My timing was fortunate, to say the least. I saw a lot of success in men’s basketball during my four years as a student at IU Bloomington, with “The General,” Coach Bob Knight, leading the charge.
Try this on for size: Our men’s basketball team won 100 games and lost 20 during those four seasons after I arrived on campus in August 1974. That’s a winning percentage of .833.
Our teams went 63-1 in my first two years of attending games in a jam-packed and roaring Assembly Hall. If we were playing at home, we won. We didn’t lose a single home game in those two years. In that 1974-1975 season, we beat Iowa 102-49. You don’t see margins like that every day.
A 31-1 record in my freshman year, 1974-1975, preceded the last perfect season in college basketball, the sparkling 32-0 season in 1975-1976. That one was capped by beating Michigan 86-68 in Philadelphia on March 29 to win the national championship.
Coach Knight often said the 1974-1975 team was better than the squad that won the championship the next year, but mainstay Scott May, a starting forward, broke his left arm about a month before the end of the regular season. In addition to the familiar names of Quinn Buckner, Bobby Wilkerson, Kent Benson, and May, the 1974-1975 team included standout senior forward Steve Green.
After a perfect regular season, IU lost to Kentucky 92-90 in the NCAA tournament that year (after defeating UTEP and Oregon State in the tournament). May suited up for the Kentucky game with his arm in a cast but stayed in the game for less than 10 minutes and scored 2 points. Kentucky later lost the championship game to UCLA in Coach John Wooden’s last contest.
With much of the strongest talent gone after the magical 1975-1976 season, the next year’s team went 16-11 (Coach Mike Woodson’s freshman season as an IU player), before everything turned more positive in 1977-1978, with 21 wins and 8 losses and a trip to the Sweet 16.
As I said, it was a pretty good time for a college basketball fanatic to be a student at IU.