From pitches in South Bend and the Bluegrass State back to the hardwood court and gritty gridiron here in Chapel Hill, Tar Heel teams showed up all weekend long.
After losing their last two regular season matches, the UNC men’s soccer team upset Notre Dame under the golden dome to reach their 12th ACC tournament under coach Carlos Somoano. They face top-seeded Virginia Sunday in Cary for a spot in the ACC semis.
Under 25-year-old Erin Matson, the freshest face of Tar Heel sports, UNC field hockey beat Duke and Virginia in Louisville for its ninth straight ACC field hockey title. Who better than the five-time national champ (as player and coach) to win the program’s 28th ACC crown, which is more since 2000 than any other conference school all-time.
Courtney Banghart’s remade women’s basketball team blew out Elon 42-17 in the second half on Thursday evening to go 2-0. She was courtside Friday night watching the men play their own near-perfect second half in a runaway win over No. 19 Kansas.
On Saturday afternoon, Carolina football moved within two wins of a seventh straight bowl bid (which would be the first in the Bill Belichick era) by defeating Stanford, 20-15. Like the win over Syracuse last week, the Heels “D” handled another second string quarterback leading two of the worst power offenses in college football. With only Big Four rivals left on the schedule, the Hoodie’s 4-5 Heels must score more points than they did against the Cardinal and beat two of them to go bowling.
* * *
In the Smith Center under Friday night lights, Hubert Davis’ No. 25 Tar Heels ran away from Kansas 84-70 in what was a Jekyll and Hyde of a game if we’ve ever seen one.
By the time the late-arriving crowd filled the Dean Dome, Carolina’s 11 new players were looking much like last season’s old ones, on their way to 10 first half turnovers that the Jayhawks converted into 17 points. Fortunately, one of those new faces is freshman Caleb Wilson — who Davis likes to say “runs right toward the bright lights and not away from them.”
The “Caleb effect” was evident an hour before tip-off when students were all in place with white shirts that Wilson asked them to wear in social media posts the day before. Like a good marketing director, he later delivered a game high 24 points.
He led the team out of the home tunnel, jumped center and had two quick dunks that set the crowd ablaze through the first TV timeout when Scott Smith presented KU officials with his father’s letterman jacket from Dean’s playing days as a Kansas guard more than 70 years ago.
Star freshman Caleb Wilson celebrates a dunk in No. 25 UNC men’s basketball’s victory over No. 19 Kansas on Friday. (Photo by Todd Melet/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Davis told his players they were lucky to be down by only eight points at halftime after the Heels shot 33 percent and made 3 of 15 three-point attempts. But that turned around somewhat like how Kansas erased UNC’s 15-point lead in the second half of the 2022 NCAA championship game in New Orleans.
“I told them if we would just take care of the basketball, just box out and rebound, we could be back in this game within three minutes,” Davis related to the media after changing his clothes from getting drenched in the locker room celebration. “In the first half, we were turning the ball over… it was almost like pick-sixes for them [interceptions for touchdowns in football]. In the second half it was the exact opposite.”
Wilson sat out about four minutes with two fouls late in the first half, while the Jayhawks were on a 10-0 run to take command of the game and a 37-29 lead at the break. Fortunately, their own freshman star Darryn Peterson sat out longer with two fouls or the deficit might have been larger.
Davis wanted his troops to stop standing around, holding the ball or just dribbling without purpose. He said against a team like Kansas with length, athleticism and uses a switching man to man, opponents have to answer that with some of their own.
He said, “We talk about a .5 second mentality. When you catch the ball you can either shoot it, pass it or drive it. Ball movement, player movement, changing sides of the floor after catching it. That’s not what we were doing in the first half.”
That is exactly what the Tar Heels did in deleting the KU lead and tying the score by the first TV timeout of the second half. The movement, the passing and eventually the shooting were a stark improvement before a national ESPN audience watching.
Commentator Jay Bilas said, “Whatever Hubert Davis told them at halftime, he should have said it before the game.”
The key stretch came when center Henri Veesaar tied the score with a dunk on a feed from point guard Kyan Evans, who followed up with a long-distance bomb to put the Heels ahead. Subsequent 3-pointers from Jaren Stevenson, another from Evans, Jonathan Powell and Luka Bogavac helped balloon that lead to 16 points.
Kyan Evans scoops a layup past a Kansas defender, two of his 12 points on the night. (Photo by Todd Melet/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Despite Kansas’ talent, Carolina’s blitz of points made it ‘game over.’ Friday’s win snapped five straight losses to the Jayhawks since Matt Doherty’s last team beat them (and their coach Roy Williams) in the 2002 pre-season NIT in New York.
The Heels shot under 40 percent in the first half but finished the game at 52 after hitting 68 percent in the second half while scoring 58 points.
The Quad 1 win could be a statement game and forecasts well for more tough non-conference opponents ahead. The team has a solid base with Wilson, junior Veesaar and senior Seth Trimble, who combined for 61 of the total 87 points aided by other newcomers. And they all showed resolve as Carolina turned it over just once in the second half for an astounding reversal.
* * *
The football Heels visit Wake Forest this week. The Deacons are 6-3 and bowl bound after upsetting Virginia Saturday in Charlottesville, knocking quarterback Chandler Morris out of the game and the Cavaliers out of contention for a College Football Playoff berth if not the ACC championship game.
The Tar Heels defense continues to improve but will face far better offenses than Stanford from Wake, Duke and N.C. State in the next three weeks. They limited the Cardinal to 100 total yards in the first half that ended in a 3-3 tie with zero third-down conversions — and later stopped a 2-point play that would have drawn the white-clad visitors within a field goal.
Both teams had come to life in the second half when Carolina scored 17 points on a second field goal from Rece Verhoff and touchdown passes to Jordan Shipp and leading rusher Davion Gause. Stanford managed just 12, failing a pair of two-point conversion tries.
North Carolina wide receiver Jordan Shipp runs for a touchdown during the second half of an NCAA college football game against Stanford, Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025, in Chapel Hill, N.C. (Photo via AP Photo/Chris Seward.)
“The ball to Shipp for a touchdown was something I probably wouldn’t have thrown against TCU because I wasn’t comfortable,” said UNC quarterback Gio Lopez, who wound up with 203 yards passing. “It’s just situations where you get comfortable with your guys practicing and it shows up on game day.”
It wasn’t as pretty as the second halves of the hoops programs’ wins, or results on the soccer or hockey fields. But wins are wins — and UNC had them all over the lovely weekend.
Art Chansky is a veteran journalist who has written ten books, including best-sellers “Game Changers,” “Blue Bloods,” and “The Dean’s List.” He has contributed to WCHL for decades, having made his first appearance as a student in 1971. His “Sports Notebook” commentary airs daily on the 97.9 The Hill WCHL and his “Art’s Angle” opinion column runs weekly on Chapelboro.Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
