Back in the day there was a choice. It didn’t happen frequently, but there were instances of teams turning down an NCAA Tournament bid and going to the NIT. In 1970 Al McGuire, upset over where the NCAA would send Marquette, turned down the bid. McGuire brought his Warriors to New York and they eventually captured the championship, defeating St.John’s in the final.
A year later Georgia Tech had a decision to make. They were an independent back then, coming off a 20-8 record – the third 20-win season in school history. Tech was invited to the 25-team NCAA field. UCLA was in the process of turning the NCAA into its own personal invitational. Slowing the march of ‘Wooden’s soldiers’ seemed an unlikely prospect. The NIT, with a field of 16, playing the entire tournament at Madison Square Garden was an attractive alternative. A year earlier, Tech played in the NIT, making it to the quarterfinal before dropping a one-point decision to St. John’s. So Georgia Tech coach Whack Hyder left it up to a team vote.
“So it was like, do you want to play a game or two in who knows where – some college town somewhere – or would you like to go back to Madison Square Garden for a week or until you lose?” Jim Thorpe, the team’s captain in 1971, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution years later. “We said clearly, lets go back to Madison Square Garden. We’ve got a chance we could win that one.”
Georgia Tech began defeating La Salle on the opening night of the tournament. The next round saw a win over Michigan. In the semis they outlasted St. Bonaventure in a double overtime thriller. In the championship the clock struck twelve for Tech. North Carolina, behind a sensational 34-point outing by Bill Chamberlain, the tournament MVP, emerged an 84-64 champion.
Georgia Tech finished 23-9. The 23 wins were a school record until Bobby Cremins’ group eclipsed the mark with 27 wins in ‘85.
The star for Tech in ‘71 was Rich Yunkus. An All-American, the 6’10” Yunkus finished with school records in points (2,232) and scoring average (26.6). This was an era when freshmen did not play varsity and the three-point arc was a good decade and a half in the future.
Yunkus originally opted for the NCAA bid. As the NIT progressed, he was pleased the team had voted to come to New York and relished the chance of competing for a championship.
Yunkus also told the Atlanta Journal Constitution a few years back, with each successive round their locker room quarters upgraded. “When we reached the championship game,” Yunkus recalled, “we were in the Knicks locker room.”
In 2017 Georgia Tech returned to the championship game. Tech was again runner-up as TCU romped to the title 88-56. Nearly half a century later, the memory of ‘71 remains intact and special. As Yunkus said, “getting to that championship game topped off the career.”
