THBB: Undefeated

...we're four and oh yeah we should be.

Photo by Taylor Smith on Unsplash

Many, if not most, of you who read regularly know that I am a college basketball fan. You may also know that I specifically follow the University of North Carolina Tar Heels. If you’re really unlucky, you’ve heard my long-winded self-serving story about why I am a fan of a University I never attended from a state I didn’t even step foot in until I had been a fan for over two decades.

It stars me, as an unusually insightful and worldly young college student, and involves it involves my college mentor, Coach Smith, Martin Luther King, Jr., a shooting guard who didn’t pick up a basketball before his sophomore year in high school, and the 1982-83 season. It is quite the tale, and I look superb in it. But, I digress.

You will find the THBB: prefix on these posts. You can ignore them, you can load your sports book apps. I don’t recommend one strategy over the other. What winnings I had on the sports book last year were for NCAA men’s basketball.

Word to the wise, don’t bet on tennis like I do. Betting against me would have made you a bundle at the 2022 US Open. I gave back all of last year’s college basketball winnings. But I continue to digress.

The Tar Heels are undefeated. They were pre-season number one in the AP poll. Four of last year’s starters have returned, and they recruited the second coming of Tyler Hansbrough in the off-season, Pete Nance, towering over everyone wearing number 32.

Coach Davis, trying to see if he can scrape together a better season than his rookie coaching season last year (they were three points shy of a national championship), has elected to not put his foot on the gas schedule-wise this year. Yes, they are undefeated. Reasonable critics could expect the Tar Heels Practice squad to be undefeated after playing UNC-Wilmington, College of Charleston, Gardner-Webb, and James Madison University.

No disrespect, but these schools do not have the recruiting draw of the Tar Heels. They’re all good mid-major programs of the type that can bust brackets in March, but Coach Davis does not have a quality team guaranteed to be on the schedule until the last day of November, when they visit Bloomington to play Indiana in the ACC/Big-10 challenge.

I watched Indiana play today. I hope the Tar Heels adjust to the deep end of the pool by then. Indiana looks like a rickety Division 1 squad cobbling itself together right now. They have pieces that work well. Will they put them together well? I dunno. They can definitely do things that might disrupt the Tar Heel defense.

What disrupts the Tar Heel defense? Collapsing to the post and moving the ball around the perimeter. What disrupts their offense? Getting the defensive rebounds. They relied far too heavily on second-chance points last season, and they’re leaning that way again.

That’s easy to do with Armando Bacot, I get that, but isn’t the Tar Heel way Play Hard, Play Smart and Play Together?

Remember the Play Hard part of that?

That’s what has been embarrassing about this so far undefeated season. They have only played hard enough to win, and only after getting spanked for a little while. Really guys? Against Gardner-Webb?

Coach Davis took his foot off the gas in the last twelve minutes against UNC Wilmington, and for good reason. That’s a sister program. No reason to stand on their necks, and he needed to see what he had on the bench. Fair enough. But they needed their starters to pull off the other three wins. That’s not good.

They’re playing smart, smart enough to win. They’re playing together, the core four: RJ Davis, Caleb Love, Bacot and Leakey Black, know each other well. The fifth starter, young phenom Pete Nance, is easy to find on the court. He’s fifty feet tall! Well, 6-11, anyway.

They aren’t playing hard, and the easy guesses about why aren’t pretty or inspirational. Disrespect for opponents? Insufficient preparation? Athletic narcissism? I hope not.

They play Portland on Thanksgiving. I am on the left coast in not-my-beautiful-house this year for Thanksgiving, so I’ll be watching, turkey leg in hand.

Portland is the first game for them in the Phil Knight Invitational (for his 85th birthday) at the Moda Center (home of the Trailblazers). If they win on Thanksgiving, they will meet the winner of Iowa State vs. Villanova game on Friday night. If they lose on Thanksgiving, they play the loser for third-place earlier on Friday.

If they end up seeing Villanova Friday night, that will be their first honest-to-God D1 game this season. Villanova has a new coach, and a young squad. They shouldn’t be a threat, but beating the Tar Heels would be quite the feather in their cap.

That’s why I’m calling this first post “Undefeated.” I think that’s probably going to time-stamp it as from the second week in November of the 2022-23 season, just sayin’.