The North Carolina Tar Heels defeated archrival Duke 84-79 on Saturday to win their first regular-season ACC championship in seven years. The league’s annual season finale is one of the most exciting things to happen in college basketball, but there’s a frustrating feeling that fans should enjoy this rivalry, and ACC basketball as a whole, because who knows how much longer the league will be around in the future.
So in the meantime, let’s all bask in the glory of the Real Housewives of Cameron indoors throwing drinks at UNC players.
The shenanigans that go on between these two enemies are always interesting and always unpredictable. Tar Heels senior guard Cormac Ryan led all scorers with 31 points, including the game-clinching free throw with 4.7 seconds left. Ryan is UNC’s fourth-leading scorer this year, averaging about 11 points per game, has never cracked the 30-point mark in his career, and, oh, by the way, he’s been there since 2018 On the university campus.
You could say he’s an unlikely hero — or should be a doctor — but at the same time, some random grinder got into Cameron and was in a game that UNC won wire-to-wire Repeatedly suppressing the Madness makes perfect sense. There aren’t many exciting things left in the men’s competition, but one of them is the top division and showdowns.
Once the Big East ceased to be the Big East we know and love, the ACC became the conference most associated with and obsessed with college basketball. Obviously, the Tar Heels and Blue Devils are a big reason for this, and if they realign, they’d essentially be a package deal like Michigan and Ohio State.
North Carolina is as crazy about college basketball as any other state. Disrupting any of the Tar Heel State’s four ACC programs would be sacrilege, as North Carolina and Wake Forest love to disrupt power trips to Durham and Chapel Hill as much as possible. Next season, Cal and Stanford will also join the fray, which will be as weird as Kansas and Arizona meeting in a regular-season Big 12 game. (Saturday’s Kansas-Houston game is disturbing enough.)
However, the future of the ACC is unclear as Florida State attempts to cancel their football (program) and go home after being ignored in the College Football Playoff. The TV rights deal dictates that these idiot conference commissioners are chasing the faintest whiff of money, and if that’s wrong, people in Tallahassee will know that the easiest path to the CFP is through the ACC.
When student-athletes become salaried employees, unfettered revenue streams will be compromised and there will be a greater emphasis on chasing television dollars. If I didn’t believe that the American college system is run by greedy scumbags, I would say that maybe one day, profits will become trivial and tradition will be the only thing left.
However, what then? Conference members retconning Star Wars like David Filoni? if.
Camila Cardozo calls competition
Kamilla Cardoso has never achieved a three-peat in her career, and she may not be calling the shots, but when you’re trying for perfection in any sport, you need a little luck. Lost in the media’s lust for all things Caitlin Clark are the women of South Carolina who remain undefeated on the most ill-fated team ever.
Trailing by two points with 1.1 seconds left in the game, the Lady Vols decided to give SC’s most unheralded candidate a free watch to clinch the win.
De La Soul, what’s the magic number?
The Gamecocks are now 31-0 after the regular season and are one win away from sweeping the SEC Tournament. Dawn Staley’s team has clinched the No. 1 overall seed and will seek revenge in March Madness.
