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1976 Hoosiers would welcome Kentucky into their exclusive club

Bob Knight, Scott May and Quinn Buckner celebrate the 1976 national championship (USATSI)
Bob Knight, Scott May and Quinn Buckner celebrate the 1976 national championship (USATSI)

Every year, whenever the last unbeaten college basketball team falls for the first time, Tom Abernethy's three sons always take great pleasure in poking fun at their father.

"They'll mockingly tell me, 'Oh, you survived another year, dad,' " Abernethy said. "It's all in jest, of course."

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Abernethy and his 1976 Indiana Hoosiers teammates may not have much longer to lay claim to the title of the last team to capture the national title without losing a game. The 39-year wait for another undefeated team could end in less than a week if Kentucky defeats Wisconsin and either Duke or Michigan State at the Final Four in Indianapolis to become college basketball's first-ever 40-0 team.

Whereas some members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins famously pop open champagne bottles to celebrate whenever the last undefeated NFL team loses each year, members of the 1976 Hoosiers will not have bubbly chilling on ice this weekend in case Kentucky falls. They would welcome the addition of another member to their exclusive club even if it's a regional rival trying to make history in their home state.

"We'd be happy to have another deserving team in the fraternity," Abernethy said. "Kentucky going undefeated wouldn't diminish what we achieved just like what we did shouldn't diminish the accomplishments of the teams before us. It's hard to do night in and night out. It takes a lot of sacrifice by the players, a lot of work by the coaches and luck along the way."

Perfection wasn't the goal for either the 1976 Hoosiers or the 2015 Wildcats at the start of the season, but it wasn't a topic their coaches shied away from either.

Since winning the 2012 national championship, Kentucky's John Calipari has openly stated that one of his goals is to coach college basketball's first 40-0 team. Bob Knight also told members of his Indiana team that if they played to their potential, there's no reason the Hoosiers should ever lose a game.

Bob Knight (USATSI)
Bob Knight (USATSI)

"I remember there were five or six of us in the locker room one day, and Coach Knight came in and he wrote 23-5 or 22-6 on the board," said Saint Louis coach Jim Crews, a key reserve on the 1976 Hoosiers. "He asked us, 'Why should we get beat five times? If we play to our capability, why should we ever get beat?' I don't know if he meant to plant a seed, but that's how I took it."

The 1976 Hoosiers drew motivation from the way their previous season had ended at 31-1 with a 92-90 loss to Kentucky in the Mideast Regional championship game. Starters Abernethy, Scott May, Kent Benson, Quinn Buckner and Bobby Wilkerson returned from that team, as did key reserves Crews and Wayne Radford.

Indiana opened the 1975-76 season No. 1 in the polls and never budged. The Hoosiers survived overtime games against Kentucky and Michigan in the regular season, escaped with a narrow five-point victory over Alabama in the regional final and overcame a six-point halftime deficit against the Wolverines in the national title game to defeat them for the fifth time in two seasons.

"We knew we were better than them, they knew we were better than them, but I'll tell you what, everyone in our locker room also knew they could beat us," Crews recalled. "In one game anything could happen. We had already accomplished a ton of stuff, but there was pressure from the standpoint that this one game was going to determine whether we got everything we wanted or not."

The pressure on Kentucky entering Final Four weekend is one similarity between the two teams. The sacrifices the Wildcats have made to get to this point is another.

Just like future NBA guards Buckner and Wilkerson sacrificed their own individual stats on a frontcourt-dominated Indiana team, Kentucky's stable of former McDonald's All-Americans and future pros have all accepted reduced minutes for the good of the team. No Kentucky players averaged more than 25.8 minutes per game this season and potential No. 1 overall pick Karl-Anthony Towns has averaged barely 20 minutes per game.

"The unselfishness, that's the biggest similarity," Abernethy said. "We had two guards who gave up an awful lot. They both averaged less than 10 points per game, yet they both were drafted by the NBA in the first round. Bobby Wilkerson and Quinn Buckner were unbelievable. If they were elsewhere, they would have had a lot more individual glory, but what they learned and what we all learned was you get a lot more glory when your team succeeds and you win a national title."

There have only been a handful of teams that have made a serious run at an undefeated season in the 39 years since Indiana achieved it.

Larry Bird and Indiana State felt like a team of destiny in 1979 before falling to Magic Johnson and Michigan State in the national championship game. UNLV reached the Final Four in 1991 before falling to a Duke team led by Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley in the national semifinals. Wichita State took an unbeaten record into the NCAA tournament last March, but the Shockers dropped a round-of-32 classic against Kentucky.

There are a handful of reasons why an undefeated season may be more difficult to pull off now than it was in decades past.

Elite programs don't have highly touted juniors and seniors very often like they once did because those top prospects typically turn pro within a year or two. The addition of the 3-point arc also has led to more upsets, as has the depth of talent throughout the sport.

The fact that Kentucky may be the team to do it is somewhat ironic just because of the fractured relationship between Knight and Calipari.

In 2009, Knight said, "We've got a coach at Kentucky who put two schools on probation and he's still coaching. I really don't understand that." In 2011, Knight had to apologize for wrongfully saying that Calipari started five players who hadn't been to class all spring semester.

Would Knight be disappointed if it's Calipari and Kentucky who are the first since his team to pull off an undefeated season? Neither Crews nor Abernethy chose to speculate.

"I wouldn't pretend to speak for Coach Knight on that," Abernethy said, "but myself and my teammates would be happy to see Kentucky do it."

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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!