University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: One Of Those Nights For Tar Heels In Champaign
December 3, 2002 | Men's Basketball
Dec. 3, 2002
by Adam Lucas
You'll no doubt wake up Wednesday morning muttering about the powers-that-be sending Carolina to play the one true on-campus road game out of the four Tuesday night ACC-Big Ten Challenge games. You'll probably complain around the water cooler about the Tar Heels being assigned to tackle the two-time defending conference champion Illinois Fighting Illini while other, more highly-ranked ACC teams were given cushier matchups.
You'll do all those things. But know this: come March, you'll be glad Carolina played this game, which ended in a 92-65 defeat.
There was zero downside to Tuesday's trip to Champaign, other than the fact that Illinois' Sean Harrington joined other illustrious names like Fred Vinson, Randolph Childress, and Harold Arceneaux as players who seemed to find a way to make back-snapping shots at just the right moment. You don't want this Tar Heel team, which features three sophomores and six freshmen, to have their first road test be an ACC game. You don't want them to wander into Tallahassee on December 22 and be wide-eyed at the hatred that comes with a Carolina blue jersey on the road.
After Tuesday night, there's no danger of that. Sure, the Heels had already played a road game at Old Dominion, but there were two sections of the 8,000 seat arena filled with Carolina fans. In UI's Assembly Hall, there were maybe 20 seats occupied by light blue, and every orange-shirted fan was going bananas as the Illini put together a nearly perfect second half.
When they weren't hitting timely three-pointers they nearly high-lowed the Heels to death, and unless Matt Doherty is capable of coaching his team to be taller, which some fans will no doubt demand, some adjustments will have to be made before Saturday. It was the type of game that didn't really lend itself to analysis, since it essentially came down to Illinois doing everything right and Carolina--other than Sean May and his 21 points--doing nearly everything wrong. Defensively, Illinois did to Carolina what the Heels had done to five previous opponents this year, as they contested every pass and prevented any offensive continuity.
"There will be days like this," Doherty said after the game, and the problem was that we knew that at the beginning of the season, it's just that five huge wins had made us forget. We knew in October that there would be nights when Carolina's freshmen looked like freshmen, but after they strung together five senior-type performances, we began to convince ourselves that maybe youth was unimportant. But even in 2002, freshmen are still freshmen and the adjustment to the college game isn't as easy as this group made it look over the first two weeks of the season. Just ask Phil Ford, who had to endure "This Ford is an Edsel" headlines after his first two games in a Carolina jersey.
Doherty had told his team after Friday night's win over Stanford that they had to get better at finishing a game. He got another chance to reinforce that point Tuesday, as the Heels appeared to turn on the cruise control with about five minutes left, ballooning what had been a close game into a blowout. Doherty didn't wait for the locker room to make his point this time, calling a timeout with two minutes left to educate his squad.
The Illini fans gave Carolina an unwitting compliment at the end of the game, chanting "Overrated" at a team that didn't even get a single vote in any preseason top 25 poll. They stormed the court after the win, and this being Big Ten country, no doubt were looking for some goalposts to remove. A trade secret to keep in mind for those Carolina supporters disheartened about the loss: fans don't storm the floor after wins over bad teams. It's when they stop storming the floor that you should get worried.
When fans in Chapel Hill last got a chance to see their Tar Heels, Carolina was leaving the Smith Center with a 2-0 record and a comeback win over Rutgers. There was a sense of giddiness about this team, but no one had any real idea about exactly how good they were. Picture this: you're walking out of the Dean Dome on November 20 and someone tells you, "Hey, the Heels will be back here against Kentucky with a 5-1 record after playing Kansas, Stanford, and Illinois." You'd have taken it without blinking.
So keep that in mind for these three days before the Wildcats come to town, a game when the student risers will be back in place along the baseline and there should be 21,000 fans in full throat.
Kentucky has had Carolina's number over the past two seasons, but this batch of Tar Heels has shown a certain disdain for history. And history is exactly what, as of Wednesday morning, the Illinois game is.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly, click here.
