Ten Greatest VMI Basketball Players: Number 8

Mostly forgotten among the legacy of the late 1970's teams is the much overlooked 1963–64 VMI basketball squad which captured the school's first Southern Conference tournament title, and from that the first NCAA tournament appearance. The team was led by Charlie Schmaus, Jeff Gausepohl, Joe Kruszewski, Bobby Watson, and captained by Bill Blair, #8 on this list.

Blair as seen in the 1964 Bomb

Hometown: Whitesburg, KY
High School: Randolph-Macon Academy
-1964 SoCon Tournament Champion
-VMI 1,000-point club
-9th all-time leading avg. point scorer

Bill Blair was not a player that blew away the stat sheets. As an underclassman he was overshadowed by Norm Halberstadt, who led the team in scoring on three separate occasions, twice with over 20 points per game. Halberstadt is third on the all-time point scoring average list and scored 30+ points in a game ten times (fourth most), becoming one of the most prolific scorers in the Institute's history.

But by the time Blair was a junior he filled Halberstadt's shoes quite nicely, averaging a team-leading 19.9 PPG, just shy of twenty. In his first three years at VMI, the team was, naturally, quite bad; twenty wins in that span. It looked to continue that way in Blair's senior year after the Keydets got off to an 0–3 start. Their first win came over George Washington (a conference rival at the time, who they would later play and beat in the SoCon tournament), and after starting 6–9, the team reeled off six wins out of eight games en route to the conference title.

The most memorable game of this run was a massive upset of Lefty Driesell's Davidson Wildcats, 22–3 and nationally ranked at the time. The Keydets escaped with an 82–81 victory in Charlotte after beating Furman by four the previous night. VMI took care of business in the championship game and won their first conference title in any league. Blair, the captain of the team, paced VMI that season with 18 PPG while Gausepohl had a team-best .556 field goal percentage.

The Keydets were promptly booted from the tournament by Princeton, 86–60, a game in which Blair scored 20 points. But it was trivial, because the thrill and accomplishment of winning the Southern Conference for the first time was more than enough. Blair would later become VMI's head coach in the mid-1970's and lead the team to an NCAA Elite 8 appearance with the likes of Ron Carter, Will Bynum, and Dave Montgomery. He later worked a failed stint as an NBA coach with the New Jersey Nets and Minnesota Timberwolves, lasting less than two full seasons.

His legacy at VMI, though, is not to be forgotten, and Blair will always be notable for putting the Institute on the map.