That sound you hear is the anguished cries of Wolfpack fans. Not that you needed me to point that out. It's a pretty recognizable sound by this point.

For all my concerns about Lorenzo Brown, who Kendall Marshall defended quite well, I was never worried about how UNC would handle the Wolfpack in the paint. And with good reason. State had no one who could restrain Tyler Zeller, as the Carolina big man would finish with 21 points and 17 rebounds, the most boards in the Smith Center by anyone not named Hansbrough or May. Richard Howell would foul out with 8:40 remaining trying to defend Zeller, and his replacement DeShawn Painter was completely ineffectual.

As was C.J. Leslie, State's leading scorer coming into the game. Held to nine points on 3-12 shooting, it's safe to say he's still hasn't gotten the best of any of his meetings with John Henson, whom would finish with five blocks, two on Leslie. Mark Gottfried had his team, like many who have faced Carolina lately, focused on preventing the Heels' fast break. Which meant abandoning offensive rebounding to have three players back behind half court after every missed shot. UNC controlled the boards easily, finishing with 33 defensive rebounds and 48 overall. Unless the Wolfpack could shoot the lights out of the place, they weren't going to win.

In fact, they're lucky the game was as close as it was. UNC would lead by as much as twenty-eight before going scoreless for the find five minutes, and State had a rash of banked-in threes to bring the margin within spitting distance of respectability. Carolina's entire defense stepped up in the absence of Dexter Strickland – Roy Williams would say that his absence in practice first highlighted for the team exactly how much he does on the court – holding State to season-low shooting. Reggie Bullock shined in his first start, and even Stilman White, playing five minutes in relief of Marshall, acquitted himself nicely and drained a three.

I'm not yet sold on the new Strickland-less Carolina team. This was just one game, with a week's preparation, against an opponent the Heels have no trouble getting amped up for. But for this game at least, Carolina played like a championship team. More games like this, especially on the road, and we can look forward to a very nice March.

State on the other hand, can always look forward to next year. They last won in Chapel Hill in 2003; they've had a lot of practice at looking forward.

The Wolfpsck bring yet another new coach to Chapel Hill. 7 pm, ESPN.

Sidney Lowe was 1-10 against Carolina.
Herb Sendek was 5-17 against Carolina.
Les Robinson was 5-7 against Carolina.
Jim Valvano was 7-18 against Carolina.
Norm Sloan was 14-26 against Carolina.
Press Maravich was 2-2 against Carolina.
Everett Case was 28-18 against Carolina.
Leroy Jay was 1-8 against Carolina.
Bob Warren was 1-3 against Carolina.
R.R. Sermon was 5-17 against Carolina.
Gus Tebell was 2-10 against Carolina.
Richard Crozier was 2-4 against Carolina.
Harry Hartsell was 0-4 against Carolina.
And Tal Safford and E.D. Sandborn both won their only games against Carolina, in 1919 and 1913, respectively.

Here's wishing you all the success of your predecessors in the years to come.

Yours truly, Carolina March

(Except for Case and those two guys from WWI. In fact, I'll even grant you post-ACC founding Everett Case success (11-17). Just because I'm filled with such bonhomie and all. And yes, I dropped your predecessor the same note six years prior. I'm nothing if not a slave to tradition.)

Ah, N.C. State. The team Harrison Barnes and John Henson crushed by twenty last year in Chapel Hill. And then again by twelve in Raleigh. A team that is basically the same as the one that Carolina so easily handled last year. Sure, there are a few new freshmen, but their playing time is limited; it's for the most part the same crowd. UNC owns this team. So why am I concerned.

It's not new coach Mark Gottfried, or at least nothing in particular about him. True, new coaches have had some success when underestimated by the Heels, none more so than Gottfried's predecessor, Sidney Lowe. But a lot of new coaches have entered the conference in the past few season, and it's not like I had a sense of unease over Jeff Bzdelik or anything

I think it's that I'm tied as closely to the miseries of State fans as i used to be, and more of their optimism is filtering in than has in years past. Because on paper, this team hasn't changed much from last year's model, outside of losing Tracy Smith. The offense now first and foremost goes through C.J. Leslie, who has improved his shooting considerably this year, at the expense of rebounding, which becomes more difficult without Smith in the paint to do the yeoman's work. He's also a bit more turnover prone. He's joined in the paint by Richard Howell, who is also little-changed from last year's model. He's a little more involved in the scoring but mostly he's the main rebounder on the team, a job he does very well, residing in the Top 50 nationwide in both offensive and defensive rebounding percentage. But rebounds are the Heels' strength, and unless they pull another Florida State performance, they should more than hold their own.

