UNC's Gritty Win Over Louisville Strengthens Championship-Caliber Resume

We fall in love with the one-and-dones in the preseason. We focus on who has the NBA prospects during the season.

But in March and April, this is what usually wins: scoring inside and out, experience and a great coach.

The team that has the tidiest package of all three this season is the No. 8 North Carolina Tar Heels, who beat the No. 7 Louisville Cardinals, 74-63, on Wednesday night to put two games between them and the rest of the ACC.

This was on a night that the Heels started 2-of-15 from the field with four turnovers during the initial brickfest. This was on a night that their starting power forward went scoreless in 14 foul-plagued minutes.

Didn’t matter.

It helped to be playing in the comfortable Dean Dome, but the Heels are so built for the NCAA tournament that the oddsmakers in Vegas might want to start considering them the favorites.

For my money, it’s either UNC or Gonzaga in terms of teams you can trust the most.

Kansas, Villanova, Duke, Oregon and UCLA are all teams with the goods to cut down the nets, but each team carries with it some form of “this and this and this have to happen” for it to win it all.

Kansas and Villanova are thin inside. Duke is without a point guard to make the game easier for its scorers. Oregon is close—equipped with bigs who score, but they simply cannot just post up and get it done like UNC’s bigs. And the Bruins are often allergic to defense.

North Carolina simply has to be North Carolina.

That was the case a year ago when Roy Williams was a buzzer-beater away from getting a shot at his third national title in overtime against Villanova.

This version of the Heels is arguably even more complete with the emergence of junior Justin Jackson.

Jackson was a nice player a year ago, a streaky scorer with a throwback in-between game. This season, he’s added range to his jumper—he has more threes (78) than each of his first two seasons combined—and he’s evolved into one of the best players in college basketball.

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"Justin Jackson to me should be one of the key guys for the Wooden Award," Pitino says. Says he doesn't get enough credit.

— Andrew Carter (@_andrewcarter) February 23, 2017"

Jackson is the rare scorer who can score from all three levels. He lit up the Cardinals for 21 points to push his average in league games to 19.7 points per game.

Jackson arrived in Chapel Hill as part of one of the best classes Williams has ever hauled. In Jackson, Theo Pinson and Joel Berry II, Williams had three prospects who ranked in the top 33, according to Scout.

It has turned into the perfect recruiting class. None of the three were no-brainer NBA lottery picks, so they’ve stayed on campus and turned into top-of-the-line college basketball players. Senior big men Kennedy Meeks and Isaiah Hicks are similar stories.

Berry was one of the best players in the NCAA tournament last season and has the wisdom of how to pilot his team through the bracket.

Pinson, who has missed 19 games because of injury, finally appears healthy and gives the Heels a defensive stopper and another creator on offense.

The Heels do it differently than most these days. They’re an uptempo team that does not shoot a lot of threes and instead relies on post-ups and putbacks.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Warning: I’m about to sound like an old man…

North Carolina is one of the few teams you’ll watch with guards who know how to feed the post and big men who know how to create angles.

It all leads to a lot of easy buckets.

And when a team can go through stretches where it's scoring easily against Louisville’s defense, that’s the sign of a team that should be able to score through the pressures of the NCAA tournament.

The Heels have had some clunkers this season—double-digit losses at Georgia Tech and Miami—and their kryptonite seems to be Berry going cold. He was 3-of-21 with eight turnovers in those two games.

But again, he was a rock in last year’s NCAA tournament. And if that’s the main worry for Williams going forward, he’s the envy of every coach in America.

The eighth-ranked Tar Heels?

The national rankings need an edit. The Heels are about to win the ACC, likely get a No. 1 seed, and at this very moment, they have the look, more so than any team in America, of a national champ.

C.J. Moore covers college basketball and football for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter: @CJMooreBR.