University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Early Warning Signs
March 8, 2010 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
March 8, 2010
By Adam Lucas
With a few days to pause and take stock of a disappointing season, Marcus Ginyard now realizes he saw warning signs before Carolina ever played a game in the 2009-10 season.
The Tar Heels travel to Greensboro later this week for an ACC Tournament opening-round game against 7th-seeded Georgia Tech. It's an appropriate postseason beginning for the bizarre world Carolina has inhabited over the past three months, as the Tar Heels will play on Thursday for the first time ever, with the lowest ACC seed ever, trying to avoid Roy Williams's first NIT appearance ever. Remember, one year ago the primary worry was Ty Lawson's toe and playing close to home in the NCAA Tournament. Now, the concern is whether Carolina will be allowed to keep playing--anywhere.
"Who knows what we might do this week?" Roy Williams said on Monday afternoon. "But at this point I'm going to look back and (this season) will be the biggest frustration and disappointment of my professional life."
That's a steep fall for a program that appeared poised to reload, not rebuild, back in October. Perhaps we should have paid a little closer attention to those who suspected otherwise.
When Williams met reporters on October 15 for media day, he expressed anxiety about two topics: consistency at the point guard position and outside shooting. As it turns out, those worries were well-founded. The head coach was optimistic about one area--frontcourt depth. That's the same depth that's been diminished by season-ending injuries to David Wear and Ed Davis, plus a 10-game absence for Tyler Zeller and an ankle injury for Travis Wear.
Two weeks after media day, Williams's team had a closed scrimmage against an outside opponent. They were clearly outplayed, leading to a players-only meeting when the team returned to Chapel Hill.
"That scrimmage was terrible," Marcus Ginyard said. "That was the whole season right there in that scrimmage. It was exactly the way this whole year has gone down. We were playing a good team and we weren't ready to play when we got there. We got our butt kicked the very first time we stepped on the court together."
It's easy now to say there should have been some early warning signs from the disappointing trip. But the Tar Heels opened the regular season by winning four straight games, including a 47-point shellacking of North Carolina Central and a 77-73 win over talented Ohio State in New York City. Even by mid-January, Carolina stood 12-4 and 1-0 in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Soon after, though, the problems that had first been evident in the preseason began to emerge. In the wake of last Saturday's 32-point debacle in Durham, Ginyard harkened back to the team's first exposure against another team.
"We were like, `There is no way we can get beat by 30 points the very first time we're playing,'" he said. "How are we not super-pumped to be playing? As soon as we got back we had a meeting in the locker room. We said, `This is how it's supposed to go down. We have to play better than this and more together than this.' Even more indicative of the year, nothing really changed after that."
That includes a very similar listless outing in Atlanta, when Georgia Tech beat the Tar Heels 68-51 in a game that could have been much worse. Even in Chapel Hill, the Yellow Jackets built a 14-point halftime lead before Will Graves's second-half explosion made the final 20 minutes much closer.
"They've beaten us both times and it hasn't been pleasant," Williams said.
No team other than Duke has beaten the Tar Heels three times in the same season since Georgia Tech did it in 1985. To avoid it happening again, the energy level at the opening tip will have to improve against a Jacket team that must win to bolster its NCAA Tournament credentials.
In many ways, it's a continuation of the same struggles the Tar Heels have had since the opening weeks of practice.
"Not coming out ready to play has happened a lot to us," Ginyard said. "We let teams beat up on us for a little bit before deciding to start doing things the right way. In the ACC, teams are good enough to put it on you like that. This is going to be another example of having to play right from the beginning."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of five books on Carolina basketball, including the just-released book on the 2009 national title, One Fantastic Ride. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter.
