Rivalry was enough for UNC’s players, but the rest thrown on top didn’t hurt either
Hubert Davis left some doubt this week whether he considered N.C. State a rivalry, citing Dean Smith and playing the just-another-game card, a truly Sendekian approach. His players clearly had their own thoughts.
How could they not? If you’re going to honor Roy Williams and the 1982 champions on the same afternoon, it’s clearly not Just Another Game. It’s a Big Game. And North Carolina is a Big Game team.
That’s not an infallible proposition, because the games against Tennessee and Kentucky were unquestionably big games and North Carolina barely made it onto the court for those games. Still, the Tar Heels’ best performances of the season – against Michigan, against Virginia, against State – have come in full buildings in games that really matter.
Like against a rival.
The players didn’t even need the rest of it thrown on top Saturday to deliver discount biscuits to their fans, 100-80, for the first time since a win over N.C. State in 2019. There’s a theme there, no matter who the coach is, whether Michael Jordan is watching from the scorer’s table or not.
But the rest of it was piled on anyway.
“Just it being a State game, we already knew the energy was going to be there and it was going to be a big game, but that was the icing on the cake,” North Carolina’s Armando Bacot said.
Davis can just-another-game his way through that part of it all he wants, and when he was in school, N.C. State was at as low an ebb as in its entire history, so if he didn’t grow up wanting to stick it to the Wolfpack the way Williams did, it’s understandable.
But everything else pointed that way, from the choice of ceremonies to North Carolina’s performance. It was a show of dominance in every respect.
From very early, this had echoes of the snow-delayed 2017 Mark Gottfried-Dennis Smith Jr. debacle when the Tar Heels threatened to record their largest margin of victory in the series, coming close to a record that’s now 101 years old.
In that 107-56 thumping, it was almost entirely about the Wolfpack being bad. Truly, epically bad. A harbinger of how that regime would sullenly end.
It was harder to sort out how much of Saturday was just UNC being exceptionally good, posting its best long-range shooting performance in four years – 15-for-23 from 3-point range – although the quality of shots provided and prolonged benching of Dereon Seabron certainly indicated that N.C. State has no shortage of issues of its own to solve. Losing to North Carolina like this – and it has happened too often – always leaves a wound that doesn’t easily heal.
Still, whether the Wolfpack could have done much to slow North Carolina down became almost immaterial. The Tar Heels have proven tough for anyone to beat when they’re in top gear; the question is what it takes for them to get there.
That’s a mystery everyone, internally and externally, is still trying to figure out. Jordan, who spoke to the team afterward, has his own thoughts.
“When our coach has more passion than we do, that’s a recipe for disaster,” Leaky Black said Jordan told the team.
The passion was unquestionably there Saturday, befitting the rivalry and the fanfare. The Tar Heels are 1-0 against N.C. State and 1-0 in front of past championship teams this season.
“If we’re going to play like this, let’s get them all here,” Davis said.
This story was originally published January 29, 2022 at 5:51 PM.
