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Cole Anthony’s start has UNC fans feeling very confident in this week’s FanPulse survey

I don’t know if you all heard, but the Heels have a freshman point guard who is pretty good at basketball.

By Brandon Anderson

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Notre Dame v North Carolina Photo by Grant Halverson/Getty Images

Welcome to SB Nation FanPulse, a survey of fans across college sports. Each week during the college sports season, we will send out polls to plug in fans to each team. Tar Heel fans can sign up HERE to join FanPulse.

This week was a bye for Carolina football, but that didn’t stop other schools from beating up on each other while Mack Brown gets his team ready for the final stretch. Let’s go ahead and take a look at this week’s FanPulse top 25 rankings:

The biggest story coming out of the weekend was LSU laying the smack down on Alabama. Following the game, Nick Saban admitted that the Tigers have no weaknesses on offense, which should be a scary statement for any team to hear that has playoff aspirations. However, all of this could easily be coach speak as it’s really difficult to have an offense that has zero weaknesses. It’s likely that we will find out in the College Football Playoffs if it’s really true or not.

Let’s go ahead and take a look at how our readers voted for the THB top 25:

  1. LSU (9-0)
  2. Ohio State (9-0)
  3. Alabama (8-1)
  4. Clemson (10-0)
  5. Georgia (8-1)
  6. Baylor (9-0
  7. Florida (8-2)
  8. Oklahoma (8-1)
  9. Penn State (8-1)
  10. Utah (8-1)
  11. Minnesota (9-0)
  12. Oregon (8-1)
  13. Auburn (7-2)
  14. Memphis (8-1)
  15. Notre Dame (7-2)
  16. Cincinnati (8-1)
  17. Wisconsin (7-2)
  18. SMU (9-1)
  19. Michigan (7-2)
  20. App State (8-1)
  21. Boise State (8-1)
  22. Virginia Tech (6-3)
  23. Wake Forest (7-2)
  24. Indiana (7-2)
  25. Louisiana Tech (8-1)

For the most part, there aren’t many differences between how all of you voted compared to the national poll. However, Alabama staying ahead of Clemson is very interesting, though not particularly surprising considering who the Tide lost against. Clemson’s walloping of the Wolfpack is likely only the beginning of their “We demand satisfaction” tour, and it’ll be fun to see what kind of an example they make out of Wake Forest and South Carolina.

As mentioned earlier, there was no football played this week by the Tar Heels. However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have some confidence stats for you. Here’s how all of you are feeling about the Tar Heels this week:

Interestingly enough, confidence this week took a slight dip compared to last week. It’s possible that readers decided upon further review that things are slightly more bleak than they initially thought following the Virginia game, which I completely understand as someone who has had second thoughts after pondering something for way too long. We’ll see if they can win against Pitt this weekend and hopefully change some minds.

Finally, we unfortunately don’t have a graphic for basketball, but the confidence in the basketball program remains at 100% after Cole Anthony showed the country that he’s perhaps even more legit than we all initially thought. His big game against Notre Dame made a lot of jaws drop, and he managed to log another rebound double-double against UNCW. There has also been some good play coming from Garrison Brooks, Armando Bacot, Andrew Platek, and Justin Pierce, but unfortunately injuries have started piling up, as Bacot could be out for this weekend’s game with a potential concussion. We’ll likely get more news on that during Roy’s weekly presser.

For me personally, the injuries to Brandon Robinson and Armando Bacot would rattle my confidence if I knew they were playing a quality opponent anytime soon. However, it sounds like there’s some hope that Robinson will be back just in time for the Battle 4 Atlantis, so hopefully some of that depth issue will work itself out. If they can get Robinson, Bacot, at least one of Anthony Harris and Jeremiah Francis, and Sterling Manley healthy, I’d feel much better about the future outlook. Hopefully we will get more updates on these players in the coming weeks, but for now, this team will have to figure it out without them.

What do you think of this week’s survey results? Let us know in the comments below, and as always, be sure to sign up for FanPulse if you haven’t done so already by clicking the link at the beginning of this article.

Go Heels!

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