This year's tournament is missing a lot of the faces that us North Carolinians are used to seeing in the tournament. There was a time when this state was well-known as being a true contender for the title every single year, it was just a question of which team was going to go the furthest. Duke, UNC, Wake Forest, and even NC State were real big names in the basketball industry. Hell, even East Carolina was starting to look good when they invested a huge amount of money into their basketball side of things a few years back.
Yet here we are in 2021 and there was only one NC team in the tournament at all, and they were unceremoniously eliminated very early on in the tournament.
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To say that this continued dominance was a point of pride for us here in North Carolina was an understatement. It was amazing to realize that there was always a better-than-average chance that at least one NC team was going to end up in the Final Four and on more than one occasion there were situations where it was kind of a foregone conclusion that one of them was going to win it all. It was a question of "will it be Duke or UNC" this year?
So why did everything fall apart? I don't really have the answer to that because I can remember back when I was in college and this school that no one had ever heard of was on a majestic "Cinderella run" that brought them to the forefront. This team was and is Gonzaga.
There are 15 teams that have won the NCAA men's tournament more than once and 3 of those teams are from North Carolina. UNC, a team that I have supported since Michael Jordan played for them, has won 6 times and the most recent victory was actually against Gonzaga back in 2017. 2 years prior to that, Duke won the tournament and it was the 5th time they had accomplished that.
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did you even know that Jordan played for UNC?
These days, the allure has worn off basketball in North Carolina and it seems that the national attention is going to other places and it could end up being a tough rebuilding. I suppose if there is anything to be said about this it is that every single school that has ever been at the top for some time has had their time come to an end. For example: Between 1964 and 1975 UCLA won the tournament every single year except 2 of them and one of those was NC State that won in their stead. UCLA would win the next year's tournament as well but then they would completely disappear from contention for 20 years.
Now I hope that doesn't end up being the case here but the fact of the matter is that this is something that happens in college sports. It is a tricky recruiting process because technically, the student athletes are not meant to be compensated in any way outside of getting a free education. On a side note I was in classes with ECU athletic scholarship recipients and these gentlemen were regularly not in class due to sports, and it was always a real bummer when you ended up in a group project with them. This was to the point that if you asked the professor they would give you a break because even the professor knew that the athletes were not really expected to perform in any sort of academic capacity... it all kind of depended on how good they were and what sport they were involved in.
So what is next for NC college hoops? This is pure speculation on my part but I think we are in for at least another several years of mediocrity. I think for one thing NC colleges have been focusing a lot on football, and therefore their basketball programs have suffered as a consequence. It just isn't possible to be good at everything and especially UNC and NC State have, for years, tried and for the most part failed, to excel at both basketball and football to the detriment of both programs.
It will probably be a disappointing next couple of years for all NC college sports programs and I don't know how they will recover. I reckon I will be in my 50's before we see the level of North Carolina dominance that those of us who have lived here for a while just kind of got used to again.
In the meantime there is nothing wrong with supporting Gonzaga - a school that has less than 6,000 students, is there? My college had more than 5 times that many students and managed to be only decent at one sport - so that impresses me for sure.