North Carolina's Redemption Tour Drama Builds After Rout of Michigan State

For the North Carolina Tar Heels and first-time head coach Hubert Davis, 2022 was the best of times and 2023 was the worst of times.

Davis' first year at the helm was rocky for the first few months but legendary in the end.

Just to get into the NCAA tournament, the Tar Heels were told they probably needed to ruin Mike Krzyzewski's retirement party, which they happily did by double digits. Then, after surprisingly making the Final Four as a No. 8 seed, they got to double down on that eternal bragging right by ending Coach K's career in an unforgettable game in New Orleans.

They couldn't quite seal the deal with a title, but you couldn't ask for much more from a first-year head coach. And with just about everyone except for Brady Manek returning for another season, the Heels were naturally No. 1 in the 2022-23 preseason polls and the favorite to win it all.

To put it lightly, though, they didn't.

Rather, they had one of the most disappointing campaigns of all time, missing the dance altogether in spite of that No. 1 spot in the preseason AP Top 25. That had never been done before in the 64-plus-team era of the NCAA tournament, which dates back to 1985.

It was an embarrassment right up there with Kentucky's "Robert Morris Year"—except for the part where North Carolina declined to even play in the NIT, at least in part because it grew increasingly evident throughout the season that RJ Davis and Caleb Love couldn't stand playing together for another minute.

Just like that, the entire college basketball community forgot about UNC's incredible 2022 run and began to question whether Davis was the right man for the job, fearing this might be a repeat of the Matt Doherty situation from the early 2000s, when he did a fine job of not immediately crashing the Ferrari he inherited from an all-time great coach but couldn't build a winner on his own.

Jacob Kupferman/Getty Images

Had the Tar Heels struggled this season, they legitimately might have been right there with Louisville, Michigan, Ohio State—Kentucky?—and others looking for a new coach this offseason.

Struggle, they did not, though, winning an outright ACC regular-season title for the first time since 2017 and securing a No. 1 seed in the dance for the 18th time in program history.

They swept Duke, too, which is always a crowd-pleaser in Chapel Hill. You could go 2-29 for the season, but if those two wins come against Duke, fans would still offer to buy you a round at one of the many drinkeries on Franklin Street.

Nevertheless, legacies are built in March, and actually doing something with this No. 1 seed was how Davis and the Tar Heels could put an exclamation mark on this redemption tour.

They made light work of Wagner in the first round, blowing out the Seahawks by 28 to set up an uncommonly high-profile second-round showdown with Mr. March Tom Izzo and the Michigan State Spartans—who earned a No. 9 seed despite doing just about all they could to replicate UNC's disastrous collapse from last year.

Early on, things were not looking great for the Heels. Whistles were definitively not going in favor of the hometown favorite in Charlotte, no one in Carolina Blue could seem to buy a bucket and Michigan State couldn't miss in racing out to a 26-14 lead after just 10 minutes.

What's a redemption tour without a little adversity, though?

After that rough start, they caught fire, riding their Big Three of RJ Davis, Harrison Ingram and Armando Bacot during a 17-0 run from which Sparty never quite recovered.

Michigan State did keep it tight until midway through the second half, but getting next to nothing out of its trio of centers (and even less from AJ Hoggard) was just too much to overcome. The Big Three scored 55 in UNC's 85-69 victory to reach the Sweet 16.

Now, it's off to Los Angeles, where we could be just a pair of Thursday games away from the most anticipated game in the history of the transfer portal era.

Chris Leduc/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

When you look too far ahead in the bracket for juicy matchups, this tournament will break your heart 99 times out of 100.

But the "Caleb Love Bowl" against Arizona is so close you'll be able to cut the tension with a knife during those Sweet 16 games in the venue formerly known as Staples Center.

Surely there have been plenty of "player going up against his former team" games in the NCAA tournament in recent years. At the very least, Bryce Hopkins leading Providence against Kentucky in a first-round game last year springs to mind.

Nothing quite like this, though, where a player who was so instrumental in a run to a national championship skips town after a turbulent season only to become the leading scorer of a different title contender in advance of a possible Elite Eight matchup.

This has to be the closest college hoops will ever get to the whole "Kevin Durant leaves OKC to win two rings with Golden State" saga, and we might be talking about a whole different redemption tour if it's Love carrying Arizona to victory over North Carolina next weekend.

You know the Tar Heels wouldn't have it any other way, though.

We'll have to wait until the second round is finished on Sunday to find out the chronological order of Thursday's games in Los Angeles. But if UNC gets the first game and wins, it's going to stick around, internally rooting for Arizona so the Heels can be the ones to vanquish Love, showing the world how much better off they are without him.

Love and RJ Davis said they called and congratulated each other for each being named conference Player of the Year, and that there's no ill will between them. If the matchup comes together, they'll talk like it's no big deal; like it's just another game standing between them and the Final Four.

However, in the words of Marquette's Tyler Kolek when Shaka Smart said he didn't really care about facing Texas earlier this season: bulls--t.

It would be massive. Historic, even. Something of a mini boss before the final boss that is the national championship.

But it would only be fitting if North Carolina's redemption tour includes a win over its former star guard.

---

Kerry Miller covers men's college basketball and Major League Baseball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter/X: @KerranceJames.