Madness Moments: The Hooping Heisman Winners
On March 18, 1993, Charlie Ward went for 15 points, five assists, four steals and three rebounds as Florida State began its run to the Elite Eight with a win over Evansville1.
It was the most statistically impressive performance of Ward’s NCAA Tournament career, though he was every bit as crucial to the Seminoles advancing further than any FSU team before or since, save the 2018 squad.
“I just thought it as part of the plan of what my job or my role was on the team,” Ward told me last November when I spoke with him for this deep-dive into the first College Gameday taken on the road2. “I didn't put any extra expectations on anything that I already had expectations on as far as doing my job and playing my role to the best of my ability.”
Ward’s standout play to open March Madness 1993 was a landmark moment in a year full of them for the multi-talented athlete, who about nine months later, became the first Heisman Trophy recipient in Florida State history.
Ward was not, however, the first Heisman-winning quarterback to play a pivotal role in his university’s basketball program advancing deep in the NCAA Tournament.
Thirty years almost to the day that Ward helped launch Florida State’s push to the Elite Eight, Terry Baker completed his All-Regional performance with 15 points in an 83-65 Oregon State win over Arizona State.
Baker and the Beavers punched a ticket to the Final Four with the defeat of the Sun Devils, one season after falling short in the Elite Eight against pre-dynasty UCLA.
That bit of redemption continued an incredible few months for Baker, who powered Oregon State past San Francisco in the Sweet 16 with 21 points — three months to the day after his 98-yard touchdown run lifted the gridiron Beavers to a Liberty Bowl win over Villanova.
As Oregon State’s quarterback, Baker captained the Beavers offense in 1960, 1961 and to a 9-2 mark in 1962.
His senior campaign was downright revolutionary, producing Oregon State’s first postseason win since the legendary 1942 Rose Bowl; a program single-season wins mark that stood until the Jonathan Smith-quarterbacked team of 2000; and winning the first Heisman Trophy any player in the West ever claimed.
The latter is a surprising tidbit, at least for me, given USC owns the majority of Heismans won by Western programs. Seven Trojans3 have claimed the trophy, making USC the only program to produce multiple winners, and that’s one more than the rest of the West combined4.
What’s more, USC was an established national powerhouse well before 1962. Oregon State, despite playing in one of the most Rose Bowls ever, wasn’t exactly viewed as a prominent program.
The Beavers were independent at the time. This period overlapped with the brief window in which the Pacific Coast Conference shuttered under a cloud of scandal and relaunched as the Athletic Association of Western Universities.
Pac-12 Tuesday: The Idaho Vandals and The Other Time The Pacific Conference Died
Although there were plenty of power independents in this era, with three breaking into the AP Poll5, Oregon State was not one of them.
For Baker to ascend to the Heisman at both a geographic disadvantage and lacking the clout of playing for a nationally recognized brand makes him arguably the equivalent of a mid-major player — Group of Five in today’s nomenclature — as well as the first Westerner.
Independent status was more to Oregon State’s, and thus Baker’s favor in basketball, however.
A conference could only send one team — ergo, its champion — to the NCAA Tournament until 1975. At-large bids were only for the best independents around the country.
UCLA’s dominant dynasty had not yet taken off in the first half of the 1960s — and, in fact, the 1962-63 Bruins actually split the AAWU crown with Stanford.
Still, with future National Players of the Year Walt Hazzard and Gail Goodrich both on the roster and a guy named John Wooden on the sideline, reaching the event that came to be March Madness out of the AAWU may have been more treacherous than earning an at-large bid.
To wit, Oregon State went 7-4 in regular-season matchups with the AAWU, including a split with conference co-champion Stanford. The Cardinal and Wooden’s Bruins were both 7-5 atop the league standings.
As an at-large for a second consecutive year, however, Oregon State went into the 1963 Tournament with both the top quarterback in college football and perhaps the best big man in the game at the time, Mel Counts.
Counts is something of a forgotten figure in college basketball lore, bridging the gap between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain at San Francisco and Kansas in the late ‘50s; and Kareem taking the game by storm in the latter half of the ‘60s.
Coincidentally, Counts was both a back-up to Russell for the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers back-up for Chamberlain.
Between Elgin Baylor at Seattle, Jerry West at West Virginia and Oscar Robertson at Cincinnati, perimeter stars had led the way in this period. Even the most dominant big man of the era, Ohio State’s Jerry Lucas, was more of a forward with face-up abilities than he was the typical low-block presence.
Counts is a fitting star running mate with Baker for Oregon State’s Final Four run, because both seem so overlooked in the pantheon of college sports greatness; Baker especially.
Ward’s crucial role in Florida State’s Elite Eight run, his Heisman Trophy win eight months later, and the Seminoles’ national championship nine months after March Madness 1993 still commands national imagination 30 years later. Deservedly so, too.
Baker’s 1962-1963 falls into the background, however, appearing as an occasional footnote for lists on football players in the NCAA Tournament.
That this game lives on via YouTube encapsulates the best of the platform’s potential, not the least of which is providing us instantaneous access to a deep archive footage from sports, world news, etc. to introduce future generations to landmark moments with proper context.
To that end, I must note how jarring it is for the Florida State-Evansville clip to open with Pat O’Brien, whose voice I now associate exclusively with filthy messages. YouTube offers some context there if you search “Pat O’Brien voicemails,” but be forewarned, they are not for the easily offended.
Independent of anything to do with this newsletter, the feature on the 1993 Notre Dame-Florida State game is my favorite piece I wrote in 2023. If you haven’t checked it out, please give it a read.
O.J. Simpson (1968), Charles White (1979), Marcus Allen (1981), Carson Palmer (2002), Matt Leinart (2004), Reggie Bush (2005), Caleb Williams (2002)
BYU (Ty Detmer, 1990), Colorado (Rashaan Salaam in 1994), Oregon (Marcus Mariota in 2014), Stanford (Jim Plunkett in 1970) and UCLA (Gary Beban in 1967).
The AP Poll only went to No. 10 in 1962. The three independents to break into the Top 10 were Army, Miami and Penn State.