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Proud graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill. Used to be a sports writer for The Asheboro (NC) Courier-Tribune. I've also done some radio work in NC and Denver.More By BlueCarp
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Misremembering Hoops History
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Whenever North Carolina's national basketball championships are mentioned, someone brings up Michigan's Chris Webber and his time out technical in 1993 as if Michigan would have won the game but for that mistake.
Most recently, J.A. Adande brought it up in an article on Denver Nuggets head coach (and Carolina alum) George Karl.
He wrote:
For all his talent at North Carolina, [Dean] Smith won 'only' two championships. And he won them thanks in part to two of the biggest blunders in NCAA history: [Georgetown's] Fred Brown's pass in 1982 and Chris Webber's timeout in 1993.
In both cases, Carolina was ahead at the end of the game. The opposition had to score on its last possession, or they would have lost.
To assume either Michigan or Georgetown would have won but for their mistake is a huge assumption.
In Webbers' case, it's absolutely ridiculous. Webber never would have had a chance to call the timeout he didn't have if the refs had called an obvious walking violation on him seconds before. The game should have ended with a traveling violation. But it didn't.
Webber then found himself in a double team, trapped in the corner of the court. What was he going to do? Time was running out. He couldn't dribble. He couldn't shoot. He couldn't pass. The time out was a bad choice, but he had no good ones. Under what possible scenario could something good have happened for Michigan with Webber stuck in the corner with time running out?
Even without the time out, things were looking really good for the Heels.
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