YouTube Gold: Phil Ford Running The Four Corners

It wasn’t fun to see this coming at you, but it was unquestionably a deadly weapon

Dean Smith was an incredibly successful coach at UNC and his fame is well deserved. He was obviously an excellent recruiter - the old joke was that he didn’t recruit, he selected - and more impressively, he was a great teacher. Guys came out of Chapel Hill who were not immensely talented but who prospered in the NBA because they were superbly grounded in fundamentals.

Smith was an outstanding young coach in the 1960’s, but his recruiting options vastly opened after Charles Scott (he didn't like being called Charlie) broke the color barrier at UNC in 1967.

A few years later, things changed dramatically. Bob McAdoo and Bill Chamberlain came in 1972. Walter Davis arrived in 1973 and, a year later, Phil Ford left Rocky Mount to come to Chapel Hill.

And with Ford, Smith unleashed a deadly weapon.

The shot clock has been in college basketball so long that people forget that Smith occasionally played stall ball. In 1979, he reasoned that UNC could hang with Duke for a half in Cameron, so UNC just held the ball for most of the first half. In 1982, Smith ran the four corners for seven minutes and six seconds to beat Ralph Sampson and Virginia 47-45 to win the ACC Tournament despite having Sam Perkins, James Worthy and a rising freshman named Michael-something. That had a lot to do with the NCAA ultimately putting the shot clock in.

However, that four corners, while effective, featured Jimmy Black at point, and while Black would help win Smith’s first NCAA title that spring, the greatest artist of the four corners, the one who turned into a unique system of basketball torture, was Phil Ford.

In this video, Ford, just a freshman, runs the stall offense to perfection against Duke in Carmichael Auditorium.

As much as Smith mastered the tactic, it should always be remembered that John McClendon invented the ploy when he was at NCCU.