I got an email last night from a reader that said exactly what I was thinking – the ACC Coach of the Year award was settled last night. No question.
The three men in the running were Coach K, Roy Williams and Dave Leitao, all for slightly different reasons. Krzyzewski was considered because while his team was picked first, no one expected them to win all of their games. Well, after last night’s loss, they haven’t won all of their games. And it’s not just a one game thing – that’s now three games in a row where they haven’t played very well. It appears to me that K has allowed Duke to become the J.J. Redick show and Redick has become a slave to his scoring average. Earlier in the year, when his shots weren’t falling, he got other players involved and started taking the ball to the hole. Last night, he just kept shooting. Sure, he scored 30, but it took him 28 shots to get there. That’s not a good game.
Dave Leitao was in the running because he had taken the team with the worst talent in the league and got them on the verge of .500 in the ACC. The loss last night doesn’t end that possibility, but it was the second bad loss in a row for Virginia. And you simply can’t win any team awards after you lose to a conference rival by 45 points. If that’s not a rule, it should be.

So, the award is Roy Williams’, and after the run Carolina has been on the past couple of weeks, it should be unanimous. Like with Duke, this is not just a one game thing, but when you beat a mid-level conference team (mid-level by their record, at least) by 45 points, you aren’t just a good team or even a very good team – you’re a juggernaut. Duke hasn’t whomped an ACC team by that much, not even close. The emphatic win over Virginia officially stamps this UNC squad as a Final Four contender. They won’t be a favorite to get that far, and they shouldn’t be, but they certainly have shown that they are good enough to win four NCAA Tourney games.
That same emailer pointed out that he can’t remember any Dean Smith coaching jobs any better than this year. I can’t argue with him, although I admit to not having the in-depth Carolina memory to challenge it. In some ways, this team reminds me of UNC’s 1993 squad, a deep team full of very good players, but no real superstars. I always thought that 1993 squad was a special bit of alchemy and this year Roy is matching his mentor.
Roy Williams – your 2006 ACC Coach of the Year
p.s. I did a Google image search for “Huckleberry Hound” to find that pic and the number one result was from my site. I had forgotten that I used that pic before. I found that kind of funny.