I talked prior to last season about my belief that playing in the natty game was very important for us and felt a real key for our recruiting to get back on track was our last season team getting back to the final 4. Well they did and rather than just get there they won the whole dang thing. I think, with the 2019 class especially, we will see the fruits of that pay back.
Yes, the NCAA is a concern but it was not all of it and frankly, IMO, was not the most of it. We had gone thru a few years, since Zeller and Henson left and really you could even take it back to our last natty, where we kinda didn't have the seasons we expected for a string of seasons. There were reasons for sure but history tends to look at the results more than the reasons why so some of our luster faded.
When you had rival programs out there preachin that UNC holds kids back and you get really highly rated kids like JMM, PJ, JP, and they really don't live up to the hype kids don't look at the player as much as the star rating they had. It just seemed for a long while the UNC sports car just was not clicking on all cylinders and again, there were reasons that we fans understand but it fed in to the negative recruiting aimed at us. The AFAM stuff was gas that was put on an already primed fire that burned us.
But everything is a cycle with both good and bad sides, we are coming out of our bad side of the cycle and the good is starting to turn away from those rival programs that hate and envy us so much. Even with all the difficult stuff we have had in our faces, UNC playing in the last 2 final 4s, played in the last 2 national title games, and is right now the defending champions of the entire freaking NCAA!
AS Dean said to Rasheed Wallace, son I would love to have you play for my Tar Heels but we will win with you and we will win without you, the only thing you have to decide is do you want to be a winner or play for some other program? LOL
