After the Clemson loss on Thursday, Robbi Pickeral ran a small little post pointing out that Roy Williams wore the same ties for both the Clemson loss and the Kansas loss in the NCAA tournament two years back. That post has disappeared from the N&O's website for reasons I won't speculate on – I got the link from Chris Chase over at Yahoo, who pointed out that it does not appear to be the same tie after all. Frankly, the fact Williams has two ties that look like that is more horrifying than anything I've seen on the court this season. I got a small chuckle from the post, and then forgot all about it. The coach, however, has a longer memory:
"We need a couple of breaks to go our way and we need to play better. I'm not going to sit up here and say that the gods are against us because the stars aren't lined up the right way and the moon is not shining as brightly or Roy's wearing the wrong dadgum tie. How about some dadgum idiot saying something about how I've got to stop wearing a dadgum tie because it was the same color tie that we lost some other game. My God. What the crap happened - I didn't wear a tie at the College of Charleston. But that's what it is. We've got to play better. We can say all of those things that we want to say, but we've got to play better."
For what its worth, UNC blog The Rafters has been on tie watch all season, on like three different social networking platforms. Web 2.0 is here people, and it's around Williams' neck.
(I was first directed to this by frequent commenter Michael Felder, and didn't hear the actual show. It reads pretty well on paper, to me at least. He's obviously frustrated, but is walking a fine line between motivating the layer to be tougher and smarter and just completely destroying their confidence altogether. He's talked of a similar moment with last year's team after they started 0-2 in conference. That squad was more resilient and accustomed to success than this year's team has been. I'm not sure which way this is going to go.)