He's confident in the team entering this season.
It's going to be very interesting to see where North Carolina is ranked in the first AP poll of the 2026-27 college basketball season, but if anything has been suggested throughout the offseason, it's the fact that North Carolina probably isn't going to be one of the top five to 10 teams in America.
If anything, North Carolina might be in the high teens to early 20s, and that's something the program is going to have to deal with. Ultimately, and I know North Carolina fans know this better than anybody after a couple of seasons ago when it was the clear best team in America preseason-wise, none of this stuff really matters.
It's nice to put up a social media graphic and for the fan base to talk some smack, but at the end of the day, winning games in March is what's going to determine the success for North Carolina.
That's why I'm really happy to see some of the players have similar comments about that. These guys don't seem to be worried too much about rankings, who's going to the NBA right now, or anything else. All North Carolina can worry about is itself, and that's something Neoklis Avdalas, the star Virginia Tech transfer, had some comments about.
“Rankings don’t matter to us. The family and our circle knows how good we are, and we want to prove that. But I think the rankings are about last season, too. I was struggling in ACC play. (Matt Able) had some good games but didn’t play to show his talent too much. So I believe that we all know how this works. But we just want to work on our game right now,” Avdalas said, per On3.
North Carolina believing that it's better than some are giving it credit for is also a really good step in the right direction and a good sign that things are going to go as planned this year.
One of those guys believes North Carolina is not getting nearly enough credit, so I'm very curious to see how the year is going to go. Avdalas and guys similar to him are going to be the reason why North Carolina can be good, so he has to back up these remarks.
