University of North Carolina Athletics
Jacobs: Survive And Advance
March 15, 2012 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers
March 14, 2012
by Barry Jacobs, TarHeelBlue.com
Spring is a wonderful time in North Carolina. Pastels and blossoms, birdsong and sweet fragrances abound. But so too do puffs of pollen and vulnerable fledglings fallen to earth.
And just as beauty contains the seeds of struggle and loss, so adversity can prepare the path to fresh growth.
Certainly this early spring has provided some of everything, the good and the bad, for athletics at the University of North Carolina.
The Tar Heel women's basketball team missed the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2001. The Tar Heel men fared better.
Roy Williams' Heels started the month of March by thumping Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium, a performance the coach called his team's best this season. The result secured North Carolina's second consecutive first-place finish in the ACC standings, the fourth in five years.
Then came an ACC Tournament that began with a left wrist injury to John Henson, the rebounding and shotblocking leader for both UNC and the ACC.
"John, he affects the game in more ways than one," said squad orchestrator Kendall Marshall, whose 31 assists set a new standard for a single ACC Tournament. "Obviously with the double-doubles he puts up on a consistent basis, but more so the shots that he alters on the defensive end. That may not show up in the stats, but you could tell teams weren't so worried about attacking us on the inside when the defensive player of the year is not sitting in there."
Actually, you could tell.
In the final Florida State became the first team this season to make better than half of its field goal tries against North Carolina. Meanwhile, without Henson in the lineup, the Heels blocked a single shot in three games and hit only 39.4 percent from the floor against Leonard Hamilton's club.
UNC did reach the ACC Tournament championship contest for the fourth time in six years.
To get there the Heels handled eighth seed Maryland despite losing Henson early, then outlasted NC State 69-67 in a game that had enough controversial block-charge calls to rile even neutral observers.
It's doubtful an unpenalized collision between Wolfpack defender Alex Johnson and Marshall --en route to the decisive basket for UNC -- will long be remembered outside Raleigh. Still, you couldn't help but recall another ACC Tournament semifinal, 55 years earlier, when a block-charge call went Lennie Rosenbluth's way in a narrow victory over Wake Forest that kept the Heels rolling toward an undefeated season and the 1957 NCAA championship.
The 2012 squad has been contemplating its own national title since being eliminated by Kentucky in last year's NCAA regional final.
The current group has built an impressive resume, more impressive than the Tar Heels enjoyed at a similar junction in 2011. This year's squad enters the NCAAs with 29 wins, equal to the victory total all of last season. Three players made the all-conference first team, compared to none in 2011. Carolina was a No. 2 seed in the '11 NCAA tournament; this season is the fifth in nine years under Williams that UNC is a top seed.
Most prognosticators envision the Tar Heels reaching the Final Four. President Barack Obama, among others, picked them to win the national championship.
Several players shrugged off a chance to leave early for the pros following the '11 season in order to make such a permanent mark at Chapel Hill. Through teasing in summer pickup games by Tar Heel champions from 2005 and 2009, and repeated comparisons with the talent-laden `09 team in preseason media sessions, the '12 squad set its sights on the school's sixth NCAA crown.
Marshall soon realized comparisons and competition with past squads, especially champions directed by Williams, were pointless.
"I learned quickly that you can't compare yourself to them," Marshall said. "They both had different paths to the way they won their championships, and I think we have our own path."
The sophomore, now the modern ACC leader for assists in a season (330 and counting), does admit spending the last month focused on reaching the end of that path with a flourish, "wanting to be remembered for what we've done on the court, trying to leave a legendary mark."
Meanwhile, even as the men's basketball team seeks new heights the football program now begins the task of escaping new depths.
Less than a day after Williams' squad was rewarded by the NCAA, the football program was punished by a different arm of the same organization. That fall from grace has been costly, well-documented, and painful.
Asked his response to those events as a Carolina alum and coach, Williams acknowledged that "it's hard figuring out what to say." He paused, joking that he doesn't always pick his words with sufficient care.
Then he added: "As an alum, as a person that loves North Carolina and loves what athletics represent at North Carolina, it's been a sad time. We've had some problems in the past and the university has bounced back tremendously, the athletic department has bounced back tremendously, and I think what we have to do is learn from it and move on. There's nothing you can do to change it. Let's learn from it and move on."
Or, to employ parlance familiar at this time of year, survive and advance.
