CHAPEL HILL - Back in October, a fan named Luis Felipe Alvim was literally called out of the stands to fill in as an opponent in an MMA title fight in Brazil. He ended up winning the bout and the championship belt.

NC Central’s basketball team is hardly a group of guys playing pickup at the local Y. The Eagles have made three straight NCAA tournament appearances representing the Mid-Eastern Athletic Association.

But as a late fill-in for a game originally scheduled to be played against Elon, coach LaVelle Moton’s team from Durham did its best to try and steal the show.

Central led by 11 in the first half and made the Tar Heels sweat all the way to the final buzzer. In the end, though, UNC’s size and talent eventually overcame its turnovers and occasional lack of focus to come away with a 73-67 victory at Smith Center.

Armando Bacot scored 19 points and pulled down 11 rebounds while Day’Ron Sharpe and Andrew Platek added 12 points each as the Tar Heels broke a two-game losing streak and improved to 4-2 on the season.

Here are 5 Takeaways from UNC’s win:

It doesn’t seem to matter who the opponent is or where the game is being played, the Tar Heels can’t seem to get out of their own way early in games this season.

Just as it did against UNLV and Texas on a neutral court in Asheville and at Iowa, UNC fell behind by double digits in the first half against NC Central at home Saturday. This time it was an 11-point hole at 19-8 10½ minutes into the game, a deficit that was as much a product of the Tar Heels’ own mistakes as it was Central’s hot shooting (4 of 8 from 3-point range).

UNC turned the ball over nine times in the opening 20 minutes while missing all seven of its 3-point attempts on its way to a 39.1% (9 of 23) overall shooting performance. On the defensive end, the Tar Heels allowed the Eagles to make eight straight field goals at one point. Central made 4 of 8 3-pointers in the period.

Only a 12 of 18 effort from the free throw line and Bacot kept things from getting any worse than they were.

“Our effort was terrible,” Platek said. “We weren’t hitting outside shots, we weren’t getting the ball inside to our bigs. We’re just not coming in with enough energy. We’re not getting up for the games as we did previously my first few years.

“I was just talking to Walker Miller about when we went up like 28-2 against Wake my sophomore year, games like that when it’s over in the first five minutes. That’s the kind of Carolina basketball we need to get to and we’re not bringing all our energy when we start. We’ve got to change some things and figure that out.”

UNC has trailed by 10 or more in four of its six games so far this season. To the team’s credit, it has rallied to take the lead in each of those games -- including Saturday. And yet despite picking up the pace on the defensive end and running off the final 10 points of the period to go into halftime with a 30-28 lead, the Tar Heels have been outscored by a combined 12 points in their first halves this year.

By contrast, they have outscored their opponents by a 53-point margin in the second half, including a 43-39 advantage against Central on Saturday.

Central had no answer for UNC’s bigger, more dominant inside presence even before its two tallest players -- 6-foot-9 Nehemie Kabeya and 6-8 Justin Whatley -- picked up three fouls each in the first 11 minutes.

A testament to that was the fact that the Tar Heels began the game by going to the free throw line on their first four possessions in which they didn’t turn the ball over. They ended up shooting 31 free throws for the game, 21 of which were taken by bigs Bacot, Sharpe, Garrison Brooks and Walker Kessler.

Bacot did the bulk of the heavy lifting in the first half when his team needed it most, scoring 15 of UNC’s 30 points before halftime.

“In the first half, he was the only offense,” coach Roy Williams said of his 6-10 sophomore, only half exaggerating.

In the second half, Bacot passed the torch to Sharpe, who scored all 12 of his points after the break.

“Second half, the floor was more spaced out,” Sharpe said. “The first half was kind of hard because they were just clogging the paint up a lot. There really wasn’t much we could do except get an offensive rebound and go back up. In the second half, we started hitting some shots, so that spread the floor and we could see the ball in the paint.”

After shooting just 39.1% from the floor (9 of 23) overall and missing all seven of its three-point attempts in the first half, UNC warmed up to go 14 of 27 overall (51.9%) over the final 20 minutes.

And while it didn’t exactly light things up from beyond the arc, going just 2 of 8, the two that went in proved to be the most pivotal of the entire afternoon. They came courtesy of Platek on back-to-back possessions, part of a 14-2 run midway through the second half that finally gave the Tar Heels some separation.

Platek hit his team’s first trey of the game -- after 10 straight misses -- with 10:24 remaining to extend UNC’s lead into double digits for the first time at 52-42. He then hit another one from the exact same spot, deep in the corner right in front of the Tar Heels’ bench before finishing off a personal 8-0 spurt with a steal and layup that extended the advantage to its biggest of the game, 57-42 with 9:11 remaining.

The 6-4 senior said that he thought about dunking the ball, but opted out of the idea at the last second.

“I just played five straight defensive possessions, so my legs were gone,” Platek said with a laugh. “So there’s no way I was going to dunk that ball. I was more concerned about getting the two points and extending the lead.”

Platek had only two double-figure scoring games in his first three seasons at UNC combined, but now has two in a row and three already this year. His veteran leadership has been even more important on this young team than his contributions on the stat sheet.

“Those two threes by Andrew today were really big for us, there’s no question about that,” Williams said. “The threes that he made and what he did defensively guarding that guy that was a tough matchup (Central’s C.J. Keyser), Andrew did good things for us.”

Nothing, perhaps other than not boxing out, makes Williams’ blood boil faster and more passionately than turnovers. Especially the unforced variety.

And point guard Caleb Love continues to struggle in that area.

He committed six more on Saturday, two of which came on offensive fouls. While he was hardly alone in that area -- the Tar Heels coughed it up 18 times as a team, leading to 18 Central points -- the freshman’s difficulties with ball security is especially concerning to his Hall of Fame coach because of the position he plays.

“You know me, I’m concerned about it immensely,” Williams said. “You can’t win big games if you turn the dagum basketball over. Point guards, I’ve always told them the two ways to stay on the court is to guard the ball, stay in front of it and don’t turn the ball over. But I also know that I’ve got two freshmen out there that are handling it and it’s a difficult thing.”

UNC’s other freshman point guard, R.J. Davis, turned it over three times in the game.

Love’s six miscues increased his total for the season to 23, or an average of 3.8 per game. He did hand out four assists, all in the second half. But his 3.3 average still leaves him in the minus category for the season.

It’s a trend Williams is confident Love will grow out of as the season goes on, he gets more college experience and continues to gain confidence.

“He’s going to get better and he has to get better, it’s a simple thing like that,” Williams said. “It’s something that you look down there and they get 18 points off our turnovers and 18 turnovers is way too many, especially in a low-possession game.

The Tar Heels took care of business and put one in the win column. That, as Williams pointed out in his postgame comments, makes it a successful afternoon after two straight losses.

As many rough edges as there are still left to smooth out, the UNC coach would have felt much better about his team’s effort had it finished the game strong. But after opening up a 15-point lead with 9:11 left, the Tar Heels appeared to take their foot off the gas and allowed the Eagles to make things interesting down the stretch.

A little too interesting for Williams’ taste -- especially after he began clearing the bench with just under two minutes remaining.

First he had to call timeout, something he rarely does, to admonish his players for not knowing who they were picking up on defense following a free throw. Then he had to put his starters back into the game with 28 seconds left to hold off a late charge that saw Central score the game’s final nine points.

“We won, so obviously he wasn’t as mad,” Bacot said of his coach. “But he was upset with how we played the whole game and I guess the ending was just the icing on the top with us not being focused and just lackadaisical.”