From caustic pilots to former coaches, plenty of perspective on UNC’s struggles
A single-engine plane belonging to UNC was forced to make an emergency landing at RDU International Airport on Tuesday with a landing-gear problem. After landing safely, one of the pilots diagnosed the issue with an air-traffic controller.
“I think our basketball program got into our gear,” the pilot said, according to a recording obtained by WTVD. Attempts to reach UNC Air Operations to determine the pilot’s identity were unsuccessful.
Alas, when things go bad, everyone wants to pile on. When they go as badly, as they have for North Carolina, that includes not only everyone on the ground but in the air, too.
“Nobody’s going to feel sorry for us,” Leaky Black said later Friday, ahead of Saturday’s game against Miami.
That is an absolute, like the firmness of the earth. No one’s ever going to feel sorry for UNC — for the players maybe, but not for their fans and certainly not for Ol’ Roy — but such is life in a down year for North Carolina.
An emergency landing offers an apt metaphor for what’s gone wrong this season with the Tar Heels. Airplanes are designed on the “Swiss cheese” principle, with multiple redundancies, so that one or two or several holes won’t hurt you … as long as they don’t all line up. In this case, the UNC pilots were able to pump the landing gear down manually when it wouldn’t deploy. Problem solved.
The Tar Heels have suffered a series of failures, none of which on its own would necessarily be catastrophic: the departure, for various reasons, of point guards Seventh Woods and Jalek Felton; the early exit for the NBA of Coby White; losing Sterling Manley for the entire season; Cole Anthony’s knee injury; and injuries to several other players, including Brandon Robinson missing games after getting hit by a drunk driver.
Even missing Anthony might have been surmountable to a degree if so much else wasn’t already compromised, or if any of the four McDonald’s all-Americans in next year’s recruiting class had arrived a year early.
The holes all lined up.
Sleepless nights
Wednesday night’s loss at Virginia Tech was North Carolina’s sixth straight in the ACC, a school record. Roy Williams said Friday he watched tape until 6 a.m. after getting back from Blacksburg before getting two hours of sleep. He’s following the same playbook he tried in 2010 when the Tar Heels lost the core of the 2009 title team, suffered a wave of injuries and ended up in the NIT. He’s also taking Dean Smith’s name in vain, for the same reason he did then.
“I am mad at coach Smith right now, to be honest with you,” Williams said. “He told us two or three times, and I always disagreed with him, around here we should have a really bad year every seven or eight years so people appreciate what we do the rest of the time. I told him I disagreed and I didn’t want to go through that crap. Crap is the best word I can give you right now. One of the few times I disagreed with coach Smith, but I violently disagreed with him.”
The 2010 season, which included Larry Drew II calling UNC fans “spoiled” before abandoning the team in the middle of the next season, certainly did what Smith would have hoped.
If 2019 falls into line with 2010 and 2002 — on Smith’s schedule, more or less — there is still one other person who may understand better than everyone else what North Carolina is going through. Matt Doherty coached the 2002 team, which until this year held almost all of the “first time since” spots in the darker recesses of the record book. (It at least beat Clemson in Chapel Hill.)
A different Smith maxim
Doherty coached that 8-20 team in his second year back at North Carolina after Williams, who had been Doherty’s assistant coach as a player at UNC, decided to stay at Kansas. All of the dynamics this team has found itself fighting, from the injuries to the ebbing confidence to the fans jumping ship, Doherty’s team fought as well. Only the freshmen on that team were his recruits (three would go on to win a national title under Williams in 2005) but the expectations were as high as they always are at North Carolina.
“I’ve been there. It’s not fun,” Doherty told the N&O on Friday. “Coach Williams is tough enough to get through it. They’ve obviously got talent coming in. But those are your players. That’s your team. Those kids are someone’s sons. You want to protect them as best you can and teach them and help them grow through this adversity.”
Doherty, now a broadcaster for the ACC Network, urged this team to take refuge in a different Smith maxim.
“It’s a life lesson. You will get through it,” Doherty said. “It’s not the end of the world. If you play as coach Smith would always say, hard, smart and together, that’s all you can ask.”
This story was originally published January 24, 2020 at 3:31 PM.
