UNC vs. Michigan - Player of the Game: Coby White

For those who happened to miss last night’s game, it may be for the best that you went to bed at a reasonable time. UNC went into Ann Arbor and got demolished by the Michigan Wolverines in a game that was something like a hybrid of the Texas game this year and the game against Indiana during the 2016-17 season. Michigan got hot, the crowd got loud, the team looked lost, and Roy was ticked. So ticked in fact, that at one point we saw Brandon Huffman and KJ Smith early in the second half. That should say enough.

Truth be told, nobody on UNC really played well enough to stand out as the clear-cut player of the game. The seniors looked terrible, Garrison Brooks couldn’t stay out of foul trouble, Nassir Little had a bad night, Sterling Manley looked sloppy, Andrew Platek took an awful shot at the end of the first half....I could go on and on with this list. However, credit Michigan for being a really tough team. Truth be told, they are playing like the non-boring version of Virginia in the Big Ten, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them make a strong push to win their conference this year and make another good run in the tournament. As bad as UNC was, Michigan is just that good.

With all of that said, the Player of the Game for last night’s trainwreck is Coby White. He finished the game with 12 points, four rebounds, four assists, one turnover, and shot at a 50% clip. He was essentially the only Tar Heel showing a decent amount of intensity on the offensive side of the ball, despite struggling a bit on defense — though to be fair, so were his teammates. This is the third game in a row where he basically was the igniter of anything positive for UNC, and for that he deserves recognition.

Honorable Mention in this game goes to Roy Williams. Despite being down going into the second half against the seventh-best team in the country, he did his best to make the last half of the game a teaching moment for his team. To be blunt: nobody was listening. He even kept them in the locker room for an extra amount of time during halftime because of the way things were going, and things weren’t getting through to them. There aren’t a lot of coaches that are willing to pull that many of their best players from the game for such a large amount of time in order to make a point, but Roy Williams is a coach that coaches for March. This is why he’s a Hall of Fame coach, and this is why I can promise you that things will not be fun for the team when they get back to Chapel Hill.

Everyone breathe, everyone shake it off, and everyone go hug your favorite person. Two losses in November is very frustrating, but these were both really good teams. Let’s just hope that the Heels respond appropriately when they take on UNCW next week.