University of North Carolina Athletics
Heels Try to Find Right Mindset for Huskies
January 16, 2004 | Men's Basketball
Jan. 16, 2004
By Adam Lucas
When the Temple Owls brought their number-one ranking to Chapel Hill on Feb. 21, 1988, the Carolina basketball world--and the rest of the world--looked very different.
Roy Williams was a Carolina assistant coach, and the prospects of him coaching the Kansas Jayhawks seemed remote. There was no argyles on the Tar Heel uniforms, and the familiar bell-bottomed warm-ups were still in use. Dean Smith had moved his team into a shiny new palace sporting his name two years earlier. The first George Bush hadn't yet been elected. "Seasons Change" by Expose was the number one song in America. A "website" was as foreign an idea as a "cell phone."
Something else was different that day, when Temple became the only top-ranked nonconference team to ever visit Chapel Hill: Carolina fully expected to win the game. The Heels were ranked fifth in the country and riding a six-game winning streak. The prospect of a non-ACC team coming into the Smith Center and emerging with a victory seemed inconceivable. The Owls eventually won the game handily, but it was a stunning victory, one that no one in Chapel Hill could have dreamed of before tip-off.
Sixteen years later, Roy Williams is trying to recapture that feeling as Connecticut prepares to become the second top-ranked non-ACC squad to play in Chapel Hill.
"That's a huge factor," Williams said. "The work ethic gives you the confidence but deep down you know you're going to win. When things aren't going well, there are unfortunate things that happen and they snowball. Having the faith and the confidence and the tenacity that you can say, 'I know I'm going to win,' is pretty strong."
That's something Carolina hasn't had in their three losses, all of which were winnable games. The Heels had Maryland by the throat early in Wednesday night's loss but eventually let them slip away. As inconceivable as it seems, no one on the Tar Heel roster has ever played in an NCAA Tournament game. At Kansas, Williams usually had the luxury of being the top-ranked team looking to ward off upsets, not the challenger attempting to spring the upset. This year, though, he's having to instill that 1988-type mindset in a team that has lost almost 40 games the past three seasons.
As befits a team considered the best in the country, Connecticut won't have much sympathy for the learning process. They've lost one game, an upset at the hands of Georgia Tech in which Emeka Okafor was limited by an injury.
Okafor will be 100 percent for Saturday's 3:30 tip, which presents an imposing problem for a Carolina offense that hasn't yet clicked in consecutive games. More importantly, though, the Huskies will almost always have five players on the floor who can score. The Tar Heel defense has vacillated between stingy and sieve-like, and their most recent effort was closer to the latter. For the second time in three ACC games, the Tar Heel opponent shot better than 50 percent from the field, prompting Williams to pore over 15 years of box scores after the team plane arrived in Chapel Hill at 3:15 a.m. Thursday morning in an attempt to discover how many times opponents made half their field goals against his Jayhawk team.
The results? It happened only three times in the past two years.
Putting together improved defensive efforts is the immediate area of emphasis for Carolina, which has only league games left after Saturday's contest. Last year's team held sharpshooting Ben Gordon to 5-of-19 in the Heels' 68-65 upset and limited Okafor to 13 points. They'll need to do that again to control a Connecticut team that Williams called one of the best he's seen in the last dozen years.
"If we go out and play 50 times better than Wednesday, we still may not win," he said.
Notes: Williams said junior Jawad Williams will play and will rejoin the starting lineup if he feels he can be effective. "The mask is a problem for him and it takes awhile to get used to it," Williams said...Sean May had a philosophical outlook on how to play against Okafor, who blocked nine shots in a recent outing: "He's a shot blocker. He's going to block a couple. It's not the first time you've gotten your shot blocked and won't be the last."
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.
