Jacobs: Final Four Yields Bitter Harvest For Heels

There can be no doubt that the better team won.

Watching Kansas rush easily to a 40-12 lead in the first half -- a larger advantage than any team had ever overcome in a Final Four contest, a larger deficit than North Carolina faced all year -- left plenty of time to watch a great UNC season come to a painful close.

The equally deep, equally talented, and apparently better motivated and better prepared Jayhawks delivered the killing blows in an 84-66 defeat. But the Tar Heels made it shockingly easy for their Big 12 opponent.

“I know there’s a lot of people out there doubting we could beat those guys,” KU forward Darnell Jackson said after his team secured a chance to play Memphis on Monday night for his school’s first NCAA title since 1988. “They’re just some guys in a North Carolina jersey.”

Recall that this was the game the Heels had waited a year to play. This was the chance that barely eluded them last season, the pinnacle to which they and their adherents openly aspired. This was their destiny, and they talked boldly of seizing it.

Then, in a performance as perplexing as it was embarrassing, North Carolina took the court at the Alamodome and displayed more fear than ferocity, more confusion than cohesion, more inertia than intelligence.

The margin of defeat was the largest in a Final Four by UNC in 40 years, since losing by 27 points to Purdue in 1969. The Heels had reached the national semifinals 10 times in the intervening decades.

“That was about as good as I’ve seen for us,” Kansas coach Bill Self said of his team’s commanding burst at the outset. “That was a pleasure for me to watch.”

To their credit, the Heels enjoyed a pride-saving awakening once the game pressure was off and there was almost no chance of victory. They climbed within four points in the second half, still hung within 69-61 with 4:47 to go on an acrobatic shot by Wayne Ellington, who led them with 18 points.

But the climb was too steep, the opponent too good, the energy expended too great to make it all the way back.

The Heels scored fewer points in the first half than in any other contest this season, and matched their low for an entire game. A team outrebounding opponents by 11 per outing was itself outrebounded.

UNC ran its offense so poorly it had seven assists compared with 18 turnovers. The 35.8 percent field goal accuracy was the worst of the year, fueled by 20.8 percent inefficiency from 3-point range. Conversely, Kansas shredded the North Carolina defense, making 53.1 percent of its shots.

But those are just numbers, calibrations of futility.

The Tar Heels, wearing the white uniforms of the higher seed in a battle of No. 1 seeds, played as though they were having a collective bad dream, the dream where you’re walking down the street or standing in front of a room crowded with strangers, and you suddenly realize you forgot to put on your pants.

“It’s a big-time loss, and a big-time bitter feeling for us,” coach Roy Williams said afterward, lamenting the death of his team’s “bigger dreams.”

Now comes the dissection, the retrospective analysis of what caused the nation's top-ranked squad, a team with 36 wins, most in the history of a proud and great program, to get decisively outplayed at the beginning and end of its biggest game of the season.

One place to start the examination is with the self-proclaimed motivation to get farther than last year's regional final loss to Georgetown.

As stated here previously, the danger in such a goal is that it inevitably allowed a sense of satisfaction to creep in when the Heels reached the Final Four. Despite protests to the contrary following their march through the 2008 East Regional, the start against Kansas indicated that trap had sprung.

Then there was the play of UNC’s sophomore starters on college basketball's grandest stage.

Four upperclassmen started for Kansas, two for North Carolina, Tyler Hansbrough and Marcus Ginyard. Most acquitted themselves well. The same could not be said for sophomores Ellington, Ty Lawson, and Deon Thompson.

Ellington’s 18 points came on 21 shots, a losing ratio. Lawson had two assists and two turnovers after sporting a gaudy 3:1 balance entering the game. Thompson put up decent numbers, but often seemed overmatched.

Now we will see if Ellington and Lawson return for a junior season, or jump to the pros. Hansbrough, a rising senior, has nothing left to prove, whatever he chooses to do next.

Most who watched the Tar Heels this season joined Williams in feeling “shocked,” as he put it, by the performance of a squad that was beaten at its own game for the first time. Kansas simply outplayed North Carolina, other than a mid-game stretch in which its players and coach admitted that, drained by the intensity of the action and the tenacity of the late-arriving Heels, they went “brain dead” and nearly unraveled as much as UNC.

Now the 36-3 Jayhawks head to the national championship contest against Memphis, giving Self a chance to step emphatically beyond the considerable shadow cast by his predecessor at Lawrence. Williams took KU to the finals twice during his 15-year tenure at Lawrence, but did not win a title until 2005 at North Carolina.

Meanwhile Williams and his team return to Chapel Hill. Fairly or not, a bitter harvest of second-guesses and might-have-beens await them, their dreams of glory reduced to a very public nightmare.