UNC Basketball: Tar Heels' Roy Williams Should Win Coach of the Year Honors

When Hall-of-Famer Roy Williams coaches his last game at Chapel Hill, people start talking about naming something on UNC's campus for him, and when he retires with a grace surrounding most admired men and women in sports, he will refer to the 2010-11 season as his favorite season and team of all-time.

Left with eight scholarship players, none of whom even made the All-ACC First Team, abandoned by the California Twins and self-serving Larry Drew II, with fans and professionals alike screaming for his head, Williams and the 2010-11 Tar Heels did what most considered absolutely impossible.

They examined themselves and created a team that will go down in Carolina lore for eternity. A Tar Heels team that beat Duke, the No. 1 team through much of the season, convincingly after putting together a 13-2 regular season despite the fact that everyone had written them off in December.

From a team ranked in the top 10, to one consigned to the slag heap of also-rans, to a team resurrected by Roy Williams, the one man who took everyone's anger for the performance of his team for weeks, the buzz now is that UNC may be a No. 1 seed. And so they should be.

Their latest ranking as 6th in the AP Poll is higher than they started, and is just the start of the good that comes from great defense. Just ask Duke whose shooters were miserable almost to a man last Saturday night.

So it was, with the already incredible fact that the top seed of the ACC Men's Basketball Tournament and regular season championship (small letters since this is not recognized as a "championship" by the ACC) was at stake on Saturday night, that the Tar Heels faced a doozie of a situation. (You can use almost all of the definitions of "doozie" here.) If they beat Duke, they had clawed their way back to the top.  

So it was that most in the Dean E. Smith Center, as blue in color as any Duke fan, as painted and loud as those in Duke's own stadium, still wondered about what would happen. Would UNC pull ahead in the first half, only to be stymied in the second half? Would Mike Krzyzewski get Williams' goat in the second half, making everyone think he is a better game coach than Williams?

The game seemed eerily similar to start. Carolina took longer, but eventually built up a 12-point lead by halftime. Then Duke scored seven in a row and everyone, including the Big Ten color commentator assigned to work this game, wondered if this would be a repeat of the previous Duke-UNC game collapse.

Yet the second half was the same as the first. And Carolina won convincingly.

This may be the best defensive team of Roy Williams' career. And it is without a doubt a monument to great coaching.

With not even a single All-ACC first team player, something no ACC regular season champion has ever gone without, Williams and his team have managed to put together a season which now has them in place for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. While they may have to win the ACC tournament to do so, there is little doubt now but that the Tar Heels can do that and run very deep in the tournament.

So it is that Roy Williams should be everyone's Coach of the Year. None of the college basketball coaches have done as much with as little. Like Butch Davis, Roy Williams made a huge success when disaster stared him and his team in their eyes. With steel resolve and a huge heart, Williams has silenced his critics with results that cannot be from anything other than coaching brilliance.

And, by the way, Williams once again has a winning record over his closest rival Mike Krzyzewski.