Turmoil at UNC? It's Par for the Championship Course

The news that Larry Drew II -- at that point a second-stringer -- had suddenly left the North Carolina program had an unintended, or at least unexpected, consequence. It got the college basketball world talking and thinking about North Carolina again.

What was unexpected was that one of the most storied programs in America had drifted so far off the radar, all of two seasons after winning its second national championship in five years. And the Tar Heels had done so even as they were tied for first in ACC with arch-rival Duke, which, as usual, is on everybody's radar.

The two renew their feud Wednesday at Cameron Indoor Stadium. But even if they beat Duke, the Heels are not expected to get all the way back to the Final Four this season, although they're far better off than they were last season, when they missed the dance completely. And these two years of stumbling -- highlighted, so to speak, by Drew becoming the fourth player since the 2009 title to walk away or be sent away -- only continue a bizarre recent trend, that of national champions plunging off their pedestal soon after settling onto it.

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There's no one reason why, in nearly every program that's hoisted the trophy since the turn of the century, the highs are followed so quickly by the lows. The fact is, though, that they are -- and the conclusion at each school is the same: it's incredibly difficult these days to sustain great success. And it's just as hard for those programs' fan and alumni bases to accept that.

Actually, there is one pretty good reason, and it was spelled out by none other than Mike Krzyzewski, back in December when he passed Dean Smith on the all-time wins list and he was asked how he managed it.

"You have to be healthy, you have to have really good players, you have to have commitment from the school. So I don't know if it's as much of an achievement as much as a result of having all those things," he said that night in Greensboro. "If you're lucky, if you have all of that, you have A, B, C, D -- I've had all of the above.''

Many chuckled to themselves; others rolled their eyes at what seemed like false, or at least forced, humility. But who would know better than Coach K, who, for the relative failure of only making one trip to the Final Four in the eight-year span between the championships in 2001 and 2010, caught a surprising amount of heat? The primary culprit, it appeared, was his attention span after taking over the U.S. national team in 2006.

Even that crown last April proved the point: In the landmine-strewn landscape of college ball these days, you absolutely have to have every break go your way to be the last team standing. Packing the roster with blue-chippers is no guarantee; neither is packing it with upperclassmen, or with freshmen, or with blue-collar kids. There are the schedule, the early NBA departures, the transfers, the discipline problems, even the draw of the NCAA tournament bracket.

If you get that far. Which an stunning number of teams post-championship have struggled to do. North Carolina, of course, did not -- and Williams alluded to the number-one reason for that, on the day Drew transferred, when the coach spoke of how he always thought the criticism of his point guard over the years had been unfair.

"I've said many times that he didn't have Tyler Hansbrough, Wayne Ellington and Danny Green to throw the ball to, like Ty (Lawson) did,'' he said. "And I'll still say that. I'll keep saying that 'til the day I go down.''

It sometimes is that simple: for all the adulation of coaches at the college level, they don't win without players, really good ones, who mesh well and live up or exceed expectations. It's the nature of the game that, most of the time, when things go wrong -- when losses mount or transfers pile up -- players get blamed, and it's no different in Chapel Hill. Even though no one has stated for the record why Drew left when he did, the snap judgment is that Drew is simply a quitter.

The next suggestion that something might be wrong in the program, after all these premature exits and the flop of last season, will be the first.

Yet explanations aren't that simple, either. The day before Drew left North Carolina last week, Maryland followers engaged in another debate over Gary Williams and what has happened since the 2002 title. Naturally, it followed a lopsided loss to Duke, and it again focused on whether Williams was still good enough of a recruiter to compete.

Left out of the argument was that the two classes following that championship were as full of highly-touted prospects as Maryland had attracted in years -- far more lauded than the ones that had formed the heart of the back-to-back Final Four teams, like Juan Dixon, Lonny Baxter and Steve Blake. But those two post-banner classes (remember Travis Garrison? Mike Jones? Chris McCray, ruled academically ineligible midway through his senior year?) underachieved tremendously -- or were rated too high in the first place -- and instead made up the core of the teams that missed the tournament three times from 2005 to '08.

"You have to be healthy, you have to have really good players, you have to have commitment from the school. So I don't know if it's as much of an achievement as much as a result of having all those things."
-- Mike Krzyzewski Roughly the same fate befell Syracuse after 2003 (four years without an NCAA tourney win, including two times in the NIT), Connecticut after 2004 (a second-round loss, the upset by George Mason, a first-round loss, an NIT trip in the next four years), even Florida after repeating in 2006 and '07 (NIT the next two seasons, one-and-done in the NCAAs last year).

It also happens to programs that reach that final weekend regularly: they can fall hard and fast. UCLA (three straight Final Fours from '06-08, missed the Madness last year and in trouble this year) and Michigan State (made the last two Final Fours, now on verge of missing NCAAs), step forward and be counted. In Westwood, everybody went pro early; in East Lansing, Tom Izzo wishes his players had.

In short: fans' demands notwithstanding, it's no accident that only Florida has gone back-to-back since 1992 -- and that the last program to do it before those Duke teams was UCLA in the '70s, with Wooden and Walton.

North Carolina, meanwhile, sprayed deodorant on the weekend's upheaval with an 89-69 rout of Florida State Sunday -- and with freshman point guard Kendal Marshall's school freshman-record 16 assists. That elicited a sprinkling of "Drew Who?'' reactions -- but more clear-thinking observers see little benefit for a team losing depth at a critical position with the clock ticking on the season.

This North Carolina team could go into Cameron and take down Duke; it could win the ACC and make a long run to the final weekend in Houston, shrugging off Drew's transfer and turning it into a positive.

In doing that, though, all the Tar Heels would be doing is reversing a decade-long trend and disproving a pretty solid hypothesis: that the one thing harder than getting to the top of college basketball these days is staying on top. Or, in most cases, just staying relevant.