YouTube Gold: The 1992 UNC-Michigan Championship Game

A classic with a classic screw-up at the end

Michigan’s Fab Five was as polarizing a team as was possible. They caught everyone’s imagination because they were young (all freshmen), immensely talented and Black.

They were also brash and immature, sometimes wildly so.

The fashion really caught on: the super baggy shorts, the black socks. And they were highly charismatic. If they played today, they’d break all kinds of NIL records.

All five were gifted, but Chris Webber was on another level entirely. He was wildly talented.

Yet in spite of their talents and popularity, the Fab Five never won a tournament.

They did play Duke in 1991 in the regular season and then again in the championship game and once more in the fall of 1992 after Christian Laettner had graduated. They lost all three.

And the following year, they got back to the championship game and played the team at the other end of 15-501, UNC. And that game was incredibly easy to predict.

That team was the distillation of everything Dean Smith valued. Those guys were mature and played together seamlessly. There were no major stars; the team was the star.

And when they met Michigan, with all that swagger and arrogance, but not the commitment to hard work that Duke and UNC put in to achieve greatness, it was obvious well ahead of time what would happen, as Julio predicted on line (Boswell can verify this): it would be a close game and Michigan would do something fatally stupid at the end and blow it.

Sure enough, Webber, after getting away with traveling, called a timeout that Michigan no longer had and earned a technical, basically giving the game, and the championship, to the Tar Heels.