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CHAPEL HILL – The road hasn’t exactly been kind to North Carolina over the last month, but the only way the Tar Heels can truly show they’ve turned the corner on their season is to notch some tough wins away from the friendly confines of the Smith Center.
The Heels (15-6 overall, 7-3 ACC) will get a crack at turning the tide Tuesday night when they visit Louisville. A program with tremendous history, the Cardinals are struggling and going through a tumultuous season that included former coach Chris Mack being shown the door last week.
The Cardinals (11-10, 5-6) have lost six of their last seven games, but they are a dangerous team to anyone in the ACC, and certainly to a UNC club that has lost its last three times away from Chapel Hill, including a pair of defeats two weeks ago at Miami and Wake Forest by a combined 50 points.
The road has been littered with speed bumps, pot holes, and crud-infested detours for the Heels, but Tuesday is an opportunity to redirect things.
“We just go back to the drawing board, we’re zero and zero now,” sophomore guard Caleb Love said. “We got this win, we’re going to celebrate this win for today, but we’re right back at it (Sunday) and we’ve got to lock in for Louisville, keep our hard hats on, and do what coach tells us to do and go to Louisville knowing what we’ve got to do.”
The fly in the ointment here isn’t just that UNC will serve as the visiting team, it is that the Tar Heels have not handled success all that well thus far. The best example of this is their most recent one.
After blowing out Virginia and Georgia Tech at home earlier in January, the Heels were then massacred in Coral Gables and Winston-Salem. Notching a few big wins doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of a long season, and it appears the Heels are starting to understand that.
They won three home games last week over Virginia Tech, Boston College, and NC State, with the lead over the Wolfpack ballooning to 35 points during the second half. But that has no bearing on how the Heels will play Tuesday night at the KFC Yum! Center.
“Just not get fat and happy,” senior wing Leaky Black said, when asked what is key heading back on the road. “That’s one of the things that Michael Jordan was telling us, we’ve got to play with passion. When we play with passion and energy, everything else will pretty much take care of itself.
“But coach is preaching to us to not get fat and happy, because previously we win a game and play good, we’ll come out and lay an egg and it feels like the end of the world. So, we’ve just got to use this momentum and keep building on this.”
Momentum isn’t just making shots, it really begins with the three intangibles UNC Coach Hubert Davis preaches on a daily basis. Energy, Effort, and toughness are demands by Davis and he wants to someday make them constants in his program.
So far, the current Tar Heels haven’t reached that point, but Tuesday night is an opportunity for them to show they are on that path. The immediate reward could be a victory over the Cardinals, the long-term effect could be a team’s internal culture changing, as they get more fortified in those decrees as the postseason creeps closer.
“You’ve got to play like we just did,” graduate forward Brady Manek said, referring to UNC’s 100-80 rout of the Wolfpack. “Play together, play hard, rebound, not expect to make every shot, but coach expects us to play hard. So that’s what we need to do.”
And if they do, it could signal the Heels have taken a big step forward away from Chapel Hill.
