Alabama has now advanced to another Sweet 16 under the helm of Coach Nate Oats. Up next, the Tide will be looking to accomplish something only seen once in the 110-year history of the program: Move beyond there. Just once has Alabama made the Elite 8, and it has never advanced further. (Who else still has their SI from 2004 with the Tide on the cover
To get there, however, ‘Bama is going to have to overcome a very talented UNC program who was in the Top 10 all season, and who has played outstanding ‘ball in its first two rounds. The Big, Bad No. 1 Seed UNC Tarheels.Carolina is favored, because obviously they would be. But it’s not by as much as you would guess. Our job is to sort out whether that’s legit, and if not, can the Tide cover or even spring an upset.
Our thanks to special sponsorship from the bros a longtime partner of Roll ‘Bama Roll (skål!) For more degenerate gambling, fantasy,posts, you can check all of those out at the SBNation hub. There’s still a whole lot of basketball left.ide faces the most ur-vanilla one you’ll ever see. If you miss basketball from 1996, does UNC ever scratch that itch.They play a conventional high-low offense, run a metric assload of high-screen and rolls, get RJ moving to the basket off the dribble, let Bacot and Withers feast one-on-one in the post, while Alabama nemesis Cormac Ryan spots up from the baseline (IIRC, Ryan lit that soft-ass 2022 team up when Notre Dame bounced ‘Bama in the first round). They are not going to wow you in terms of innovation. They just execute with superior talent. It looks exactly like the kind of team Hubie Davis would have played for, in other words — and not appreciably different than any other iteration of the Tar Heels we’ve seen in the last three decades.They are a middling perimeter team (and would positively foul without Ryan), and don’t shoot partic
But it is the defensive end where the Tarheels have turned around their fortunes and really made a living. They play a sagging sort of 1-4 called the “drop defense,” where defenders pressure the ball at the top of the key and play an aggressive man defense with backside help inside the key.
That is a type of defense that was custom-built to shut down the conventional (and often limited) offenses of the ACC. But against elite offensive teams, it has one glaring bugaboo that was exploited by the likes of Kentucky, Villanova, Tennessee etc.: They are really susceptible to ball movement that clears out perimeter shooters. Against that troika, the ‘Heels went 1-2, and only shooting 40 FTs at home bailed them out against a Vols team that was burning up the nets