Sure, there's a chance Scott Wood could become the third Tar Heel opponent in as many games to just catch fire from behind the arc. He hasn't in the past, but that's what he's on the court to do. He's taken more threes than his next two teammates combined this season (C.J. Williams and Alex Johnson, both seniors). Wood will probably find himself matching up against Barnes – whose perimeter defense is vastly underrated – or Reggie Bullock, no slouch in that department himself.

No, when it comes down to it, I'm concerned about Lorenzo Brown. Last year he was the brightest point of either of the two Wolfpack performances against Carolina, coming off the bench to score twenty points in Chapel Hill, and managing eleven in Raleigh. He hit only one three-pointer against the Heels last year, instead generating a lot of his own points with drives from the perimeter or his five steals in the two games. He was a freshman. Now he's a sophomore. He's also the new point guard.

And he gets Carolina in their first game without Dexter Strickland, perimeter defender extraordinaire.Which means he'll draw a combination of Kendall Marshall or Bullock, both good defenders, but susceptible to being taken off the dribble, Marshall especially. And this coming in a game where the backup point guard spot for the Heels is still a bit of an unknown – expect Stillman White before TV timeouts, in little usage, although apparently everything has been tried in practice this week. This is a situation ripe for Brown to have a tremendous game, and a Carolina team that still hasn't hand'ed meltdowns all that well.

Typically, the jump in performance between the freshmen and sophomore year's is the biggest in college. State brought in a great freshman class in Lowe's final season. C.J. Leslie has slowly progressed; Ryan Harrow left for Kentucky. But Brown is the one making big gains, and he's my biggest concern in Chapel Hill tonight. In the paint, the Heels should have no problem, unless you're expecting a different Jordan Vanderberg to suddenly appear. Their defense is exploitable, their offense dependent on interior play the Heels can handle. But Brown? He's the threat.

I've avoided the hype over Gene Wojciechowski's new book The Last Great Game, even turning down a free review copy, because life is just too short for however many pegs there are lionizing Mike Krzyzewski and Rick Pitino. I did catch the excerpt ESPN published on Christian Laettner, which went a long way toward cementing my already-drawn conclusion that neither he nor Krzyzewski is anyone I'd like to spend time with. But if you can stomach your way through it, there's an interesting tidbit in the story of his recruitment:

But Laettner, despite his mother's wishes and the family's Catholic background, wasn't interested in playing for the Fighting Irish. And as much as he respected Knight, he wasn't interested in the Hoosiers, either. The reason was simple: Laettner considered himself a basketball purist, and the finest, most elegant form of college hoops, he decided, was played in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). He would make official visits to only three campuses: Virginia, Carolina, and Duke.

In 1986 and 1987, the years Laettner would have been winnowing down his school choices, there were eight ACC coaches, and it's sad how many I can reel off by name. Dean Smith, of course, was raised and mentored in Kansas, but by this point his roots were almost irrelevant. If there was an ACC stye, he would be one of the main architects of it. Lefty Driesell was at Maryland, until the LenBias tragedy at least, and had been since 1969. He played college at Duke – which has to rankle Terps fans – and then started his college coaching career at Davidson. There he coached a young Terry Holland, who would take the job at Virginia in 1974. Bobby Cremins had been at Georgia Tech since 1981; he had played college under, and had been a young assistant for, Frank McGuire at South Carolina.

Wake Forest was suffering through a series of forgettable coaches. Around this time it was Bob Staak, who played and got his first assistant job at Connecticut, and was a head coach at Xavier before coming to Wake. He grew up playing ball in and around NYC, however. Jim Valvano was at State, naturally. He played at Rutgers, and bounced from Johns Hopkins to Bucknell to Iona, before arriving in Raleigh – another New York City kid. Mike Krzyzewski is actually an outlier, here, coming from West Point and being mentored under Bob Knight, the same coach Laettner eschewed in favor of the ACC.

Finally, there was Cliff Ellis, whose teams never really fit the ACC mold, even then, and eventually decamped to Auburn, where his SEC style of play was the norm.

So there you had "the ACC style." Born in New York, with Everett Case and McGuire, passed along through Norm Sloan, Vic Bubas, and Dean Smith until it blanketed the state of North Carolina, and scattered through the conference by the '80s, either through coaching trees or more transplants from NYC. And let's face it, the refereeing probably helped, not allowing physical play when the top-flight teams weren't playing that style or advocating for it during games.

Contrast that with now. There's twelve teams instead of eight. Krzyzewski is still around, unfortunately, and Roy Williams studied at the feet of Dean Smith. But everyone else? Mark Gottfried at State grew up in the Midwest, played in the SEC, and coached most prominently in the Pac-10 and SEC. Jeff Bzdelik grew up in the Midwest too, and if there's any logic to his coaching career it's just as inscrutable as his hiring at Wake in the first place. Tony Bennett was also from the Midwest and refined his glacial pace at Wisconsin and Washington State. Mark Turgeon at Maryland is another Midwest transplant, though at least one mentored by Larry Brown. Brad Brownell at Clemson? Also a Midwesterner, as was Brian Gregory at Georgia Tech.

