UNC Not Yet Living Up to the Promise That Earned Its No. 1 Ranking

The Tar Heels' loss to Iowa State didn't come out of nowhere—and they weren't the only Phil Knight Invitational team to disappoint.

There will be a new No. 1 in men’s college basketball next week.

North Carolina’s loss to Iowa State Friday is the humbling that had seemingly been looming since the start of the season: A defeat to an unranked foe that again exposed the troubles the Tar Heels have had living up to the expectations set by last year’s run to the national title game.

The case for North Carolina as the nation’s top team entering 2022–23 (as it was in both major polls as well as Sports Illustrated’s rankings) was built far more on the eye test than analytics. It was a dream that the same Heels that electrified the sport last March would bring it consistently this year. UNC entered the season ninth in KenPom’s preseason rankings and underachieved in the opening two weeks, dropping to No. 19 heading into Friday’s game and No. 21 after the loss. The numbers saw a team with plenty of returning talent but plenty of flaws—a group that, for much of 2021–22, had looked more like a bubble team than a title contender.

Friday's game against the Cyclones was the first real test for Davis and UNC this season :: Larry C. Lawson/IMAGO

But the vision of a full season of the Carolina team that ran through March Madness was hard to shake, and that’s why it garnered that No. 1 moniker. A roster with two elite guards in RJ Davis and Caleb Love who are capable of taking over a game, a walking double double at center in Armando Bacot who is likely to be in the mix for National Player of the Year, high-level connective pieces and a deeper bench than a season ago? Now that’s a team worth being labeled title favorites. Yet the more chances we get to watch these Heels, the more that vision fades and reality sets in: That this group is one with an elite ceiling, but right now isn’t among the nation’s truly elite teams.

Taken in a vacuum, Friday’s performance against Iowa State can be explained away rather easily. The Cyclones are one of relatively few teams with the size and depth up front to not be overwhelmed by Armando Bacot’s physicality on the glass, and still lost the rebounding battle to the Heels by seven. ISU’s sturdy defense may have kept Carolina under 70 points for the first time since April’s title game against Kansas, but the Tar Heels did lead by seven with under four minutes to play. It took an explosion to the tune of Iowa State senior Caleb Grill going 7–11 from beyond the arc to beat UNC, made more remarkable by the fact that Grill entered the day just 4–24 from deep this season. If North Carolina had been dominant until Friday, this result would feel fluky.

Instead, it feels like it was due. The talented Tar Heels have been flying too close to the sun all season, trailing Portland and Charleston at the under-12 media timeout of the second half and struggling to put away UNC Wilmington and Gardner-Webb. While not an all-encompassing stat, North Carolina has covered the spread in just one of six games this season—a clear sign the Heels aren’t meeting their on-paper expectations. UNC would have stayed as the No. 1 team in the polls until it lost, but if you had polled writers on who they truly thought was the “best” team in the country coming into this tournament, it’s hard to imagine many would have picked the Tar Heels.

We know North Carolina has another gear; it’s the same one it found last year in March. But something’s not clicking, at least not yet. It was obvious last March that the team’s chemistry was close to perfect with its “Iron Five” lineup that ate up so many minutes during that tournament run, and four of those five are back. The transition from Brady Manek to Pete Nance at power forward does tweak some things, but Nance hasn’t been the biggest problem—in fact, without him the Heels may not have escaped Portland on Thursday. Perhaps it’s not something that can be blamed on one player, but collectively the Heels don’t have the “it” factor of last March.

“We just gotta find our swag as a group,” Bacot said. “Right now, we’re really just finding ourselves.”

Inevitably though, the patience nationally and in Chapel Hill for the Heels to “find themselves” will be short, considering the expectations. This team has been compared over and over to the 2016–17 Tar Heels, who found redemption and won it all after getting beaten by Villanova’s buzzer beater in the ’16 championship game. That team won its first seven games by 15 or more points, dominated the Maui Invitational and cruised to the ACC regular-season crown. This team, with four starters back from one that was three points away from a national championship, not playing to its elite standard should raise some alarms. But given the experience of last year’s Heels, a group criticized for much of the year and not safely in the NCAA tournament field until the first week of March, those inside the locker room don’t seem panicked.

