Legendary UNC coach Roy Williams once explained that his intense dislike of NC State stemmed from his early years in the North Carolina mountains, when he grew tired of obnoxious Wolfpack fans bragging about their teams’ relatively brief stretches of success against the Tar Heels for parts of the 1950s and 1970s.
Decades later, of course, Williams got his revenge. His 33-5 head-to-head mark against State is by far the best record of any head coach — for either school — in the 100-plus-year history of the rivalry. At one point, Williams even remarked that “he’d rather beat State than eat.”
Heading into the Tar Heels’ trip to face the Wolfpack in Raleigh on Tuesday night, UNC had an almost two-decades-long relationship with State that could be described as hammer-versus-nail. Since 2007, in the past 40 rivalry games, and bridging Carolina’s 2021 coaching transition from Williams to Hubert Davis, the Heels had won a whopping 34 games to the Pack’s measly six, representing the most dominant stretch — by either school — in the rivalry’s history.
This year’s only regular-season matchup between the two schools, however, barely got out of the starting gate. There had been some offseason hype for the game, mainly related to State’s hiring of provocative head coach Will Wade and the ensuing transfer of UNC big man Ven-Allen Lubin to the Wolfpack, but the matchup between two of the top half-dozen teams in the ACC never materialized.
With UNC missing its two best players, Caleb Wilson and Henri Veesaar, against a Wolfpack team that had been vulnerable against opponents with quality big men, it quickly became clear that the Tar Heels were overmatched. Before a hostile crowd, UNC’s point guard pairing of Derek Dixon and Kyan Evans looked particularly nervous, and the Heels trailed by double-digits even before the second TV timeout, while falling to an alarming 2-5 in true road games this season.
The 82-58 final score marked the Tar Heels’ largest deficit of the entire season and just their third double-digit defeat of the 2026 campaign, following earlier such losses to Michigan State and SMU.
With Wade’s rivalry record now standing at 1-0, it’s worth noting that the most recent State coach to finish his career with a winning record against Carolina was Everett Case, who retired more than 60 years ago, in 1964, just three years after the Tar Heels promoted a little-known assistant named Dean Smith to the top job in Chapel Hill.
Featured image via Associated Press/Karl DeBlaker
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