Throw in Virginia Tech and Boston College from the Big East, both who had long-term coaches (at least until last season with BC) playing in their more physical style, and Leonard Hamilton, who played at Tennessee-Martin and assistant coached at Kentucky, and there just aren't that many coaches who came out of the North Carolina style. (And by North Carolina style, I mean the state, not the school.) In fact, one of the more faithful coaches to that stye of play might be Jim Larranaga, another guy to come out of the Bronx who was first an assistant under Holland at Davidson.

ACC coaches have been almost completely supplanted by folks who grew up immersed in the stodgy style of the Big Ten, or the brutalist play of the Big East. And once you get a critical mass of those sorts of styles, refereeing shifts to favor it, and soon you're left with, well, a hollowed-out conference with a few good teams and no recognizable style of play. Is that what's happening here? It's a bit of a judgement call, but I'm not getting the emotional attachment to a lot of ACC game like I was ten or fifteen years ago, and I'm beginning to wonder if this is the reason.

Anyway, one final bit from that excerpt, for the folks who made it this far in the post:

On the November 1987 night he made his decision, Laettner stayed at his coach's house and called Holland, Smith, and Krzyzewski each with the news. He wanted to make the calls himself, rather than have his father or Kramer deliver the decision. Then he called his mother. She burst into tears.

"Why are you crying?" said Laettner, baffled by his mother's reaction. This was supposed to be one of the best moments of his life -- he was going to Duke on a full scholarship. Duke! -- and his mother was inconsolable.

"Because I love Dean Smith," she whimpered.

UNC. It doesn't matter where you end up, your mom will always have a thing for us.

After UNC's implosion against Florida State, everywhere you looked someone was spouting off on how "No NCAA champion has lost by more that [blank] since [blank] in [blank]. What filled those [blanks] was basically determined by how lazy the author was. Connecticut's loss by 16 in 2004 to Georgia Tech was the most common especially by folks who ignored the 2011 season where the same Huskies lost by 17. The more diligent folks went all the way back to Carolina's loss by 26, also against Georgia Tech, in 1993. Finally, someone went and just listed every worst loss of every national championship, which SBNation promptly repurposed to make the same point everyone's been making.

Champions don't lose by 33 points. Ergo, Carolina is doomed. Doooooomed.

In fact, all of this championship record-scouring tells us nothing. Good teams losing by 33 points is an extremely rare event in college basketball. After all, no team has won the national championship the same year their coach hit the lottery, but if Roy Williams wins the Powerball next week, folks wouldn't suddenly write off the Tar Heel's chances. What you have to ask yourself is, how bad were the losses for the good teams that didn't win the national championship?

For the purposes of this this experiment, we'll define "good teams" as 1 or 2 seeds, because that is where the local bracketologist had UNC after the FSU loss. (Aside: This is the first time I've ever found bracketology useful for anything. I expect it might also be the last.) Here's a histogram of all the losses from 1 and 2 seeds and the national champions, going back to 2003, the first year of Ken Pomeroy's data:

(Blue are losses by the eventual champion, gray total losses by champions, and 1 and 2 seeds.)

The first surprise is that yes, 1 and 2 seeds occasionally lose horribly. The worst loss is Michigan State's 35-point loss to North Carolina in the fall of the 2008-2009 season. That Spartan team would go all the way to the national championship game, before losing again to... North Carolina. Louisville lost by 33 that same season to Notre Dame, and were knocked out in the Elite Eight by the same Michigan State team. Texas has the next worst loss, by 31 to Duke in the 2005-2006 season; they would make it to the Elite Eight as well, one round further than the Blue Devils. (Both teams would lose to LSU.)

All in all, eleven 1 or 2 seeds have lost by 20 or more points since 2003, and none of them have won the national championship. But last season you could say the same thing about teams that lost by 17 points, until Connecticut user that particular apple cart. Now, a team who has lost by 17 is more likely to win the national championship than a team that lost by 2. What does it mean? Not much. Margin of defeat just doesn't play a large role.

In fact, you can look at the same data and come to the conclusion that not getting stomped could be equally detrimental to your championship hopes. Here's a scatterplot of the number of losses for each team and their largest margin of defeat:

(That data point at 0,0 shouldn't be blue, by the way. That's St. Joseph's, who didn't win the title. Some software bug is changing its color.)

