FanHouse North Carolina Tar Heels

It was the fluke catch of the week. Sunday night at the Meadowlands, Giants rookie receiver Hakeem Nicks caught a tipped pass that had been intended for Mario Manningham and carried it all the way to the end zone for a 62-yard touchdown against the Cardinals. It was a shake-your-head play -- the kind the defense can write off as an excusable miracle, a bizarre bounce, nothing more than pure luck.

But they say luck is the residue of design, and the people who know Hakeem Nicks say that design is a huge part of his game. Coaches and teammates past and present describe Nicks as an intensely studious, hyper-prepared player who obsesses over his playbook and game scripts and would rather talk about route-running than anything else. Knowing Nicks means knowing that the seeds of that Sunday night play were planted years ago at Independence High School in Charlotte, N.C., where a coach named Tommy Knotts drills 16- and 17-year-old kids on something even NFL coaches struggle to get across -- the importance of film study.

This certainly wasn't the same Michigan State team we watched the past two weekends. But it was the same North Carolina team we all thought, back in November, was the best team in the country by a mile.

If ever a national championship game felt like a coronation, it was 2009.

There were reasons, over the past three months, to doubt these Tar Heels. There was Ty Lawson's bum toe. There was that weird and inexplicable loss to Boston College. There were memories of the way they went out, too soon, in the tournament the past two years. The 2007 collapse against Georgetown. The 2008 pasting by Kansas.

Tom Izzo has used words like "enigma" and "challenging" to describe Raymar Morgan. He has spoken of the difficulty he's had in finding the multi-talented junior forward to keep his mood up, and to play with consistency. In a year of challenges overcome at Michigan State, Morgan has represented one of Izzo's most persistent coaching conundrums.

But after Morgan went off for 18 points, nine rebounds and five steals Saturday night in the Spartans' national semifinal victory over Connecticut, the word Izzo used to describe Morgan was short and simple: "Best."

As discussed here earlier in the week, there was a way for Villanova to beat North Carolina. They had to do it on the perimeter, where they were supposedly strong and the Tar Heels were supposedly weak. They had to do it by exploiting Carolina's suspect three-point shooting defense and driving against the Heels' weak help-side interior defense.

This was all feasible. Anybody who's watched Carolina play for the past couple of years has seen the Heels go through scoring droughts and fritter away leads while they ignored defense entirely for large chunks of the game.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Ford Field. It looks as if North Carolina doesn't do that anymore. In fact, with a healthy Ty Lawson and an improved 40-minute focus, it looks as if North Carolina might not have any flaws in its game at all.

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Highlights of the 2002 Rose Bowl between Miami and Nebraska popped up on YouTube recently and they're an amazing artifact in the wake of Miami's dismal 2006 showing, both on and off the field. I mean... good God, you've got Vince Wilfork crushing people, Andre Johnson burning them, Clinton Portis running past them, Jeremy Shockey catching a bunch of stuff and acting like an asshat -- some things never change -- and a whole array of Miami linebackers tatooing their numbers onto Cornhusker jerseys:



Aside from the prominent involvement of Ken Dorsey, that looks like an NFL Pro Bowl roster. This should tell you two things: 1) you and I could have coached that team to a national title, and 2) the ACC -- Miami included -- should be very afraid of Butch Davis. UNC already raked in a Zook-ian inexplicably monster recruiting class before Davis has coached a game. Mack Brown era redux coming up in Chapel Hill?