UNC Basketball: The Road Less Traveled

Roy Williams willingly and regularly takes his team on the road in non-conference play. How do other blue bloods compare? They don't.

As you look back at North Carolina’s 2019-20 men’s basketball schedule, something curious jumps off the page: Roy Williams took his team to UNC-Wilmington’s campus for the second game of the season. Then in mid-December, the team traveled to Spokane, Washington to play what was arguably the best team in the country last season.

Go back further. Look at the 2018-19 schedule. What do you notice about the first two games? The Tar Heels began that season by playing back-to-back true non-conference road games – against Wofford (who won in the Smith Center in 2018-18 and in Carmichael in 2019-20) and Elon.

“What is Roy Williams thinking?” you ask yourself. “Major programs like Carolina don’t have to take road games. They can get anyone they want to come to Chapel Hill. That’s what all the other major programs do!”

Here’s the thing: As you’ll see from the numbers in this article, playing away from home in the non-conference part of the schedule actually isn’t a strange phenomenon or outlier for Coach Williams and the Tar Heels.

But just how does Carolina’s scheduling stack up against programs of a similar ilk?

SET-UP

Of the country’s historically most successful major college basketball programs, the majority only venture away from home when they absolutely have to. Some coaches argue that conference tournament and NCAA Tournament games are all played on a neutral court, so it’s pointless to schedule true non-conference road games.

With all due respect to those coaches, I contend that to only look ahead to postseason tournaments is to miss the mark. Half of the regular season conference match-ups are true road games. The results of those games play a huge factor in conference seeding, which ultimately helps determine a team’s seed in the NCAA Tournament. To fail to test your team on the road in the non-conference portion of the schedule is to set them up for failure when they go on the road in conference games.

CRITERIA

To determine how the Tar Heels compare to other similar programs in this metric of true non-conference road games, I examined the 10 winningest programs of all time. I looked at the past 10 schedules for each of these programs (from the 2010-11 season through the recently completed 2019-20 season) to determine which teams were willing to go prove themselves outside the friendly confines of their home gym.

To be included, a team had to have been in a BCS / Power 5 conference for each of those 10 seasons. This stipulation ruled out Temple (#5 – 1940 wins), St. John’s (#9 – 1871 wins), Cincinnati (#11 – 1836 wins), and Utah (#12 – 1835 wins). 

Additionally, I took into account vacated victories, so Louisville is bumped.

The list is therefore whittled down to (in order of all-time wins):

• Kentucky (#1 | 2,318 wins)
• Kansas (#2 | 2,302)
• UNC (#3 | 2,275)
• Duke (#4 | 2,201)
• Syracuse (#6 | 1,922)
• UCLA (#7 | 1,906)
• Notre Dame (#8 | 1,900)
• Indiana (#10 | 1,856)
• Arizona (#13 | 1,834)
• Illinois (#14 | 1,832)

Which teams are willing to consistently schedule true regular season non-conference road games? Here’s the chart:

WHAT THE NUMBERS REVEAL

After studying each blue blood's habits with regard to scheduling true non-conference road games, one team stands out above the rest. Below is the total number of true non-conference road games each of the programs scheduled during the 10-year period evaluated (from most to least):

• North Carolina – 24
• Arizona – 17
• Kansas – 15
• Kentucky – 13
• Indiana – 11
• Syracuse – 11
• UCLA – 9
• Duke – 8
• Notre Dame – 8

TAKE-AWAYS

Additionally, there are interesting takeaways concerning these blue bloods and their scheduling of true non-conference road games (or lack thereof) strewn throughout the research.

In the 10-year span…

• Carolina is the only team of the 10 to have multiple true non-conference road games in each of the past 10 seasons.
• Carolina is the only team of the 10 to amass more than 20 true non-conference road games over the past decade (24 total). No one else has more than 17.
• Carolina has four seasons (including three of the last four) with three true non-conference road games. The other nine teams have combined to do that just once over the decade.
• In five of the previous 10 seasons, Duke scheduled precisely 0 (ZERO!!) true non-conference road games. 
• The same is true for Notre Dame in four of the past 10 seasons.
• For the past nine years, Duke has only voluntarily scheduled two total true non-conference road games. Those were both at Madison Square Garden, which only technically counts as St. John’s second home arena.
• If you take away the true non-conference road games scheduled as part of a conference challenge, Carolina still has 19 other true non-conference road games in the past decade. By comparison, Duke and Notre Dame would only have four true non-conference road games each in the same time span.

CONCLUSIONS

One complicating factor in this discussion is the sheer number of conference games these teams must play now. Last season, the ACC moved to 20 conference games. Surely what will suffer in the long term are agreements like the home-and-home series that Carolina and Gonzaga just finished up. As the number of conference games rises, the number of road non-conference games will certainly fall.

In terms of how Carolina's willingness to go on the road in the non-conference schedule has paid dividends, the proof is in the conference road record results. Prior to last year’s 2-8 conference road record, and a 4-5 mark in 2017-18 (with a 9-0 2018-19 conference road record sandwiched in between), the Heels had recorded seven straight seasons of a winning conference road record (while the rest of the conference fell miserably short of that level of success).

Do you think that type of achievement is pure happenstance? Absolutely not. The road to success in conference road games is paved in the non-conference portion of the schedule. By exposing his players to hostile road environments early in the season, Roy Williams is preparing them to succeed away from home when it matters most – on the road in the country’s most difficult conference. The road to success certainly is a road less traveled.

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