Only three teams in nine years have won national championships without getting beat by at least 10 points – North Carolina in 2009, Kansas in 2008, and Florida in 2006. Meanwhile, plenty of teams has had smaller defeats, as well as lower average margin of defeat, and not cut down the nets.

So you can put the Florida State loss out of your mind; it's not going to hold Carolina back come March. The succession of injured shooting guards, however, is a bit more worrisome.

UNC has released the news we were all dreading – Dexter Strickland did indeed tear his ACL in last night's Virginia Tech game, and will miss the rest of the season. This, of course, is a serious blow to UNC's championship hopes. Strickland was not only the best perimeter defender on the team, but also the backup point guard, and it's going to take multiple players to replace him.

Strickland's starting job will probably be filled by Reggie Bullock. If nothing else, this should lead to more perimeter shooting; for a guy in the position commonly referred to as shooting guard, Strickland didn't take that many shots. (He attempted one three-pointer this season. It didn't fall.) Defensively, it's a loss, but probably not as much as most people are thinking. Bullock has in recent weeks emerged as one of the players willing to throw himself all over the court, and it has shown in defense. It's tough to judge much from the plus/minus stats, as Bullock gets more time with the second team – and plays more often against the other guys' second team – but it's rare UNC gives up significantly more points with Bullock on the floor than on the bench. (One big piece of evidence against that is the Virginia Tech game, where Strickland had three fouls in the first ten minutes, and was benched most of the time. Tech scored 52 points with Bullock on the floor, and only 16 with him on the bench.)

The role of backup point guard falls to Stilman White, who was recruited at the last minute for that very purpose. And yet he's been relegated to third string, playing only 4.3 minutes a game. Kendall Marshall is playing 31.2 minutes a game; last year after Larry Drew's departure he averaged 34.9, and it took its toll by the end of the year. Marshall has another year of conditioning under his belt, but I still wouldn't expect him to play more than 35 minutes per game. Where this may have the biggest effect is on Marshall's defense. He can no longer afford to get into foul trouble early, and opposing teams are going to attack him hard. As for White's performance at the point guard position, well, it's tough to say. His assist-to-turnover ratio is pretty good, but you rarely see him play against the other team's best defense. He's an unknown quantity, and one we'll get to know very quickly.

And that's the long and short of it. Expect UNC's defense to take a big hit, more from Marshall than from Bullock, and expect Marshall's life to get a lot more difficult. Don't expect Leslie McDonald to return, however. If there was any way he could, I'm sure he would, mind you. This is a championship-contending team, and McDonald would fight his way back if at all possible, even with Strickland healthy. No, Carolina will finish the year without two shooting guards. How they'll handle it will say a lot about this team.

For those of you lucky enough to miss the FSU game this weekend, Carolina was looking out for you. They put on an encore performance in futility for the first half tonight, allowing Dorenzo Hudson (season average, 11.4 ppg) sixteen points in the first half on 5 of 5 shooting, four of them coming from beyond the arc. UNC flailed for the first twenty minutes, missing shots and turning the ball over while the Hokies, after a slow start, couldn't miss. Only a last second John Henson dunk kept the Heels' deficit at a manageable five points, and the basketball world at large seemed primed for a second meltdown.

And then UNC remembered they were a title contender. More accurately, Harrison Barnes remembered, going a perfect 6 of 6 from the field to finish with 21 second-half points, while Virginia Tech as a team would only manage 29. More importantly, the defense, already the key engine of this team over the passed few weeks, found another gear. Free of the concern that the Hokies would try to drive on them, UNC finally confronted their three-point shooters, as Henson would notch six of the team's nine blocks. They also proceeded to dominate the boards, pulling down one fewer rebound in the half (24) that VT had for the entire game (25). It was as dominant a second-half performance I've seen from UNC this season.

O course, it won't be enough to satisfy the skeptics until Carolina can play like that for an entire game, and against ACC opponent that can manage a conference win. And that job got a little tougher when Dexter Strickland went down clutching his knee early in the second half. Diagnoses from the medical professionals at Twitter ranged from a torn MCL to a torn ACL to the rare Bari-Bari kneecap detonation; it'll be a few days before Dr. Tim Taft, actual medical professional gets to announce what the actual prognosis is. UNC will really mis his defense, of course, although I think people have been sleeping on how much Reggie Bullock has improved this this season in all aspects unrelated to shooting.

A lot of folks seemed to think if Carolina had continued to flounder tonight, it would have been the end of this team's championship hopes. I didn't think so, having seen a Carolina team start ACC play 0-3 and still make the Final Four. But I can say I'll sleep easier tonight knowing the Heels were able to light a fire under themselves at halftime and take their game to the level they should be at every game. UNC now has an entire week to prepare for N.C. State, a team they rarely have trouble getting pumped up for. here's hoping they can continue the momentum.