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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1011624, member: 289"] 1965 RICK BARRY had an amazing year for Miami, scoring 37.4 points a game and pulling down 18.3 rebounds a game. His major competition for the scoring title was Estes, whose average was 33.7 when he set a became the first player from his school to reach 2000 points with a 48 point night in his 19th game against Denver. Utah State fans expected to read about Estes’ great game in their morning paper. Instead, they read that he was dead. He’d changed into leather shoes after the game while his teammates kept their sneakers on. Driving back from the game, there was an accident ahead of them and they pulled over and got out to see if they could help. What they didn’t know is that the car had hit a telephone pole and a live wire was down, hanging from a near-bye tree. Estes walked right into it and was electrocuted. [media=youtube]yZK6j-kCmAM[/media] Bill Bradley was #3 at 30.5 He really made his legend with an incredible post season run that included leading Princeton to an amazing 109-69 demolition of a 24-1, #4 ranked Providence team in the finals of the eastern regional. They lost to Cazzie Russell’s Michigan team in the Final Four but Bradley set a Final Four record that likely will never be broken by scoring 58 points against Wichita State in the consolation game. Russell scored 25.7, John Austin 26.9 and Purdue had a new gunner named Dave Schelllhase, who scored 29.3. 1966 My memory of this, (the first year I started following college basketball) is that for most of the season the scoring title battle was between Michigan’s Cazzie Russell and Syracuse’ Dave Bing but both were beaten out by DAVE SCHELLHASE and someone named Dave Wagnon of Idaho State, who both averaged 32.5, (Schellhase: 32.54, Wagnon 32.50). Russell was third at 30.8, Utah’s Jerry Chambers fourth at 28.8 and Bing 5th at 28.4. In the subsequent NBA draft, the Knicks and Pistons battled it out for the first choice. Both finished last in their divisions, (it was only East-West back then). Instead of a lottery, there was a coin flip. The Pistons who desperately wanted Russell, lost and had to settle for Bing, Russell played for a dozen years in the NBA and got to play on the Knicks’ 1970 NBA championship team. He even had a couple of 20 point a game seasons. But Bing scored half again as many point, almost three times the assists and was named one of the NBA’s 50 greatest players. He also founded Bing Steel and became major of Detroit. All on a coin flip. Schellhase was a reserve for the Bulls for two years before going into coaching. I was unable to find out anything about Dave Wagnon but the chart in this link is interesting, (I think?!?): [url]http://nba-draft-history.findthebest.com/q/7093/12256/When-was-Dave-Wagnon-selected-in-the-1966-NBA-draft[/url] 1967 UCLA was all-conquering in UCLA’s first year with Lew Alcindor, (who later re-named himself Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) but Lew couldn’t beat out JIMMY WALKER of Providence, (Jalen Rose’s Dad, as we found out decades later), for the national scoring crown. Jimmy scored 30.4, Lew 29.0. Elvin Hayes was fourth at 28.4. But the big scorers that year were freshmen, who weren’t eligible for the varsity and had to play on freshmen teams. Back then we didn’t talk about high school players to evaluate our team’s future: we talked about freshman teams. Syracuse had an undefeated one, (16-0) with Wayne Ward, (20 points and 16 rebounds a game) and Ernie Austin (30ppg). They twice took on the Niagara freshmen, who featured Calvin Murphy, who was scoring 50 points a game, (he wound up at 48.9). The combination of Ward and Austin beat Murphy’s heroics twice, (people were seen leaving to go home before the varsity game), but it was obvious that a new scoring champion was on the horizon. Indeed, someone would lead the NCAA in scoring for the next three years in a row. But it wouldn’t be Calvin Murphy. [url]http://www.allsportswny.com/wny-legends/calvin-murphy-niagara-all-american/[/url] 1968-70 A sophomore burst onto the college scene and scored like nobody has scored before or since. No it wasn’t Calvin Murphy, it was Pistol PETE MARAVICH of LSU, a skinny 6-5 kid with socks that seemed too big for him and who had a Beatles haircut but who had incredible skill with a basketball. He had scored ‘only’ 43.6 for LSU’s freshman team but improved on that as a varsity sophomore with 43.8 and as a junior with 44.2 and a senior with 44.5. There weren’t as many televised games back then, (usually one a week and regional) and I only saw him play once in college. It was against Kentucky. He put up 64 points on one of Adolph Rupp’s best teams. On one play I remember he was driving along the sideline on a fast break and never made a move toward the basket. Instead he threw in a running 25 foot hook shot from the corner that hit nothing but net. The Kentucky players looked at each other and at Rupp, wondering what to do about this guy. But the Tigers didn’t bother playing much defense and lost 106-121. Pistol Pete was a sort of one-man Loyola Marymount. In the same three years, Murphy scored 38.2, 32.4 and 29.4. Murphy set the record for the most points against a major college team when he rang up Syracuse for 68 and then Maravich topped it with 69 against Alabama. Purdue had another great one in Rick Mount, who averaged 28.5, 33.3 and 35.4, leading his team to the NCAA final in Alcindor’s senior year, where they, too got crushed by UCLA, 92-72. Maravich, Murphy and mount were known as “The Three Ms”. It’s a pity their schools never scheduled each other in this period. Elvin Hayes scored 36.8 for a Houston team that upset UCLA in 1968 and went into the Final Four 31-0 and ranked #1. The Bruins exacted a devastating revenge, 101-69. Spencer Haywood put in a year for Detroit after his Olympic glory, scoring 31.8 in 1969. These were also the years of Bob Lanier at St. Bonaventure. He made the top ten with 27.3 as a junior and 29.3 as a senior. And Note Dame had another scoring machine in Austin Carr, who finished second to Maravich in 1970 with a 38.1 average. Unlike Maravich and Murphy, Carr’s team made the NCAA tournament, (which was much harder to do in those days when only 24 teams got invitations). And he became the King of the Big Dance, averaging 41 points a game in 7 NCAA tournament games during his career, with a record high of 61. It was an age when the scoring totals of the game’s greatest players roared like mighty guns across the land. [/QUOTE]

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