It isn’t easy to make basketball history at North Carolina, which fairly reeks with that stuff. But this season’s Tar Heels, once ranked No. 2 in the nation, managed to do just that.
Take, for example, the accomplishment they achieved with their Jan. 22 loss to Florida State. The honor they received for that defeat was a non-appearance in the next week’s national rankings, which they had graced for 338 straight games stretching back more than a decade.
They finished the season without reappearing in the rankings, so their tournament selection was in doubt. They had appeared in every NCAA tournament played over the last 25 years. But here they were 18-13, first-round losers to Wake Forest in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament and bumbling underachievers who had split their last 10 games and were sitting on the NCAA bubble.
This was another historical moment for Carolina, which has regarded a bid as its birthright, and when it finally did get one for the 26th straight time, it was accompanied by a very pedestrian eighth seed. This tied the school record for lowest seed received, but then the Tar Heels resurrected themselves and winged into Austin for their South Regional semifinal with Tennessee off victories over Missouri and top-seeded Stanford.
“We feel there’s a sense of urgency for us as a team,” senior guard Ed Cota said before Friday night’s game against the fourth-seeded Volunteers. “We’ve had an up-and-down year, and now we’re just trying to make the best of it, play hard and prove to ourselves that we are one of the best teams in the country. We feel we have to prove to ourselves that we belong here, so everybody on the team has really stepped it up.”
On Friday night at the University of Texas’ Erwin Center, the Tar Heels again stepped up, and moved onto a Sunday meeting with Tulsa with a 74-69 victory over Tennessee.
This was a game that merely added another chapter to North Carolina’s eccentric season, which it entered both well-equipped and highly regarded. It had, in Cota, an accomplished point, and it had an inside force in 7-foot junior center Brendan Haywood. It also had Jason Capel, a 6-8 swingman, and freshman guard Joe Forte, who went on to be named the ACC’s rookie of the year.
They comprised the core of a group many favored to reach the Final Four, but never did they come close to realizing those expectations.
When the Tar Heels fell out of the rankings for the first time since 1990, they resembled not the royalty of college basketball but just another average team. They lacked emotion and cohesiveness, offensive execution and defensive intensity, and they didn’t recover them until, bid in hand, they went on to contribute their part to the madness that is March.
