Season: 2000-2001
Record: 26-7 overall, 13-3 ACC(1st place)
ACC Tournament: Lost to Duke in the finals
NCAA Tournament: Lost to Penn State in the 2nd Round
Roster: Brian Bersticker, Adam Boone, Michael Brooker, Jason Capel, Ronald Curry, Jim Everett, Joseph Forte, Brendan Haywood, Jonathan Holmes, Will Johnson, Kris Lang, Orlando Melendez, Brian Morrison, Max Owens, Julius Peppers.
Source: UNC Media Guide
This team was a lot like the 1992 team. Both started out winning a ton of games including a win over Duke, who was the higher ranked team. After that the wheels came off. In 1992 it was probably owed more to youth and the fact UNC ended up playing five of their final eight ACC games on the road. In 2001 it was a simple matter of bad chemistry and a harbinger of doom for the program a year later.
The problem was we had no idea what we were getting from Matt Doherty. Doh spend several years with Roy at Kansas and then ended up at Notre Dame. After the coaching search went to hell in a handbasket and Dick Baddour had “In the Family” tatooed on his freaking forehead to the point he was willing to hand the keys to one of the greatest programs in college basketball to some guy with only one year at the helm of a major college team. I cannot imagine why we thought this was going to end well.
Anyway, despite the misgivings, we were all riding pretty high when UNC went to Cameron at broke a five game losing streak versus Duke. The 18 game win streak garnered a #1 ranking until the Heels had that classic trap game at Clemson deepening my fear of playing any game at Littlejohn while ranked #1. After that things got really touchy, more so between Jason Capel and Joe Forte but also in terms of how this team performed. Granted UVa a top ten team but losing by 20 to the Cavs on the road sent all sorts of red flags up.
The real warning sign came when Duke visited Chapel Hill and knocked UNC around on their home court and then did worse to them the following Sunday in the ACC title game. Duke and UNC was clearly heading in two different directions with the Devils winning a national title and UNC falling completely apart against Penn State. Penn. Freaking. State. In some ways losing to PSU may be worse than what happened against Weber St. At least with the 1999 team it was evident the Heels simply did not have it. In 2001, there were glimpses of greatness but that Sunday afternoon in losing to a team that is routinely at the very bottom of the Big Ten(the Big Ten people) was humiliation galore.
It was really a tough ending for Brendan Haywood’s career and as it turns out for Joe Forte’s too.
Countdown So Far
20. 1992
21. 1996
22. 1999
23. 2000
24. 2004
25. 1990
26. 2003
27. 2002
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Penn. Freaking. State.
Ouch again………
The Duke game at Cameron, wow, I do remember Adam Boone slapping the floor, challenging Jason Williams. I cringed at that, but Forte had SEVENTEEN rebounds and looked like an NBA lottery pick during that part of the season.
However, THF is dead on that the end of this particular season was a harbinger of things to come. Julius FREAKIN Peppers was at times the best player on the court for the Heels as Forte had become a head case, Capel was simply a role player who thought he was the second coming of MJ, and certainly Haywood would disappear at times.
I was pulling hard for the Heels, but one had to know we were in trouble……. Matt D was the AP coach of the year. Boy did it all go down hill from there…..
I would have rather had Capels brother.
I still contend that Doherty could have been a success had he been more willing to seek out and accept advice from those around him (i.e., Dean, et al.) and if those people had more actively tried to help him. I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of the situation, but my sense has always been that instead of helping a green coach with lots of potential, Doherty rubbed people the wrong way, so they gave him enough rope to hang himself.
As for the great start and equally bad finish to the season, Doherty certainly “lost” the team somewhere down the stretch, But I also seem to recall that ACC teams didn’t scout the ‘Heels very well, but had learned a few things (e.g., Peppers was amphibious, but predominately left? handed) after playing them once, and made the second meeting more competitive, where possible. After getting thumped by Duke at the end of the regular season, I told my wife that an ACCT meeting of the 2 teams would tell us a lot about Doherty’s coaching ability. It did.
