by Dave Zeitlin C'03
 
Even as he practiced on the Palestra floor, Tom Crowley W'78 could hear the phone ringing from the coach's office and knew something was up. His suspicions were raised when Chuck Daly, then the head coach of the Penn men's basketball team, ran back and forth to take the calls rather than sending a manager in to answer. And when Daly, at the end of a November practice in 1977, told Crowley and the rest of the players that he needed to call a meeting the following morning, it became clear to him what was about to happen.
 
"I remember walking off the floor, looking at the guys and saying, 'He's gone,'" Crowley says.
 
Crowley was right. After six seasons in charge, Daly quit unexpectedly to take a job as an assistant coach with Billy Cunningham and the Philadelphia 76ers. For Daly, the move kick-started a Hall of Fame coaching career in the NBA. For the Quakers, it could have been a disaster—a star coach bolting just three weeks before their first game.
 
As it turned out, it was the start of something special as the 1977-78 Quakers, under the guidance of Bob Weinhauer, produced one of the finest seasons in the program's storied history and blazed a trail for Penn's incredible Final Four run the following season.
 
"The change really, really helped us," said Crowley, now an associate athletic director at Butler. "It sounds like I'm criticizing Coach Daly and I'm not. Coach Daly was a wonderful coach obviously. But Weinhauer took over and the whole atmosphere around the program changed."
 
Weinhauer—who, along with several of his former players, will return to the Palestra this Saturday to be honored on the occasion of the 1977-78 team's 40-year anniversary—became famous in basketball circles for Penn's unlikely place in the 1979 Final Four alongside Magic Johnson's Michigan State team and Larry Bird's Indiana State squad.
 
But his first team, a year before, holds a special place in his heart too, in large part because of the bumpy beginning.
 
"Did I feel I was prepared because of my high school career and the four years I spent with Chuck Daly? Sure," says Weinhauer, who was only 37 when he got the job. "Was I nervous? Hell yes."
 
It certainly helped that Weinhauer had been a Penn assistant since 1973, and that Crowley and fellow seniors and tri-captains Keven McDonald C'78 and Stan Greene C'78 had played under him three years earlier when he was the freshman coach. And he had a strong rapport with the trio, with McDonald noting he was "more involved on a personal level" than Daly.
 
Perhaps even more helpful, Weinhauer decided to open the floor and run and press a lot more than the previous two seasons when the Quakers fell off their Ivy perch and finished second to Princeton. (Remarkably, the 1975-76 and 1976-77 campaigns were the only two in the 1970s that Penn did not win the league.) That switch not only immediately excited the players during what could have been a stressful time but also paved the way for the Quakers to rattle opponents with a high-octane offense that shot nearly 50 percent from the field and averaged more than 80 points per game—quite an achievement in the pre-shot clock, pre-three-point line era.
 
Penn's offense was fueled by McDonald, who averaged a whopping 22.3 points per game and saved his best scoring performance for Penn's win over St. Bonaventure in the NCAA Tournament (more on that later). Much earlier in the season, McDonald poured in 28 points to lead the Quakers to an 88-71 win over USC at a late December tournament in Columbia, South Carolina.
 
Following that trip, which also included a narrow loss to Oklahoma, then-Penn athletic director Andy Geiger decided to take the interim tag off Weinhauer's title. The newly permanent head coach's response: guiding Penn to a 78-63 shellacking of Princeton in his very next game.
 
How impressive was that road performance, which immediately restored the Quakers as Ivy League favorites? Let's hear from those who were involved.
 
Legendary Princeton coach Pete Carril, as quoted afterwards in the New York Times: "This was one of the worst lickings we've ever taken by Penn, at least since I've been here."
Weinhauer: "Let me tell you something: that may be the best win by a Penn team at Princeton, ever."
 
Crowley: "It was the best win, I think, in the 70s."
 
While that may seem like hyperbole, it certainly is true that scoring 78 points against a Princeton team known for holding the ball and slowing the game down was somewhat remarkable in that era. But that was just what that potent Quakers squad did, as they followed up that win in Jadwin by scoring 103 vs. the Citadel and 99 against Furman at the Spectrum.
 
It wasn't until their next clash vs. Princeton when Penn's offense was finally slowed down. But the Quakers still managed to sweep the Tigers in Weinhauer's first year — a feat they would replicate the following season — with an equally thrilling 49-44 win at the Palestra.
 
"That one right there, that was the thing that turned the Palestra upside down," Weinhauer said. "The Palestra went crazy. Absolutely crazy."
 
Tony Price W'79 — who averaged 15.2 points per game that season and who, along with Tim Smith C'79, Bobby Willis W'79, James "Booney" Salters W'80 and the late Matt White C'79, would go on to make up the Final Four core following key contributions in 1977-78 — came through with the decisive free throws in the final seconds of that game, before fans rushed the court.
 
