Where: Dean Smith Center, Chapel Hill, NC
When: Wednesday, January 7th, 9:00 PM
TV: Fox Sports
Records: UNC 13-1; Charleston 10-2
There will be liveblogging tonight.
Here are the three things I know about the city of Charleston.
1. The Civil War started there.
2. I spent part of my honeymoon there.
3. Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind was from Charleston.
As for the basketball team hailing from the College of Charleston those of us who have been watching ACC basketball since the 1980s get to see Bobby Cremins again. Cremins was the head man at Georgia Tech for many years during which the Yellow Jackets were known to cause all sorts of grief every so often for the Heels. Cremins, whose hair may have been white from birth, had a penchant for recruiting good point guards from New York City and GT for a while was generally know as a PG school. Mark Price, Kenny Anderson, Travis Best, and Stephon Marbury are among some of the best PGs to play for Cremins.
With that in mind and given the fact that Cremins is by and large a fairly successful coach, Charelston should be approach with a modicum of respect as a dangerous squad. Which really should not matter. The expectation is for UNC to come out and drop the equivalent of a Trident II nuclear missile on the Chanticleers Cougars(wrong South Carolina school) in a bid to exorcise the demons of Sunday past. Whether that will be the case or not remains to be seen.
The point is there have been pesky questions raised about whether this team is all that and a bag of chips. Nothing would please me more than to see the Heels answer that question with an emphatic, "darn straight" and then head to Winston-Salem to cap off the week with a "any questions now?" My gut feeling is that will be the way of things but we will see how the Heels respond to their first loss in how they handle Charleston.
And since parity plus uncertainty is the way of college basketball I am just going to toss some 20 point win prediction out there and be done with it.
UNC 90 CofC 70