I believe I heard WCHL report this morning that Ginyard turned himself in to police after having a bench warrant written on him for failure to appear (for minor charges, like noise ordinance violation). I can’t find the story anywhere online myself. Has anyone else seen/heard about this? If true, man, does the team need to get back into the gym, or what?
I have not heard that and I my search of the internet has not produced anything nor does WCHL mention it on their website.
^Please check with Joe Ovies of 850thebuzz. I’m sure he will find something negative about anything Carolina, (despite his claims of neutrality).
Yeah. First place I looked was the WCHL website, then N&O, Chapel Hill News, etc. No luck finding anything. I even went to the SFN site thinking that they’d be one of the first places to report bad news about UNC athletics.
Ovies is on vacation and I interact with him a bit, he is a good guy who basically likes to stir the pot and will post anything of that nature because it drives traffic on the 850 blog where I frequently comment.
Perhaps WCHL was talking about Lawson and mistakenly said Ginyard? I can find nothing on Ginyard.
I was at the Clemson game setting behind our bench. First time I’d seen the team in person that year and had high hopes that we would avoid the Clemson let down in Littlejohn. The 1st half we got off well and looked like we were going to cruise. Clemson started off the 2nd half and began making everything. As it got tight in the last 10 minutes the Tiger crowd began to smell blood. Forte and Capel literally started screaming at each other on the court and had to be seperated by Haywood. The yelling continued into the time out on the bench. To this day I’ve never seen that before or since from a Carolina team! When the game was over I had to shield my daughter and fight through the student section as they rushed the court to celebrate upsetting #1. I could not believe what I had witnessed and I told my wife “put a fork in us because we’re done for this year”. Unbelievable!
Scout.com has this up….
CHAPEL HILL — UNC basketball player Marcus Ginyard, 21, turned himself into police Tuesday evening to have a warrant served on him for failure to appear in court.
A magistrate set his bond at $150, which Ginyard posted before being released from custody. His next court date is set for July 21.
Ginyard failed to appear in court on June 24 on two charges — violation of the noise ordinance and driving a car with an expired inspection sticker. He received the charges on Oct. 7, 2007, according to a court clerk in the Orange County Courthouse.
Ginyard is a rising senior at UNC.”
Is it that hard to appear in court?
Could be, THF. Earlier in the week they did a story comparing the ‘08-’09 team to the ‘93-’94 team. I really hope they meant the previous year’s team, or we’re in for a big letdown come March.
I heard them say “Ginyard,” “turned himself into the police,” “bench warrant for failing to show up in court,” and “noise ordinance violation.” Lawson did break a noise ordinance, but I haven’t heard of a bench warrant being issued for failure to show (in this or any other jurisdiction).
No news is definitely good news in this instance.
Lawson had his case continued until August. Sounds like Ginyard had the same thing done from last October but failed to show up in June. This probably happens more than we realize and is probably less of a deal that we tend to think. Lawson failed to show up for his other violations and I have no idea how those have been handled.
I would like to just say that 2001 kinda sucked over all, and the whole Duke title run was so 2001. It carried over into 2002 as well. UNC-wise, Roy turned everything around…and thank God for that.
Did anyone ever get the impression Kris Lang’s mouthpiece looked like a sofa? I mean, it was huge. I always wondered how he could get air past it…..
I sure liked him tho, he was a hustler.
Psycho K
Whenever I watched Kris Lang play, particularly in his last two years, it made me feel uneasy. It had less to do with him than it did with the fact that UNC were starting their typical #2 squad and getting hammered or breaking down in many of the big games. The Kansas Debacle kinda reminded me of the bad times when we had the big game (Lang, Capel, Forte, etc. teams) and got smacked up and down. I STILL can’t beleive that we got beat by 18 in a Final Four game. Sure, it wasn’t a 30-point defeat in a national title game (hmmmm?), but it still pisses me off.