Home, away or Hawaii, these Tar Heels haven’t measured up against tough competition
After a month of waiting to see how things play out, a month in which North Carolina lost to every good team the Tar Heels played, Wednesday’s thumping at the hands of Alabama at the Smith Center left no doubt.
They have a long way to go.
Does North Carolina have the talent to beat anybody in the country? Unquestionably. But at some point you’ve got to go out and do it. And it’s one thing to lose at Kansas, or on a neutral court in Maui. The Crimson Tide — another elite team facing questions about its ceiling — came to Chapel Hill and made short work of the Tar Heels.
That’s 4-0 in games to fill out the schedule and 0-4 in games that matter, a damaging blow not only to North Carolina’s NCAA tournament resume, but the ACC’s hopes at large as well.
After going 1-9 against the SEC on the first day of the so-called “challenge,” the Tar Heels opened the second day with an 94-79 loss while Virginia was busy getting rolled by Florida. There wasn’t much left for anyone to salvage in the late-evening session.
Alabama is an outstanding team, to be sure, but it’s a little frightening that North Carolina can’t put up more of a fight at home, at this point in the season. At 4-4, the Tar Heels have their worst record through eight games since the disastrous 2002 season, and they’ve played schedules this difficult before.
It’s hard to look at a team that has R.J. Davis, Elliot Cadeau and Seth Trimble in the backcourt and do the math on why the Tar Heels seem unable to guard anyone. But that’s a function of a gravely — perhaps fatally — flawed roster. The Tar Heels are so weak up front, it hurts more than their rebounding or lack of any under-the-basket scoring threat. It bleeds over into every aspect of their performance, and the longer they play defense, the more likely someone’s going to get lost on a switch.
“This group has shown flashes of playing at the level it takes to be successful,” North Carolina coach Hubert Davis said. “The next step is to start there and stay there for the full 40 minutes on the floor.”
Against Alabama, their ability to get going in transition was the only thing that kept the Tar Heels in the game in the first half. There are only so many spectacular layups Davis can make when the baskets are coming all too easy at the other end. Freshman Ian Jackson chipped in with a career-high 20, but that came with the occasional and understandable lapse at the other end.
Jackson, at least, offered reason for hope. The rest of it should get better with practice and experience and time, but time’s ticking away fast, and it’s also fair to ask just how much better it can get. Everyone knew the misses in the transfer portal left the Tar Heels undermanned up front — what a luxury Armando Bacot’s prolonged UNC career was — but it turned out to be precisely as damaging as feared.
The good news for UNC, such as it is, is that there’s only one difficult nonconference game left — Florida in Charlotte in two weeks — and there appears to be a significant gap between the ACC’s top tier of Clemson, Duke, North Carolina and Pittsburgh and the rest of the league. The conference schedule is full of the kind of games the Tar Heels have cruised through.
But no one signed up for a bunch of wins over Boston College and Miami, or Elon and Hawaii for that matter. To be among the elite, you’ve got to have at least some reason why you belong other than reputation. That’s all North Carolina has to offer right now.
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This story was originally published December 4, 2024 at 9:25 PM with the headline "Home, away or Hawaii, these Tar Heels haven’t measured up against tough competition."
