Unbeaten and unhappy, North Carolina can’t stay both for long. It’s one or the other.
However this season was supposed to start for North Carolina, this wasn’t what Hubert Davis or his players expected. Undefeated, 3-0 and No. 1 in the country, yes, that was on the table. But the Tar Heels’ path to that point has been anything but smooth, and Tuesday it got downright turbulent.
Clearly, the Tar Heels have run out of patience, on both sides of the aisle, after Tuesday’s narrow win over Gardner-Webb.
They let a late 14-point lead wither to five before hanging on for a 72-66 win, but whatever relief they might have felt was quickly swamped by frustrations that had been held back and were now unleashed.
None of UNC’s wins, over UNC Wilmington, Charleston and Gardner-Webb, have been particularly impressive by the usual standards of the No. 1 team, let alone the expectations North Carolina brought into the season. And while that may not have caught up with the Tar Heels in terms of results, it’s about to catch up with them at practice. Davis made that perfectly clear Tuesday night
“We’re definitely having a reality check right now with everything we know we’re doing wrong,” UNC guard Caleb Love said.
Asked if he saw any red flags, Davis said he did not. But he then proceeded to throw as many yellow flags as one of the ACC’s third-tier football crews – six of them, as he proceeded to enumerate all his issues with his team, ranging from toughness to sustained effort to commitment to defense to the failure to follow the scouting report.
“It’s very difficult to do the exact opposite of what the coaches asked you to do,” Davis said. “That seems to me to be harder than what you’ve been asked to do.”
Davis reminisced about his days coaching the UNC junior varsity, when no one worried about their draft status or NIL deals, when no parents texted or called him about roles or playing time, when it was just basketball and only basketball — “It was just pure,” Davis said — and how this varsity group needed to capture that attitude.
And he said he wished he could take the team back out on the court Tuesday night, or Wednesday — a mandated off day — but instead left them to their leisure with the threat that playing time could be “tweaked and pivoted and changed and altered” and that he would see them Thursday. Ominously.
None of which Davis expected to be dealing with at this point in this season, with this veteran group that was mere minutes away from a national title. Whatever had been simmering boiled over Tuesday. Davis was, he admitted, surprised to find his team at this juncture.
“I am. That’s the shocking thing. I really am,” Davis said. “I really felt like at the beginning of the year there would be a hunger and a thirst. I really felt that. I was excited about that. It felt like it was coming from different directions, different viewpoints.”
But it hasn’t materialized, not as anyone expected. Armando Bacot, among others, dismissed the notion that this could be standard November finding-your-way stuff. It’s something less fundamental and more concerning, whatever it might be: the hangover from last season everyone feared, the pressure of being the No. 1 team so many have suffered, something less easier to put a finger on.
“I guess I just expect more out of us,” Bacot said. “But it’s early in the season. We’ll figure it out.”
There’s only so much time. As Love pointed out, “it’s going to get real soon,” and there are opponents coming up who won’t be as forgiving with the Tar Heels, whether that’s in the PK85 in Portland or trips to Indiana and Virginia Tech right after that.
It’s better to confront these shortcomings after an unimpressive win than a disastrous loss. Unlike Syracuse and Florida State, the Tar Heels haven’t hurt themselves yet, although the bottom half of the ACC seems determined to do damage to the league’s reputation again.
It’s a strange place for the No. 1 team to be, both unbeaten and unhappy. The Tar Heels can’t stay both for long. It’s one or the other.
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This story was originally published November 15, 2022 at 11:39 PM with the headline "Unbeaten and unhappy, North Carolina can’t stay both for long. It’s one or the other.."
