Lucas: A Rough Road

By Adam Lucas

When this year's Atlantic Coast Conference schedule was released, conventional wisdom held that Carolina once again faces a highly backloaded slate stacked with the toughest games in late February and March.

Which is what makes it even more daunting that the Tar Heels are about to embark on an almost unprecedented week, followed by a home game against a team that has already beaten Duke, followed by another road game against a ranked team.

Carolina is a solid 12-2 after Saturday's win over Wake Forest, but we're likely to learn as much or more in the next week as we have in the previous month and a half. Trips to Florida State and Virginia mean Carolina will play back-to-back road games against ranked ACC opponents for just the third time in the Roy Williams era. The others came in 2013 (UNC lost at No. 8 Miami, 87-61, and lost at No. 2 Duke, 73-68) and 2004 (UNC won at No. 16 Wake, 79-73, then lost at No. 15 Georgia Tech, 88-77).

After the two-game road swing, the Tar Heels host Boston College, visit Notre Dame, and return home to face Clemson. In all, Carolina plays four top-30 teams in the Ken Pomeroy ratings in the next five games. The supposedly much tougher final six games of the regular season include just three top-30 KenPom opponents.

The next time anyone tries to tell you that any league, anywhere, is the equal of the ACC, inform them of this stretch, and then remind them this is supposed to be the lighter part of the conference schedule.

Need another challenge? On Wednesday, Carolina faces a Florida State team that is one of the most athletic in the league, an uptempo squad that creates havoc defensively with long arms and forced turnovers. Then, less than 72 hours later, the Tar Heels will travel to a Virginia team that is—by the numbers—even more proficient than the Seminoles defensively, but does it in a completely different way. As usual, the Cavaliers grind the game nearly to a halt, thrive on frustration, and make maintaining any offense inside the three-point line an exercise in futility.

The fact that both of these games are the only meetings of the year against these particular foes only serves to heighten their importance. Even though the versions of these teams playing in March are likely to be very different than today's teams, there's a decent chance the outcome of these games could decide ACC Tournament seeding (where one tiebreaker at the top of the loaded league could mean the difference between no bye, a single bye, or a double bye) and/or contribute to NCAA Tournament seeding lines.

The good news is the Tar Heels will enter this stretch off their most consistent practice time of the last four weeks, having made it through the cycle of exams and the holidays and back on campus with a week until classes resume. They've also had a varied nonconference schedule that has presented them with differing styles that bear some similarities to what they'll see this week. Arkansas, for example, tried to pressure all over the court in a similar fashion to FSU (that one went well), while Wofford wanted to make Carolina play defense for the entire shot clock (still some work to do there). Having already played true road games at Stanford and Tennessee is good preparation for the environment in Tallahassee and Charlottesville.
And while Williams is breaking in some youthful players in the post, his rotation also includes several conference veterans. This would be a series of games that could be disastrous with a group of players who were new to the ACC; instead, Joel Berry, for example, has already played six career games against the Cavaliers and three against the Seminoles.

Locked in a tight game against Wake Forest in the league opener, fellow senior Theo Pinson realized something: "I've been through this so many times," the Greensboro native said he thought late in that contest. "You know everything you have to do."

So the Tar Heels are familiar with the challenges presented by the next several games. Now they have to execute against one of the toughest stretches of the year.

University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Theo Pinson

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