http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball/news?slug=jn-uncwoes020810&prov=yhoo&type=lgns On good nights Roy Williams says he sleeps between two and three hours. Most times, though, the North Carolina basketball coach is lucky if he gets any rest at all.
“I just lay there and look at the ceiling,” Williams said. “I’ll try to close my eyes and fall back asleep, but I can’t.”
Less than a year after he stood on a stage at Ford Field in Detroit and hoisted the national championship trophy, Williams is enduring the most difficult season of his Hall of Fame career. Sunday’s loss at Maryland dropped the Tar Heels to 13-10 overall and 2-6 in ACC play.
...All of it is taking its toll on Williams, who has literally been brought to tears by North Carolina’s recent struggles. Sitting behind his desk at the Dean Smith Center on Friday morning, a frustrated and fatigued Williams said there is only one person to blame for the Tar Heels’ shortcomings.
“I haven’t done a good job with this team,” he said. “As a coach, to say that … it’s hard. It really is.”
Williams paused as a lump swelled in this throat. He gulped and then lowered his voice as he strained to speak.
“I’ve always been very confident,” he said. “Other people can decide whether they think I’m cocky or not. Cocky is someone that looks down his nose at somebody else. I know I’ve never done that. But I’ve always been really confident in my ability to get guys to play together and to compete.
“This year has shaken my confidence a little. You start questioning your own worth to a team. You start wondering about your ability.”
...The only time Williams coached a team that didn’t earn a berth was at Kansas in 1988-89 ? his first season as a head coach. The Jayhawks were banned from postseason play that year because of improprieties that occurred under the previous staff.
Williams has been to the tournament every year since and won at least one game. That streak, it appears, is about to end.
“We knew it was going to be a fine line,” Williams said. “We knew we had a chance to be good, but we also knew there was a chance we could struggle. But never in my wildest dreams did I think we’d struggle like we are right now.”
...He said it’s becoming more and more difficult to sign Top 20-caliber players when there is already so much talent on one team.
“We got Tyler Hansbrough in 2006 when he thought Sean May and Marvin Williams would be back,” Williams said. “Luckily, that didn’t bother him. But those kinds of situations are rare.
“We’re going to take hits sometimes. In this case we didn’t get a couple of players that we wanted because we had Tyler and Danny Green and Wayne Ellington and Ty Lawson. The [recruits] were like, ‘I don’t want to come in and be a backup to those guys for two or three years.’
“People are always going to criticize and nitpick at things that they don’t understand. The bottom line is that I’ve got to coach who we have. If I make a great decision in recruiting or a bad decision in recruiting, I’ve still got to coach them.”
