Part two of my three-part look at Lefty Driesell
Yes, I know I said two-parts. I changed my mind
I was a freshman at Duke when Vic Bubas announced he was leaving coaching to go into administration.
I remember Lefty Driesell’s name kicked around as a possible successor, for obvious reasons.
I have no idea if it ever got past the talking stage.
At the time Bucky Waters seemed like a pretty good hire. The 32-year-old NC State grad was a young firebrand. He had been Vic Bubas’ top recruiter and had kept West Virginia relevant, winning the 1967 Southern Conference regular season and tournament titles.
That 1967 WVU team beat Driesell and Davidson 81-65 in the tournament title game. But they lost their NCAA opener to Princeton 68-57; Bill Bradley was long gone by then.
Who knew that Waters would never coach another game in the NCAA Tournament.
Still, Waters won 37 games in his first two seasons at Duke, while Driesell won 27 in his first two years at Maryland.
But that’s a superficial way to look at it. Waters took over a program that went to three Final Fours in the 1960s, won four ACC Tournaments, first in the regular season four times, produced five AP All-Americans, three ACC Players of the Year and one national player of the year. Those first two seasons were fueled largely by players he inherited from Bubas, Randy Denton, Dick DeVenzio, Rick Katherman and Larry Saunders and a freshman team largely recruited by Bubas that went undefeated in 1970.
Driesell also inherited some good players; well at least one, Fred Heizel’s brother Will. But Frank Fellows’ last Maryland team went 8-16, which is why they needed a new coach.
Maryland didn’t have a lot of recent hoops success. They won the 1958 ACC Tournament as a four seed, the only non-Big Four team to ever win an ACC Tournament or Dixie Classic title in Reynolds Coliseum.
But it was an outlier. They didn’t even make an NCAA Tournament title game in the 1960s.
But Driesell saw something. The term “sleeping giant” is an over-used cliche in sports but Maryland was a large, state-supported school in a recruiting hotbed. They also were the first ACC program to integrate and they embraced integration at a time and place where integration was not always embraced. No recruit was ever going to be denied service in College Park, as Charlie Scott was in the town of Davidson.
Was his boast that he would turn Maryland into the UCLA of the east preposterous? Well, he didn’t follow through. Then again, no one else did either, not while John Wooden was coaching. And he got people talking about Maryland basketball which most emphatically had not been the case before he got there.
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