It’s in your hands now…

UNC

We began this season looking at a team that had one left over starter, a couple of subs, a returning injured senior and a lot of freshmen to fulfill the “reigning champions” status left from a squad that featured four NBA’ers and a couple of others playing overseas. Between the great job done in 2006 by some of those same players that left last season as national champs, the hype of the freshmen coming into Chapel Hill, and the media pushing a team like this as a Top 5 squad, this team had very little chance to live up to the pre-season expectations and was placed in almost a no win situation. Let’s be real, this team was given a lot of pressure, too much, to uphold something that they didn’t have much of a hand in building. While it might not be the biggest problems I do believe that the fact these incoming players had a hard time adjusting from being the best players on the court to not seeing the court that much. Add to that the fan fare that was built up with this being the 100th year of basketball and you can see what I am trying to say, can’t you?

Carolina lost one of the best and fastest point guard in the country and replaced it with a pair of players, one who had almost no experience in college and the other was coming out of high school and wasn’t even a full time point guard at the lower level. UNC lost one of the hardest working player to have ever donned a college (not just Carolina) jersey and replaced it with last year’s fifth option, a seven footer that needs to build up and learn some more about the college game and a sophomore that has the skill set but a lot of people feel he might have been thinking more about the next level than playing this season. Head coach Roy Williams had shooters like Wayne Ellington and Danny Green to go to for the three pointers last season, this year he had a player that was out for some of the season due to personal issues, a freshman who needs to learn that in college the game is faster and a fifth year senior who was labeled as a defensive stopper not an offensive powerhouse. I could go on with this, but I think we all get the picture.

But once this season is over, where it is after the ACC Tournament, the NIT or if a miracle came, the NCAA) everything changes for these players! With this team having finished close to the bottom of the ACC, not going to the NCAA, without one player in the All-ACC teams, what they do with this off season and how they perform next year is not on anyone but them. A lot of the fans are down on this squad, whether that is right or not is not for discussion in this post, but what they do to bounce back from this year and come back next is all on them, no one else but them. If no one leaves (either by going to the next level or transferring) next season’s squad would have 12 scholarship players that are NOT seniors. Sure, things need to change, sure people need to adjust to the fact that the name on the front of the jersey WILL always be more important than the one in the back, but if they “buy into the system” the talent level that could be sitting on the bench for coach Williams could match some of the starting five for a lot of squads in the nation.

Harrison Barnes could easily be the freshman of the year (heck, if not by the burnt I got from drooling about the incoming class I would say more than freshman of the year). Henson and Davis, if they keep working and developing should be hands down on the All-ACC squads. Zeller could also be a candidate for a spot on those squads. If this team can hit from outside, with the returning players and the ones coming in, the inside game could be something truly worth watching, with five players that could work hard, wearing down the opposition, being so dominant that it would not be funny. And before you tell me “well this and that aren’t coming back” this post is about what is here and now, as the players make their decision of course things will change. But the one fact that remains is that next year’s squad will have a lot more players that have had their hands in this season’s results and will have their hands in next year’s results.

As fans forget this season, which could be labeled “horrible” by some, “different” by others, “add your own comment here” by you, and begin to think what six months of gym, shooting, working on flaws could mean to these players. And when you are tired of thinking about this half year that awaits us you can always think about the freshman class from the 8-20 season and then think about what they did three years later! For those of you that might wonder why I didn’t talk about the injuries in this post it’s pretty simple: this post wasn’t about that, it was about the “handing of the torch” (to keep with the Olympics that have just passed), and now this team’s faith being all about them and not living up to things other people/players put in place.

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