According to the New York Times recap, Price also hit Bob Roma in the face with his forearm earlier in the contest, causing Carril to draw a technical foul and, says Crowley, go "crazy after the game."
 
"It was a rough-and-tumble game," Crowley recalls. "The game sort of teetered on the edge of the brawl. It was just raucous the whole game. You could hardly hear yourself. The last couple of minutes of the game symbolized that team — just the resolve that we're winning this thing and going to get to the tournament."
 
While sweeping Princeton certainly put the Quakers in excellent position to return to the NCAA Tournament after a rare two-year absence—Carril went as far as saying, "Quite frankly, as far as we're concerned, it's over"—the road through the Ivies was still a perilous one.
 
The team had to travel to New England for its Yale-Brown trip just after the famous Blizzard of 1978 pelted Providence with over two feet of snow. Crowley remembers the team taking a train from New Haven to Providence, and then being thrown in the back of army trucks and transported to the game by the National Guard. Even still, the Quakers blew out Brown, 108-73, a day after routing Yale, 96-78, behind 36 points from McDonald.
 
The following week, Penn was tripped up at Harvard for its first Ivy loss despite 29 points from McDonald. And the Quakers dropped to 11-2 in the Ivies with an 88-84 loss at Columbia on March 3, falling into a first-place tie with the upstart Lions heading into the final game of the regular season.
 
But Penn took care of business at Cornell in the finale, riding 28 points from McDonald and an unlikely 23 from White to pound the Big Red and claim the outright Ivy title and automatic NCAA berth thanks to a win by Princeton over Columbia the same night.
 
"Just the resolve of the senior class is what I remember," Crowley says. "It was important to us, for the legacy of the class, that we continue the great Penn tradition of being one of the best teams in the country and making the NCAA Tournament."
 
That year's senior class was certainly a well-rounded one as Crowley provided leadership and great shooting while Greene was, says Crowley, "a tremendous defensive player." And then there was McDonald, the offensive star who not only led the Quakers into the NCAA Tournament but carried them to a win once they were there.
 
Playing in his first NCAA Tournament, McDonald scored a career-high 37 points to lead the Quakers to a memorable 92-83 victory over a very good St. Bonaventure team at a packed Palestra on March 12th.
 
"Keven was a special offensive player his whole career," Weinhauer says. "Anything he did did not surprise me on the offensive end of the floor. In that game, we were behind at halftime and he just came out and took over the game."
 
McDonald, now a freelance attorney in New York, said he was motivated by the "enormous disappointment" of watching Penn lose to Kansas State at the Palestra in their last trip to the NCAA Tournament in 1975 (when he was a member of the freshman team).
 
He did not want that to happen again.
 
"Three years later, the thought of that game was running through my mind before the game: that I did not want to let down the fans and I certainly wanted to play well enough as to not let my teammates down," McDonald says. "It was one of those games where the basket seemed as wide as the Atlantic Ocean. I was just in the flow. I was not going to be denied that game."
 
McDonald and the Quakers seemed poised to continue their NCAA run in the next round but surrendered an eight-point lead in the final nine minutes to drop an 84-80 decision to a Duke team that would charge all to the way into the national championship game before losing to Kentucky. Had the Quakers held on, they would have met Big 5 rival Villanova — which they lost to by just one point earlier that season — for a spot in the Final Four.
 
The what ifs remain embedded in many of the former players' minds.
 
"It was a great season," McDonald says. "But for a few bounces of the ball, we had a legitimate shot that year of going to the Final Four."
 
McDonald said he's read arguments that the 1977-78 team was actually better than the team that did get to the Final Four the following year. But like every other Penn alumnus, he was captivated by the 1979 run and proud to have played a part in helping the basketball program reach such a pinnacle.
 
"We were just learning to recognize how good we could be," Weinhauer said of his first team. "We lost to Duke in the Sweet 16 in a game probably the next year we would have won because of the confidence of having been there before.
 
"It was a great team because we were willing to play together as a team and put all individual thoughts aside. I thought we did a great job of setting the tone for every team I coached after them at Penn."
 
Crowley, who went on to a long career in coaching and athletic administration, is still bitter about losing to Duke and says having a late shot blocked by the Blue Devils' Mike Gminski is "not something you ever get over."
 
But 40 years later, he knows the Quakers "played a whale of a game" in what was his final time donning the Red and Blue. And, even if it might get overlooked because of what happened the following season, he firmly believes the 1977-78 squad left behind a crucial legacy at Penn.
 
"I think it was an important connector to the '79 team," Crowley says. "It was a tremendous team. '78 was kind of the year we got our swagger back."
 
The 1977-78 Penn men's basketball team will be honored at halftime of Saturday's game with Yale. Earlier in the day, a special dedication is taking place honoring the 1977-78 and 1978-79 teams in the Tse Center Atrium.