PHOENIX North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams hedged his bets earlier this week when asked if he would accept an invitation to the White House should his team win the national championship by saying that he didn’t want to jinx his team’s chances by taking about it.Monday, after his Tar Heels defeated Gonzaga 71-65 at University of Phoenix Stadium to secure that elusive title, Williams was just as noncommittal when posed with the question again.”You know, the office of the Presidency of the United States is the most fantastic place you can be, but let me think on it,” Williams said. “I don’t know if we’re going to get invited. I really don’t. But I know one thing, we’re putting up a nice banner in the Smith Center that’s hard to get.”The potential of a White House visit by the Tar Heels became an issue last month, when answering a question about the advantages of playing the ACC tournament in a major media market such as New York, Williams took an unprovoked pot shot at President Donald Trump’s excessive use of Twitter to express his opinions.”Now everybody has got social media, and we don’t need The New York Times to find out what in the dickens is going on in our country,” Williams said. “You know, our President tweets out more bull(bleep) than anybody I’ve ever seen.”We’ve got social media. In the old days, there’s no question it was the media capital of the world, but I’m not sure it is right now.”Trump has never responded to Williams’ comment as he sometimes does to negative statements made about him, so there’s no telling whether he will continue the tradition of Presidential visits for championship teams.Before the NCAA tournament began, he declined to fill out a bracket the way his predecessor Barack Obama did.Williams said that even if the Tar Heels don’t go to the White House, it wouldn’t necessarily be because of a political statement using the first of his three national championship teams in 2005 as an example.”We won in ’05 and they invited us in September when they were doing a lot of teams,” the Hall of Fame coach said. “All my (players) were already at NBA training camps and two of them were in Europe, so we didn’t go in 2005 and we did go in 2009.”
