It just seems like UNC is tired, worn out, sick of all we’ve been through the last few years. The alumni and fans still come (well, some of them) and they watch (well, some of them), but the pride that made Carolina special for more than 50 years has been so beaten down that you can’t see it, or feel it, much anymore.

And I’m not talking just about Carolina Basketball, which put on another dismal show Wednesday night in the under-filled Smith Center against a more aggressive Iowa team, followed on the same TV station by Duke stunning Wisconsin (where few visiting teams win) while shooting 65 percent and missing five shots in the second half.

Even the DTH, the student newspaper that always gives its school the benefit of the doubt, wrote this week that being a Tar Heel doesn’t feel so good these days. The academic scandal, perpetrated by a few that affected so many, has worn everyone down to a frazzle. The brand we’ve loved and boasted about for years has been battered into submission.

It was part of an athletic sponsorship bringing in $650,000, but the “green out” at the Dean Dome Wednesday night almost made it look like we were hiding the famed Carolina blue on national TV in favor of another color that nobody seemed to understand. And Roy Williams, going through one of the toughest personal periods of his life, did not help by trashing the maneuver, calling it an attempt to make “13 cents” in his post-game press conference.

There is little understanding of what is going on because everyone is trying to find solace in a neutral corner. The $650k green-out doesn’t really affect the athletic department because the money goes to the athletic media rights holder (Learfield) that is trying to recoup its commitment of $100 million dollars to UNC over 13 years. So when ol’ Roy was asked to wear a green tie against Iowa, he agreed. But he changed at halftime because his team was playing such dadgum bad basketball.

We had a big win in football at Duke, a proud win on national TV, before a few players just about ruined it by trashing the visiting locker room with spray paint. In a vacuum, that’s not a big deal, but how do you tell 18-20 year olds that everything they do these days reflects on the bigger picture at their school? P.J. Hairston certainly never got it, and he lost his college basketball career.

And then the football team comes back with an inexplicably putrid performance against its arch gridiron rival, raising more questions about the current coaching staff and giving a transfusion of hope to an N.C. State program trying to get off life support. Then came the annual ACC-Big Ten Challenge game at the Smith Center – in years past a very big deal. But the building was embarrassingly empty at tip-off and never looked close to the announced 18,000 attendance figure.

Williams himself looks March tired and it’s barely December. He lost his best buddy, Ted Seagroves, to cancer Tuesday morning, his wife Wanda is battling through health problems, and children of a UNC colleague and prominent basketball alumnus are waging uphill fights against their own cancers. That disease is ol’ Roy’s cause, as he’s helped to raise million for UNC’s Lineberger over the years, so you can imagine the frustration he feels over something else besides basketball.

His team, supposedly deeper and more talented this season, was awful against Iowa, shooting 28 percent for the game and looking disjointed on both ends of the floor. The Tar Heels had a 15-1 offensive rebounding edge in the first half, yet still trailed. Then they gave up 16 offensive boards in the second half, many that bailed out the Hawkeyes after they missed all 12 of their 3-point shots.

Players who have been in the program two or three years are trying to do too much and not getting the results. The game turned when athletic and gifted 6-11 junior forward Brice Johnson missed a one-foot put-back in front of the rim and then picked up his fourth foul out of frustration. “Next time I won’t be such a baby and just dunk the ball,” Johnson said. But every “next time” means he didn’t do it the last time. Star Marcus Paige, the preseason ACC Player of the Year, probably isn’t feeling the pressure but he sure looks like it. He had numerous good looks against Iowa, yet made only 4 of 16 shots, 3 of 12 from behind the arc. Williams ran players in and out of the lineup, trying to find someone who would make a commitment to playing defense and rebounding. This is the second time in seven games that he’s had to call his team out for lack of hustle, which is embarrassing for a program of Carolina’s caliber.

We know what we think, because we’ve been around long enough to know that the Carolina we are living these days isn’t the real Carolina. But what must the administration think?

An Athletic Director who was dealt a really bad hand when he took over a “hear no evil, see no evil” department in 2011 and who hasn’t been able to get his head above water since. And a chancellor from Dartmouth, who may know what academic integrity looks and feels like but, wrapped in the cloak of big-time college athletics, is deferring to a Board of Governors that wants answers without caring about consequences and getting advice from a $2 million P.R. firm that (from this vantage point) hasn’t earned any of that jack thus far.

It’s been a tough stretch for a hallowed university where the old leadership naively believed that “it could never happen to us” and the new leadership seems to be tilting in the breeze. We want our university back, but sadly no one seems to know how or where to find it.