35 Years Ago: Navy's Historic Men's Basketball Season
Justin Kischefsky
*Note: This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Navy men’s basketball team advancing to the Elite Eight round of the NCAA Tournament. The Mids compiled a 30-5 record on the year, won the Colonial Athletic Association’s regular season (with a 13-1 mark) and tournament titles and were ranked as high as 17th nationally. The accomplishment is not only the high-water mark for the program, it also is on the short list of the top team athletic achievements in USNA history.
NavySports.com will relive the historic 1985-86 season all this week. Below is an excerpt from the first chapter; the complete series can be read here.
Expectations for the Navy men’s basketball team prior to the start of the 1985-86 season were as high as they had been for the program in a generation, if not more. And with good reason, as the team had been on a steady three-year climb with new standards being set each season.
After back-to-back losing seasons in which Navy had compiled a total of 21 victories in 1980-81 (9-16) and 1981-82 (12-14), the Mids posted an 18-11 record during the 1982-83 campaign. The 18 victories tied the school record for the most wins in a year (1920-21, 1924-25, 1953-54) and was part of an effort that sent the Mids into the semifinal round of the inaugural ECAC South Tournament. Vernon Butler was a freshman on that team. The post player started every game that year and, in the process, leading the Mids in rebounding (10.2 rpg) and ranking third in scoring (11.6 ppg).
The following year, 1983-84, Navy put together a 24-8 record, tied for second place in the ECAC South’s regular season with a 6-4 mark and reached the championship game of the conference tournament. The team’s .750 winning percentage was the best by a Navy team since the 1958-59 team also posted that mark.
Individually, Butler put together team-leading averages of 14.7 points and 8.7 rebounds a game. Fellow sophomore Kylor Whitaker moved into a starting role in the backcourt and averaged 10.0 points and 3.4 assists a game. A freshman named David Robinson also started to become comfortable with the college game as the season went on. He didn’t start a game all season, but averaged 7.6 points, 4.0 rebounds and 1.3 blocks a game to be named the conference’s rookie of the year.
Despite 24 victories and an appearance in the conference title game, Navy was at home to watch both the NCAA Tournament and the NIT in 1984. Determined to not place their fate in the hands of those sitting around a conference table for a second time, the 1984-85 Mids again set a school –– and service academy –– record for the most wins in a season with a 26-6 mark, shared the conference regular season crown with an 11-3 record and won the ECAC South Tournament to advance to the NCAA Tournament. It was the first appearance by the Mids in the NCAA Tournament since the 1959-60 campaign and was the first postseason appearance of any kind by the program since an NIT trip in 1961-62.
The 13
th-seeded Mids did not waste their opportunity in March Madness as they blasted fourth-seeded and 20
th-ranked LSU, a team that had four future NBA players on the roster, 78-55, in the opening round to win a game in the event for the first time since the 1958-59 season. Two days later, Navy led a Len Bias-paced, fourth-seeded Maryland team by as many as nine points in the second half and was up by five with eight minutes to play before falling short in a 64-59 defeat.
Navy’s 1985-86 team returned its entire starting lineup and top-seven scorers from the squad that threw the scare into the Terrapins. Most notably, Robinson decided to forego opportunities to transfer to another school and remain at Navy. Robinson explained being comfortable with his decision in a story that appeared in the Washington Times prior to the start of the season: “It was a pretty hard decision. When the season ended, I definitely thought about it a lot. It was tempting. But the atmosphere here was too good –– and the education. It was just too much to turn down. You never know what’s going to happen in two years of basketball. You get hurt or something, like Nap McCallum did, and it could be worse for me than it was for him. I just found the advantages of staying here more overwhelming than the advantages of maybe leaving and sitting out a year and waiting three years and seeing what happens in the pros.”
Robinson averaged 23.6 points, 11.6 rebounds and 4.0 blocks per game as a sophomore to earn conference player-of-the-year honors. Joining him in the frontcourt for the 1985-86 season was Butler, who entered his senior season on the verge of becoming the Navy record holder for career points and rebounds after his 18.4-point, 9.1-rebound per-game averages in 1984-85. Whitaker was the third Mid to average double figures during the prior year (13.6 ppg), with he and Robinson’s classmate, Doug Wojcik, dishing out a combined 398 assists in 1984-85.
Rounding out the quintet of returning starters was sophomore guard Cliff Rees (8.8 ppg). Also on the team were Carl Liebert, a junior forward who had played in 29 games the year before, Tony Wells, a senior forward who played in 26 games in 1984-85, and Derric Turner, a freshman forward who had led the Naval Academy Prep School in scoring and rebounding with averages of 20.2 points and 9.5 rebounds a game during the 1984-85 season.
“The potential is there for an excellent season,” said Navy head coach Paul Evans in Soundings Magazine prior to the start of the 1985-86 campaign, which was his sixth year at the helm of the Mids. “We’ve got three or four recruits who should push the returnees for playing time, so they should offset any complacency or overconfidence that might be present. Our guys still feel there is a lot left to accomplish.”
