UNC's Tyler Zeller is one of ten players named to the John Wooden All-American team and also received a nod for the AP All-American second team.
Kendall Marshall was named to the AP All-American third team. John Henson and Harrison Barnes were honorable mention.
Marshall is also one of five finalists for the Bob Cousy Award given to the nation's top point guard. The others are Isaiah Canaan(Murray State), Matthew Dellavedova(St. Mary's), Damian Lillard(Weber State) and Tyshawn Taylor (Kansas).
Yes, we are all biased here when we say Marshall should win the award of these four players, especially if any consideration is given to his performances during the last month or so.
Speaking of Marshall and his importance to UNC's offense, check out this great piece from SBNation's Andrew Sharp who make some outstanding points about Marshall importance to UNC and Harrison Barnes. It includes a quote from a Grantland piece in October which discusses why the point guard is so crucial in Roy Williams' system.
When it comes to describing college point guards, the lexicon of basketball is almost never enough. Point guards are called quarterbacks or floor generals or spark plugs or the straw that stirs the drink, but for whatever reason, the sports media seems unwilling to call a point guard a point guard. For the North Carolina basketball team, the point guard is "the engine that runs Roy Williams' supercharged machine." Carolina basketball, as the metaphor goes, is a beautiful machine stocked with elegant, fast parts — the Bugatti of college basketball. And like all high-performance cars, the machine is fragile and bound to break down every once in a while.
If the Heels played a different style of basketball, in which the point guard's duty was just to walk the ball up and pass off to one of the playmakers, Roy could get away with throwing an average point guard out there with the instructions: Just don't turn the ball over. But because the Heels are all about Roy's system, and because Roy's system has never been anything but run, run, and when you're tired, run some more, the player tasked with all that running becomes the focal point of the offense. To stretch the metaphor a bit further than it should probably stretch, the point guard at Carolina is both the driver and the engine.
Marshall was the point guard, team leader, consummate teammate and the glue that held the 2012 Heels together. Hopefully the Cousy Award voters will give him his due.