History Suggests Carolina Will Bounce Back Quickly

Only the 2001-02 North Carolina Tar Heels lost more basketball games in a season than the club that recently completed its season falling in the second round of the ACC Tournament in Greensboro.

The Heels concluded the campaign with a 14-19 mark, falling one game shy of the program’s most defeat, set by the Matt Doherty-led Tar Heels 18 years ago when they went 8-20.

That season included an internal problem that actually began late in the 2001 season, Doherty’s first at the helm, and concluded following the 2003 campaign when Doherty was fired. Roy Williams took over and until this past season, the Tar Heels had been as successful as any program in the nation over that 16-year period.

But now, Williams must rebound the Tar Heels from another very rare spell. UNC has had two losing seasons since Dean Smith’s inaugural campaign in 1961-62 when Carolina went 8-9, a season that was cut short because he inherited a program on probation. His track following that season is historic.

So, three losing seasons in the last 58 years and the first ever for Williams is unsettling to the legendary coach.

“Needless to say, I thought we'd have a better record at the end of the year,” he said, following UNC’s loss to Syracuse in the ACC Tournament. “I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what our record is going to be, but I try to evaluate our team, and I thought that we could be better.”

Three years after the 8-20 disaster, Williams led UNC to the national title. A year after the surprising injury-riddled 20-17 campaign in 2010, which included a run to the NIT finals for the Heels, Williams had his team in the Elite 8 and the 2012 team may have been the best team in the nation until serious injuries squashed its NCAA title hopes.

So, he’s turned around bad seasons quickly, and must do so again. But it won’t happen until plenty of reflection, learning and understanding takes place.

“What I take from it is you can never quit,” rising senior forward Garrison Brooks said. “You're never down, you're never really out. But we dug ourselves that hole in our season… So just taking advantage of stuff like that and just coming to work hard every day.”

Injuries ravaged the Tar Heels, as rotation players missed 101 games, and the top three scorers – Brooks, Cole Anthony and Brandon Robinson – played in just 13 games together, four of which one of them was coming off an injury or illness or suffered one. So, they were healthy together for just nine games.

The Heels also lost six contests that involved last-second shots made by opponents. The 100-year home streak over Clemson ended and Carolina was the bottom seed in the ACC Tournament for the first time ever.

Williams often blames himself for losses, and it’s not just a coach trying to protect his players, he actually means it. He’s his toughest critic. It’s an approach that has worked just fine so far, even though the results this season didn’t reflect that.

“I felt like that I'd take two steps and one of them would go forward and the other one would go back just immediately,” he said. “Or I'd take one step forward and two would go back.”

He’s not going anywhere, and neither is UNC basketball. The Tar Heels are likely to return three starters – Brooks, Armando Bacot and Leaky Black – plus welcome in one of the top recruiting classes in the nation. Several other likely rotation players will also be back, and next season’s upside is far greater than it ever was for the 2019-20 Tar Heels.

But it won’t be a plug-and-play situation. Adding a wealth of talent and returning players working on their shots, ballhandling and getting stronger are all necessary elements of Carolina returning to national prominence. But the players need to work through the challenges of processing being a part of something that almost never happens to this fabled program and the responsibility that comes with being on such a team.

“I told them that what you have in life is you have a lot of challenges,” Williams said. “There's nothing more fun than being on a team. There's nothing more fun than being willing to make sacrifices towards a common goal.

“There's nothing more fun than doing something with somebody else. And that's called putting a team together.”

And that will be the mantra moving forward.

Williams won the first of three NCAA titles in 2005 with a group of players he didn’t recruit, but he got them on the same page and working for the greater good of the team. The 2009 club was loaded and could have broken up sooner, but those players shared a common mission, stuck around and it paid off by winning the national championship.

And the 2017 team overcame losing its two best players in Brice Johnson and Marcus Paige from a club that fell at the buzzer in the 2016 NCAA title game by winning the whole thing the following year because there was no question about why they were grinding so much.

Nobody knows what will happen next season or the year after with the Tar Heels, but history suggests Williams will have the program right where it almost always is. He will have the talent, enough experience and employ a proven concept.

It may have been Williams’ first losing season as a coach, but this won’t be his first time rebuilding from a difficult season.