“Success begets success,” said Whitaker. “We had all of our key players back. We were confident and excited and felt we could do even better than we did in 1985. Now we had some exposure to playing against ranked teams. We were very confident we could build off of that.”
“Our expectation was that we were going to be very competitive,” said Robinson. “We were loaded with returning players, but we still had to go out and prove it. We had great pieces. Making the NCAA Tournament in 1985 was a great experience and boost. At a minimum, we wanted to make the NCAA’s again. You never know how far you can advance in it.”
“Our hopes and goals were to repeat as conference champions and advance to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament,” said Wojcik. “Expectations were extremely high, yet I do not believe we felt it as a team. We were very determined by Vernon Butler and relaxed due to Kylor Whitaker’s confident, easy attitude.”
“You have to look back at winning that first-round game against LSU,” said Liebert as to the reasons why the team had confidence heading into the fall of 1985. “And with 3-4 minutes to go, we had Maryland down. Len Bias and Adrian Branch were on that team and Lefty Driesell was the coach. They were really talented. They were pressing us. We hadn’t played against those types of athletes. We had some turnovers late. Our teams flew back together on the same plane. I remember how crappy we all felt because we felt we could beat them.
“After that season we started to play more. A lot of ball that spring season. Playing pickup ball, working out more in the summer. That led to a summer where we all spent a lot of time getting ready.”
“Expectations were certainly high,” said Rees. “I think our focus was to win the league and get back to the NCAA Tournament. We never discussed much how far we thought we could go in it, just that we wanted to get back. But this team had the mindset that we could compete against anyone.”
Assistant coach Dave Laton had placed a sign in the locker room at the start of each season with goals. The 1982-83 sign read “Winning Season.” In 1983-84, “20-Win Season” was the goal. The following year, 1984-85, the goal was “NCAA Tournament Bid.”
“At the top of our locker room at the start of the 1985-86 season,” said Turner, “coach had a placard that said ‘National Champions’ on it. I kind of looked at it and went, yeah, okay, it is good to reach high, but come on.”
“I truly believe that (the National Champions sign) set the tone for our mindset,” said Liebert. “We didn’t have it then, but I think it started the conversation that we could be fairly good. It was a wakeup call for me personally. I don’t know if we believed it ourselves, but clearly the coaching staff did.”
What Navy had the potential to accomplish was noticed outside of the team locker room as well.
Over 2,700 fans were in Halsey Field House for an exhibition game by the team against the Greek National Team. That attendance figure was higher than the size of the crowds who had turned out for the majority of the team’s home games during the entire 1984-85 season.
Nationally, the team held preseason rankings of 10th (Washington Post), 13th (Sporting News and Sport Magazine), 15th (Inside Sports), 18th (Dick Vitale) and 19th (Associated Press).
“We clearly viewed Navy as the team to beat in the CAA heading into the season,” said UNC Wilmington player Greg Bender. “Richmond and George Mason had quality teams as well, but Navy emerged as a real force in 1984-85, which included a win in the NCAA’s against LSU. Navy returned nearly everyone from that team, which included maybe their two best players of all-time in David Robinson and Vernon Butler. They also had experience at the point guard position in Doug Wojcik, who was the leader on the floor. Anytime you have David Robinson on your team you are going to be great at the college level. I always felt like Kylor Whitaker was very much underrated and really made them a complete team. Whitaker was by far their best outside shooting threat and he made it more difficult to sag your defense around Robinson and Butler. Navy had an excellent coaching staff that had been in place, which led to continuity for the team. It was clearly an inside oriented team with Robinson and Butler, as they had a distinct inside advantage against most teams in the country and certainly against the CAA teams.”
“Expectations for Navy were high going into that 1985-86 season,” recalled Washington Post columnist, accomplished author and college basketball encyclopedia John Feinstein, who covered the team that season. “Robinson had emerged as a real star as a sophomore and the Mids had crushed LSU in the first round of the NCAA Tournament before running out of gas –– and INTO Len Bias –– in the second round.
“David wasn’t close to being the only good player on that team. Every other key guy came back, most notably Vernon Butler and Wojcik, but really the first seven guys. They were experienced and had been through an NCAA Tournament already. They were close knit and played a style they all enjoyed under Paul Evans. Plus, David never acted like he was THE star. I remember in the locker room one day after practice, David was giving Wojcik a hard time and Wojcik said, ‘Careful David; never bite the hand that feeds you.’”
“Dave didn’t walk around like he was the best player,” said Turner, “but we all knew it.”
“Vernon was the team captain and led by example,” said team manager Ian Cassidy. “Kylor was the joker who kept us in good humor. David was a superior athlete. But no one thought they were above anyone else.”
“When they beat LSU and had a chance to beat Maryland,” said Capt. Al Konetzni, the team’s officer representative who would go on to retire from the Navy as a vice admiral, “you could see they were pretty good and close to being great. They just didn’t have at the time that killer instinct they needed, that ability to give the 10-percent more that was needed to take another step.”