In an unpredictable season, a predictable NCAA tournament exit for North Carolina
What an all-too-predictable end to an unpredictable season. Even the most amateur of bracketologists could foresee North Carolina coming out of the gate slow and falling behind by a wide margin. If it was always this easy, everyone would get it right.
There were few teams more erratic in general over the course of the season than the Tar Heels, but if they had one thread of consistency it was the slow starts that left them often, but not always, with too much work to do.
Whether that was merely a function of youth or harsh reality for a team whose best players were forwards but couldn’t always count on the guards to get them the ball, let alone make enough outside shots to unclog the lane, those issues became a rock of certainty in an uncertain world.
When it worked, when North Carolina’s guards could hold up their end of the bargain, the Tar Heels could beat anyone. When it didn’t, they were left in the position they were in Friday night — Wisconsin clogged the middle and the freshman backcourt was incapable of unlocking the defense.
It’s the post mortem not only for Friday’s 85-62 loss to ninth-seeded Wisconsin in front of what passes these days for a rowdy partisan crowd of Badger fans at Purdue’s Mackey Arena, but also eighth-seeded North Carolina’s season.
“Caleb (Love) and RJ (Davis) and Kerwin (Walton), they wanted to do well,” North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. “We weren’t good enough or experienced enough or coached well enough, all of the above tonight. But it’s frustrating, guys. We take bad shots and turn the ball over. It’s been our Achilles’ heel all year long. But the kids do want to do well. I never had a kid that wanted to turn the ball over. I’ve never had a kid that wanted to miss a shot.”
Not even an out-of-body performance by Armando Bacot to start the second half — 15 points and two steals in less than nine minutes — could drag the Tar Heels back into the game, not with Wisconsin’s Brad Davison finishing with more points (29) than charges drawn (0).
“A lot of times, we were settling for 3s or settling for bad shots,” Love said. “We couldn’t get anything going in the first half especially. In the second half, we tried to come out with some fire, and we did, but we had dug ourselves such a big hole we couldn’t get out of it.”
The way Wisconsin played demanded near-perfection from the Tar Heels. They weren’t anywhere close. It was not only a third straight NCAA exit by double digits since the 2017 national title — by an average of 20.3 points — it was the worst NCAA tournament loss of Williams’ entire career.
The magnitude of the loss showed on his face. Williams had to remind himself afterward, several times, that he was lucky to be coaching college basketball, as the toll this long and trying season took on him was all too apparent. Even considerations of the promise of next season were couched in the reality that “kids nowadays have decisions to make,” and any evolution is not guaranteed.
Along the way, one of the most improbable streaks in college basketball came to an end: Williams’ 29-0 record in the first round of the NCAA tournament, first at Kansas and then at North Carolina. It survived when the Tar Heels were a No. 4 seed, a No. 6 seed, the first time they were a No. 8 seed under Williams, but it couldn’t survive Wisconsin shooting 48 percent from 3-point range.
The ACC, meanwhile, lost its first three games in Indiana. Clemson and Syracuse still had yet to play late Friday night, but there’s suddenly a lot of pressure on Virginia and Florida State, both No. 4 seeds and the pride of the conference, on Saturday.
The Tar Heels went out the way they came in, hoping against hope their promising young guards would grow up quickly and allow their talented big men to thrive. They lost to a Big Ten team in December and a Big Ten team in March, went 0-2 against teams from Wisconsin and didn’t do enough during the regular season to avoid a veteran team from a tough conference like the Badgers in the postseason.
From start to finish, the issues never changed. Perhaps it was unrealistic to expect they ever would. It was the wrong year to be this young, with all the disruptions and restrictions and the lack of anything approaching a normal college experience.
“Twenty-nine games,” Williams said. “I’m still saying a lot of the same kind of things.”
With that, Williams’ streak is over, the Tar Heels’ season ended in another blowout NCAA loss and the reverberations run deeper in history than that. For the first time since Black Sunday in 1979, the Triangle has gone 0-for-the-NCAA-tournament.
This story was originally published March 19, 2021 at 10:15 PM.
