If you ask most North Carolina fans how they've felt over the past few years about the basketball program, a lot of people would have some up-and-down responses. Obviously, North Carolina hasn't been the program it is looking to be, as it moved on from head coach Hubert Davis.
If Davis were doing as well of a job as everybody in the building was hoping for, there wouldn't have had to be a new head coach, which is now Michael Malone, the former Denver Nuggets championship head coach.
While there have been some disappointing moments, there has been a lot of good at the same time. North Carolina is still a very good program, but college basketball insider Jon Rothstein doesn't think it is one of the blue bloods in the country. In fact, he believes that there are only two blue bloods in the country right now, with one of them being the University of Connecticut and the other being archrival Duke.
"There are two programs in college basketball that are still operating as traditional blue bloods. It's UConn and Duke, it's Duke and UConn, and that is reiterated when you really dissect the rosters of the other blue blood programs in college basketball. So I wanna take a close look right now at three of them, Kansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina.
“As of today, in the Rothstein 45, which I update every single day based on if there's any roster changes in college basketball, Kentucky's ranked 40th, Kansas is ranked 30th, and North Carolina's ranked 26th. Of those three rosters right now, Carolina has the best roster,” he said.
I don't necessarily agree with Rothstein that there are only two blue bloods in the country at the moment, but I also don't necessarily disagree that North Carolina isn't one of them.
Unfortunately, the Tar Heels haven't been playing the type of basketball that everybody expects out of them, and as a result, it has led to some questions about the future of this program.