UNC Recruiting History: Eric Montross and The New Kids On the Block:

The Indiana big man was the centerpiece of UNC’s monster recruiting class of 1990.

As the winter of 1990 turned into spring, Dean Smith’s status as a great coach was secure. Yet, as the 1990 basketball season wound to a close, Smith’s North Carolina basketball program appeared to be slipping after almost a quarter-century of sustained excellence.

It was bad enough that the Hall of Fame coach had not led the Tar Heels to a Final Four since 1982. Worse, Smith’s 1990 team, weakened by the early NBA departure of center J.R. Reid and frustrated by a series of close misses on the recruiting trail, was struggling to reach the standards that Smith had established during his long and successful tenure. The veteran team—led by seniors Scott Williams and Kevin Madden; juniors Rick Fox, King Rice and Pete Chilcutt—lost six of 10 games down the stretch and finished the regular season with fewer than 20 wins for the first time since 1970. A first-round exit from the ACC Tournament sent UNC to Austin, Tex., as a No. 8 seed in the NCAA Tournament, needing a first-round win to get to the 20-win mark.

Had time—and a new generation of young ACC coaches—finally caught up with North Carolina’s iconic coach?

As it turned out, the 10 days after that dispiriting ACC Tournament loss to Virginia would demonstrate Smith’s resiliency. He would remind his critics of his game-time brilliance by engineering not only a first-round NCAA victory over Southwest Missouri State, but a stunning second-round upset of the nation’s No. 1 ranked team, Oklahoma.

And just 72 hours after pulling off that on-the-court triumph, Smith would strike gold on the recruiting trail, stealing a prize prospect from Bob Knight’s backyard to cap the most acclaimed recruiting class of his career—a class that would restore UNC to the top of the ACC pyramid.

THE YOUNG GIANT

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