campus (they had part-time jobs). They didn't even lift weights.

"Not ever," says Abernethy, who spent the summer before IU's perfect season working for the Indiana Bell Telephone Company. "My only goal was just to be in shape when practices started."

No more. Now high-level college basketball is a year-round gauntlet, documented daily by the likes of ESPN, digested on social media, debated without end. Knight never had to worry about agents trailing his players, or if they'd bolt early for the NBA. It was a simpler time. His players' minds remained fixed on the season and pleasing their combustible coach.

"There was no element of the pros whatsoever," says longtime Bloomington Herald-Times sportswriter Bob Hammel, who covered Knight's Hoosier teams for three decades. "That season was the climax for them. Today, it almost seems like every move, from their choice of college on, is based on how soon they can get to the pros and how soon they can start making money. That was all secondary back then."

"I was pretty much a normal college student," Abernethy says. "Which these guys aren't able to be."

Not even close. Now, America's best prep players select a school — which they announce at a news conference — for a 12-month stopover on their way to draft day.

And Calipari has mastered the One-and-Done Era better than any coach out there, luring the country's top prospects to Lexington, year after year, as if the nation's high school gyms are bountiful stables and he always gets his pick of top thoroughbred.

And with it comes the circus: The insatiable fan base, the media, the attention, the hype, the criticism.

Through it all this season, the Wildcats have emerged from the fire unscathed.

"Every game they played this year was an event," Calipari said last week. "Every game is somebody's Super Bowl. Every game a coach walks off the court and says, 'That's the best team we've played all year.'

"And it's not only you coming at 'em," he told a group of reporters, "it's people around them coming at 'em."

Every team came at them this season, same as every team came at Indiana in 1976. Two teams, separated by 39 seasons, linked by one number: A zero in the loss column. But the parallels run deeper than that.

Knight's Hoosiers were coldly efficient, masters of his motion offense, overwhelming on defense, a juggernaut seasoned in experience. Four of their top five scorers that season were seniors — this, remember, was when elite players actually stayed four years. Eight times that season they faced a team ranked in the Top 10. The Hoosiers never budged and never lost. Nothing could shake them.

"They were the toughest team mentally I can ever imagine," Knight wrote of them in his 2001 autobiography.

Yet Knight never stopped pushing. Never stopped teaching. He chased basketball perfection. What they gave him was pretty darn close.

"Maybe 10 games in, I would have thought we were maybe a .500 team," Abernethy remembers. "Like, man, we're working so hard, we need to correct so many things. We hadn't lost, but it sure felt like we were struggling."

Once that season, during a timeout in the midst of a tight game, Knight made his players count out loud how many passes he wanted to see before a shot attempt.

"One. Two. Three. Four," his players responded.

Then, for good measure, he had them do it again. It was a scene straight out of Hoosiers. (It's no coincidence, then, that Indiana had a sign in the locker room that read: Movement + Patience = Baskets.)

Now, Calipari scrapping his patented Dribble-Drive offense for a page out of Norman Dale's playbook come Saturday night vs. Wisconsin seems unlikely. Just as it was for Knight's Hoosiers, Kentucky's backbone comes on D. Offense comes and goes. It's defense that keeps them perfect.

Both teams were loaded with blue chip recruits. (Abernethy says Indiana's seniors that season came in as the top-ranked recruiting class in the nation in 1973.) The byproduct: Deep reservoirs of talent. The '76 Indiana team produced four first-round picks, all among the top 11 players chosen. Kentucky has bench players who will go in the first round of June's NBA draft. Both squads were guided by polarizing coaches operating at the peak of their powers.

Scott May's 23.1 points per game average paced the Hoosiers that season; this year, the Wildcats are so evenly platooned that Aaron Harrison, who averages just 11.1 points per game, leads them in scoring. No top 25 team this year had a leading scorer average so little.

It's a testament to both coaches: On units thick in individual talent, Knight and Calipari convinced every player to buy into the team's greater good.

"I take my hat off to the job coach Calipari's done," Abernethy says. "I can't believe he's gotten all those players to come together like that in just one season. It took us a while. Coach would tell you something 100 times. By the 100th time, you decided you should start listening."

The most striking parallel may be how the previous seasons ended. Both teams returned with work unfinished.

The '75 Hoosiers — whom were every bit as good as the team that followed — saw their bid for perfection crash in the regional final against, of all teams, Kentucky. Knight believes to this day without a left arm injury to Scott May, who played just seven minutes that night with a cast on his arm, Indiana would've reeled off back-to-back perfect seasons. They fell 92-90 in overtime.

Instead, he'd have to settle for a 63-1 record over two years.

Last year, Kentucky's freshman-dominated squad stumbled through plenty of growing pains — including 10 losses in the regular season — before a stirring tournament run left them seven points shy of a national title. The aim this year, just as it was for Indiana in the fall of 1975, has been clear from the start. Finish the job.

Both teams wore a target on their back from the opening tip through the season's final weekend. Both left opponents in awe.

Said Al McGuire, whose No. 2-ranked Marquette fell to Indiana that season: "You could just see it, feel their assurance. It seemed like they won most of their games during warm-ups."

Said Hugh Durham, Florida State's coach, after IU whipped his team 83-59 early that season: "I'm glad this isn't like baseball. I'd hate to play these guys in a three-game homestand."

Said West Virigina's Devin Williams after UK rolled past his Mountaineers in the Sweet 16 by 38 points: "You can't stop something that's destined."

For now, the Wildcats have work to be done. Like every undefeated team over the past 39 seasons, they are still chasing the Hoosiers.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.

(ALMOST) NOBODY'S PERFECT

When Indiana completed its perfect season in 1976, it was the fifth team to pull off the feat in 13 years. The Hoosiers, of course, are also the last undefeated champions. This year, Kentucky will be the first to reach the Final Four undefeated since UNLV in 1991. Here's a look at all teams that reached the Final Four undefeated (record listed is entering the Final Four):

Team

Record

Result

2015 Kentucky

38-0

????

1991 UNLV

34-0

Lost to Duke in semis

1979 Indiana State

32-0

Lost to Michigan State in title

1976 Indiana

30-0

Won NCAA title

1976 Rutgers

31-0

Lost to Michigan in semis

1973 UCLA

28-0

Won NCAA title

1972 UCLA

28-0

Won NCAA title

1968 Houston

31-0

Lost to UCLA in semis

1967 UCLA

28-0

Won NCAA title

1964 UCLA

28-0

Won NCAA title

1961 Ohio State

26-0

Lost to Cincinnati in title

1957 North Carolina

30-0

Won NCAA title

1956 San Francisco

27-0

Won NCAA title

1941 Seton Hall

20-0

Lost to Long Island in semis#

1939 Long Island

22-0

Won NIT title#

1939 Loyola

20-0

Lost to Long Island in title#

#-The NIT was more prestigious than the NCAA at the time