“It’s going to take some time,” Love said. “It took all the way until March last year until we finally put it all together. Once we do that, we’ll be just fine.”

What’s Wrong With Villanova?

Villanova’s 83–71 loss to Portland on Friday was a new low this season at a program that has arguably been the sport’s best of the last decade. Through six games to open the Kyle Neptune era the Wildcats are just 2–4, including being 0–4 against opponents ranked in the top 175 nationally and having trailed by 16 or more in the second half of three straight games. The season isn’t yet a month old, but it doesn’t feel like a lock that Villanova will be dancing in March, putting a decade-long streak that has featured a pair of national titles in jeopardy.

Point guard play is the most glaring issue. The standard is high at Villanova for floor generals: From Ryan Arcidiacono to Jalen Brunson to Collin Gillespie, the Wildcats’ remarkably consistent success late in Jay Wright’s tenure was always hallmarked by their lead guards. That constant isn’t there this season: Veteran Chris Arcidiacono is at best a stopgap, redshirt freshman Angelo Brizzi has struggled to make an impact, and gifted freshman scoring guard Mark Armstrong hasn’t had an assist since the opener against La Salle. That trio of unproven ballhandlers is struggling with shooting the ball, allowing defenses to key in more on the likes of Caleb Daniels and Eric Dixon. Arcidiacono, Brizzi and Armstrong are a combined 10–40 from three this season, contributing to Villanova’s sluggish 31% mark from beyond the arc. A team that under Wright was known for its ability to get easy shots not only struggles to produce them, but isn’t knocking them down at a Nova-like clip when it does.

Some of Villanova’s offensive struggles should be assuaged by the impending return of five-star freshman wing Cam Whitmore. Whitmore isn’t a knockdown shooter from deep, but earned praise this summer while playing with USA Basketball for his ability to get to the basket and finish. Whitmore also gives Villanova another capable body who can play multiple positions, meaning less court time for struggling youngsters like Brizzi and Armstrong as they get up to speed with high-level college hoops. Eventually getting Justin Moore back from offseason Achilles surgery would be a huge boon, but that’s not likely to come until conference play and could take longer—plus there’s no guarantee he’ll be in top form after such a devastating injury.

“We have really good guys in this locker room, and basketball is a contact sport,” Neptune said. “We can’t make any excuses for ourselves … we just have to go with the guys that are out here right now.”

But even a more Villanova-like offense wouldn’t solve all the Wildcats’ woes right now. Things haven’t been smooth defensively either, which comes as something of a surprise given how impressive Fordham’s defense was in Neptune’s lone season as coach. The Wildcats have given up at least a point per possession (PPP) in all but one game this season, a grind-it-out victory against lowly Delaware State. On Friday, Portland put up a blistering 1.24 PPP in the win, shooting 67% from two and 46% from three. Getting unlucky can explain the fact that teams are shooting nearly 38% from deep this season against Villanova (and nearly 79% from the line), but the Wildcats’ subpar two-point defense (227th nationally per KenPom) is a sign of bigger problems. Chief among them is the lack of an interior presence defensively, as just five teams nationally block shots at a lower rate than the Wildcats. While Dixon has shot well from deep this season, his ability to impact the game around the rim on both ends is lacking, and Villanova has yet to deploy a true center other than him.

The most hard-to-quantify question with the Wildcats is just how much the coaching transition from Wright to Neptune is impacting these struggles. The flaws of this roster, particularly in its current form with injuries, would still be there with Wright, and they’re the types of issues that might have stopped the Wildcats from winning the Big East crown this season even with the proverbial dean of the league’s coaches at the helm. But Wright is an all-time great for a reason, and his ability to develop players and adapt his teams to win without elite recruits or top NBA prospects made him one of the winningest coaches in the sport. And while Neptune was a highly-regarded assistant for years under Wright before performing well at Fordham, expecting him to have Wright’s magic touch is perhaps unrealistic.

A full Big East schedule as well as an upcoming nonconference test against Oklahoma give the Wildcats plenty of time to get things turned around, especially as they get healthier. But as the imperfections with this roster get exposed and with Wright no longer on the sidelines to fix them, the reality that this team is very far away from the standard at Villanova of the last several years becomes more and more clear every game.