What a difference a year makes for the North Carolina Tar Heels men’s basketball team.
A year ago, North Carolina was in the midst of one of the most disappointing seasons in modern college basketball history. The Tar Heels underwent an unthinkable fall from grace in coach Hubert Davis’s second season, crippling under the weight of the expectations from a preseason No. 1 national ranking to miss the NCAA tournament. Vibes, mojo, whichever word you prefer, the Heels were missing it. They spent a year trying to rediscover the magic of March 2022, when UNC ripped through the Big Dance and came oh so close to an eighth national championship.
That 2022-23 flop put all sorts of pressure on Davis entering his third year on the job. To put him on the hot seat 18 months after playing for the national championship would have been going too far, but ’23-24 certainly felt like a tenure-defining campaign for the man tasked with leading the Tar Heels in the post-Roy Williams era. And while success in Chapel Hill is defined mostly by triumphs in the third and fourth months of the year, Davis’s reshaping of this UNC roster has passed its early tests with flying colors. Saturday’s dominant win over Syracuse was just the latest example.
