Once the final buzzer sounds in the Dean Smith Center, Jake Patterson is on the clock.
Win? Loss? It doesn’t matter. The UNC senior is scrambling to put together the holy grail for anyone covering Carolina basketball: the postgame notes.
“I’m trying to find everything,” Patterson told Chapelboro. “Our record whenever we score over 40 points in the first half. Our last time we shot over 50 percent and below 40 percent in the same game in each half. Really, just anything I can do to provide context to the game.”
An example postgame note: Ian Jackson scored at least 20 points in four consecutive games earlier this season. The last UNC freshman with such a streak? Tyler Hansbrough in the 2005-06 season.
To dig up these and other gold nuggets of statistical treasure, Patterson is flipping through the mammoth Carolina Basketball Record Book. This year’s edition is a spiral-bound tome stretching for more than 500 pages, each one packed with tables and charts from years past. There’s also what Patterson calls the “Last Time Sheet,” chronicling the last time the Tar Heels did anything on a basketball court.
A 30-point scorer? R.J. Davis vs. Dayton, earlier this season.
A 20-rebound game? Armando Bacot vs. Lehigh in November of 2023.
The last time UNC trailed by double figures in the second half of consecutive games and won both of them? The 2011 ACC Tournament against Miami and Clemson. Obviously.
“It’s almost like putting together a puzzle,” Patterson said. “With the record book, with the game notes, with the last time sheet, with the career high sheet, with our old box scores going back years. And then a knowledge of what is relevant and what’s not. Because whenever we win, there’s typically a lot of positives. And wherever we lose it’s, ‘What are the positives out of this loss?’ For me, it’s a nice mental exercise in trying to figure out what is most valuable for someone writing a story.”
There are other Carolina students who call the Smith Center their office. Junior Ben Mihailovich is tasked with the adrenaline-pumping job of “calling” games. Not calling for ESPN, but calling out stats – in real time.
Did Drake Powell just get a bucket off an assist from Elliot Cadeau? “Shot 9 made, assisted by 3″ would be the call.
Mihailovich is responsible for one half of the floor, with another caller taking the other half. The pair sit courtside with two statisticians, and together they are in charge of the live stats anyone covering that game will see.
“You’re right there. You’re almost in the action,” Mihailovich told Chapelboro. “The one I really remember is [Alabama head coach] Nate Oats. We could hear everything that Coach Oats was saying for Alabama. And we could hear everything the Alabama bench was saying as well.”
Mihailovich credits his experience as a play-by-play announcer – starting with hockey games at his prep school in Connecticut and continuing into baseball games in the Triangle – as being an asset for a stat caller.
“The only changes I needed to make,” he said, “were just saying fewer words.”
The group which mans the UNC men’s basketball scorer’s table during the 2024-25 season. Ben Mihailovich stands on the far right, dressed in white. Jake Patterson stands fourth from the left. (Image via UNC Athletic Communications/Robert Willett)
Patterson brought his own unique experience to his job at the Smith Center: raised a Georgia Tech fan, he wrote for a blog covering the Yellow Jackets before coming to Chapel Hill.
“I enjoy the opportunity to tell stories,” he said. “I enjoy getting to know people and sharing with the rest of the world the cool things that a lot of people are doing, which I got to do in high school a lot. Athletic communications is a fun blend of writing, of people-to-people work. You have to talk to people. You have to make sure that they are all satisfied with their stats and also the conditions that they’re given. You get to do research, you get to work a little bit with social media. It was a way for me to not only write, but also get skills in other aspects of the communications world while doing so in a world-class athletic department.”
Patterson has worn many hats in his work with UNC, including that of a stats caller. These days he prefers compiling the postgame notes. Mihailovich’s job, he said, is no picnic.
“You don’t realize how fast a basketball game is,” said Patterson, “until you have to say every single thing that happens, stat-wise.”
Jake Patterson (middle) sits with UNC’s associate director of communications and content creation Jordan Green (right) and communications and content coordinator Walker Brooks (left) at a women’s basketball game in Carmichael Arena. (Image via Jake Patterson)
Patterson and Mihailovich, like anyone else working in basketball communications, report to Steve Kirschner, the senior associate athletic director for sports information and media relations. Kirschner is responsible for compiling the record book and last time sheet, and is the keeper of UNC’s world-class statistics archive. Its sheer scale, Kirschner told Chapelboro, comes from a desire to give every number a proper backstory.
“I think anybody can look up a stat sheet. Anybody can look at a box score,” he said. “I’m really big on putting what teams and players do in context. Whether it’s an individual game or a series of games, a season, a record, a career, whatever it may be. I want to know, ‘This person’s done it the most since…?’ Or it’s the most ever in this kind of particular situation. Because I think that’s how I can help people tell the story.”
Non-students also help Kirschner in his statistical mission. Longtime listeners of the Tar Heel Sports Network will recognize the name of Jody Zeugner, who retired at the end of last season after more than three decades of statistical work.
“I’m a sports freak,” Zeugner told Chapelboro, “to the chagrin of my wife.”
Zeugner worked as a statistical spotter for both football and men’s basketball radio broadcasts, sitting alongside first Woody Durham and later Jones Angell in the booth. When asked for a favorite memory, Zeugner recalled UNC running back Leon Johnson’s quest for 1,000 rushing yards in the 1993 season. It came down to the final game against Duke in Kenan Stadium.
As the Blue Devils punted the ball back to the Tar Heels, Johnson sat just six yards shy of the milestone. Carolina, of course, fed the ball to its star. Johnson rumbled ahead for five yards. Or was it six?
“[Durham] says, ‘Jody Zeugner, our statistician, did he get it?'” Zeugner remembered. “I had to wait for the ref to spot the ball to see what yard line it was on. It was a yard short. I just shook my head and held up one finger.”
The UNC crowd, most of which was plugged into Durham’s radio broadcast, was up in arms about the ruling. (It didn’t matter in the end, as Johnson surpassed 1,000 yards one snap later).
As for his favorite basketball memory, Zeugner’s answer is an easy one: Marvin Williams’ putback bucket against Duke in the Smith Center in 2005, which head coach Roy Williams famously referred to as the loudest moment he’d ever heard in an arena.
“That was a moment that I’ll always remember,” Zeugner said. “We had just moved to courtside that year.”
Though Zeugner’s days of every-game attendance are behind him, he still hasn’t shaken the itch to follow the numbers.
“These days, the real-time stats are available on the internet,” he said. “So I usually have my iPad with me when I’m watching a Carolina game to keep up with what’s going on. You’re mainly looking for anything that’s out of the ordinary or interesting.”
Kirschner credits Zeugner, along with Charlotte-based minister and UNC basketball historian Ron Smith, for numerous corrections to the record book.
“It’s cool that there are these people in the community who love Carolina Basketball so much, they’re so interested in it, that they put in hundreds and thousands of hours of their time,” Kirschner said. “And we’re the beneficiary of it.”
Those people include Patterson, who has trained several younger students to take his place after he graduates this spring, and Mihailovich, who still has one year left. And so it goes, on and on. Theirs is an often invisible job, but one which enhances the experience for so many who want to know just who the last Tar Heel was to score at least 25 points in three consecutive road games (Garrison Brooks, 2020), or when Carolina last held an opponent without a single point off a turnover (Fairfield, 2015).
For those in the know, Kirschner and his crew are as much of a UNC staple as Michael Jordan or Roy Williams.
“I try and train these kids so that you can look at a box score, and it’s not just a piece of paper with numbers on it,” Kirschner said. “It tells a little bit of the story.”
Featured image via Todd Melet
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.
Comments on Chapelboro are moderated according to our Community Guidelines