North Carolina Is Back in Top 25, but Are They Truly a Team To Take Notice Of?

It truly is fitting that North Carolina is back in the top 25 and playing their best basketball of the season on the eve of their duel with hated rival Duke.

Roy Williams Tar Heels struggled early and dropped games to Minnesota and Vanderbilt in the Puerto Rico Tip-Off Tournament. The early pair of losses was a bitter pill to swallow for a North Carolina team that entered the Puerto Rico Tip-Off Tournament ranked eighth in the country.

To make matters worse, highly-touted freshman Harrison Barnes wasn’t living up to his lofty preseason All-American expectations and struggled to find his rhythm during the Tip-Off Tournament. Barnes went 4-24 and only scored 17 points in the Tar Heels losses to Minnesota and Vandy.

As quickly as media personalities and fans were buying stock in North Carolina in the preseason, those same people couldn’t rescind their UNC success predictions quick enough and the consensus word regarding Roy Williams’s team became “SELL.”

For the better part of two months the buzz surrounding North Carolina remained at a whisper as the Tar Heels played out their schedule and watched their aforementioned buddies from Durham steal most of the national headlines.

After suffering those early season hiccups in San Juan, the Tar Heels returned to the states and began showing glimpses of their preseason potential. North Carolina has gone 15-3 since the Tip-Off Tournament and looked tough in a two-point loss against No. 3 Texas and two-point win over No. 18 Kentucky.

UNC ripped through a recent three-game ACC stretch against NC State, Boston College and Florida State going 3-0 and winning all three games by close to 21 points per game.

Now before I start making UNC out to be a sure fire final four pick, let me play devil’s advocate.

North Carolina hasn’t played an AP top 25 opponent since December 18^th. The Tar Heels have also slipped by some of their lighter ACC competition. UNC slipped by Virginia (3-6 ACC, 12-11 overall) by a score of 62-56 and edged Miami [Fl] (3-6 ACC, 14-9 overall) 74-71.

It’s unclear just how improved North Carolina really is. We will most likely have to wait roughly 40 hours from now when they take the floor against Duke to get a better answer to that question.

What is clear is that UNC is now a different team in early February than the one that was floundering around in November.

The much-maligned Harrison Barnes is hitting his stride and has recently been playing like the elite talent many projected him to be. Barnes looked impressive against Florida State scoring 17 points and grabbing 10 rebounds against a Seminole frontcourt that has a multitude of talented big men. The freshman from Ames, Iowa, has scored 22.7 points per game over the course of his past three ball games and looks to be finally getting his feet under him.

Fellow freshman Kendall Marshall is also playing well, dishing out five assists per game and shooting 45 percent from beyond the three-point arc. Marshall recently took over the starting point guard duties from the now-departed Larry Drew II (Larry left the program recently after being relieved of his starting duties).

Dexter Strickland, Tyler Zeller and John Henson have also been playing inspired ball for Coach Roy.

North Carolina’s winning ways have them back in the top 25, but don’t expect everyone to immediately go running back to the UNC bandwagon. North Carolina’s pair of games against Duke is the only top 25 competition that they are scheduled to play the rest of the season. This team is likely to continue their winning ways in the watered down ACC, but only a victory against the mighty Blue Devils would truly make everyone once again take notice of this young Tar Heel team.

You can’t simulate the atmosphere at Cameron Indoor Stadium when North Carolina walks out onto the court. To say that the Duke game will be a measuring stick for Roy Williams’s team would be an understatement. This game will show how much UNC has improved since their early stumbles in Puerto Rico and whether coach Williams’s team will be one to take notice of once March Madness rolls around.