CHAPEL HILL — Normally when a team suffers an upset, like No. 3 UNC’s 80-76 home loss to Clemson on Tuesday, players will say that it serves as a “wake-up call” for the team.
It turns out the Tar Heels needed the wake-up call during pregame.
“Most people take naps before the game, and we just weren’t ready to go,” said Harrison Ingram, after Carolina lost at home to Clemson for the second time in the last three meetings after going 59-0 against the Tigers in Chapel Hill over the first 94 years of the series. “Some people slept in or were getting taped. People were just late. That can’t happen.”
Armando Bacot confirmed that “three or four” Tar Heels were late to pregame warmups. That followed two lackluster days at practice that had UNC coaches warning that a loss could be on the horizon.
“We got what we deserved,” Bacot said. “We had casual practices. We didn’t come out how we wanted to. Practice should be full on, all out. They just haven’t been that good the past few days. Shootaround today was bad. Even in warmups today we didn’t get out there on time. Our whole approach coming into this game just wasn’t where it needed to be.
“The coaches, they tried to warn us,” Bacot continued. “Sunday, they told us, this team (Clemson) is coming in hungry. The way we’re playing, we’re going to lose. Coach (Hubert) Davis told us that.”
When asked about warning the team that a loss could be coming, Davis refused to elaborate, saying he told the team, “We were able to be successful on Saturday and had a game here on Tuesday. It was a game in the regular season, and we needed to move forward and continue to get better, and that was my message to the team.”
Davis also claimed he didn’t know that his team was late to pregame warmups because players were sleeping in the locker room.
“I don’t know … have any knowledge of that. So I can’t react to something I don’t have any information on,” he said.
Once the team arrived at the court, Carolina still showed signs of sleepwalking as Clemson jumped out to a 15-2 lead, forcing Davis to call one of the earliest timeouts in his coaching career, less than three and a half minutes into the game.
“Well, I mean, I really didn’t want to call the timeout there,” he said. “I don’t know what else … We were down 15-2. That was obvious. We were down 15-2 because they were playing harder. That’s obvious. I don’t know what a timeout, telling them to play harder, does.”
Instead, Davis told the team his hands were tied. “I told them it’s not about X’s and O’s. There’s nothing from a basketball standpoint we can talk about until the effort and the enthusiasm rises.”
Ingram blamed the team’s laissez faire approach to the game on the slow start.
“I feel like that showed in the game,” he said. “It was one of the first games where we were late, and we came out slow. Energy at warmups was slow. Energy at halftime. It just wasn’t the same.”
The Heels trailed by as many as 16 but managed to tie the game at 70. Clemson scored seven straight points, however, and held on for the win.
Now UNC faces back-to-back road games against two more desperate ACC teams, Miami and Syracuse. The coaching staff will once again try to get the team to get the message it’s been trying to send ever since the Duke win.
“I checked them at both practices and checked them again at shootaround today,” Davis said. “(I told them about) the importance of attention to detail — the importance of two things: Always show up to work, and nobody’s perfect, but when you do show up to work, your job and your responsibility is to be the best you can be.”
It appears that the team slept through that message, quite literally, later that night.
