You couldn’t create a better advertisement for the 2024–25 men’s college basketball season than the two-plus hours of basketball played at Allen Fieldhouse on Friday night.
Two blueblood programs, the North Carolina Tar Heels and Kansas Jayhawks, playing in one of the sport’s iconic venues with students on campus. Both offenses put on shows: Kansas shredding Carolina on the interior in the first half; North Carolina’s guards going to work in the second. A compelling finish, with the Heels rallying from 20 points down in the first half to take the lead late, just for the Jayhawks to punch back and come away with a 92–89 victory. In a game that felt for a while like whoever had the ball last would win it, North Carolina’s hopes of overtime were dashed when point guard Elliot Cadeau’s potential tying three rimmed out.
It’s the type of game the sport desperately needs more of, especially in the season’s first few weeks.
The sport officially tipped off Monday with 199 games. But 82 of them featured at least one non-Division I team and only four featured two high-major teams. Mark Few at Gonzaga and Scott Drew at Baylor delivered the type of blockbuster opening night matchup the slate needed … only to have it tip off just a few minutes before midnight as a Monday Night Football postgame show of sorts. To make matters worse, that game was never competitive, with the Bulldogs putting a historic 38-point hurting on the Bears. For a sport already pushed into the background by college football and the NFL for much of the early part of the season, having zero relevant games on television aired before half the country goes to sleep is less than ideal.
Enter Friday’s clash of two of the sport’s most storied programs. The matchup, announced initially last summer, is the first leg of a home-and-home series that will bring the Jayhawks to the Dean Smith Center next November. Bill Self and Hubert Davis deserve credit for being willing to schedule a game like this in the season’s first week, but the two teams are better off for having tested themselves like this instead of beating up on another overmatched mid-major like the majority of their blueblood peers chose.
With Kansas, we learned that South Dakota State transfer Zeke Mayo is ready for the bright lights. The Lawrence, Kan., native was one of the best mid-major guards in the sport a year ago, but leveling up from that to a blueblood isn’t an easy adjustment. Self raved all summer and fall about Mayo’s readiness, and he shined in the bright lights with 21 points, five rebounds, four assists and three of the Jayhawks’ six made threes. He made huge plays late in the second when North Carolina had all the momentum and looked like Kansas’s best guard for large stretches of the night. It’s hard to believe that he was playing in the Summit League this time last year.
Mayo’s adjustment to playing with the Jayhawks has been less smooth than KU's other three transfers. Wisconsin transfer AJ Storr was better Friday, scoring 13 points off the bench, but hasn’t quite delivered on the hype of being one of the top players in the portal. Alabama transfer Rylan Griffen, a mainstay on last season’s Final Four team, had a quiet six points in 16 minutes, while Northern Illinois transfer David “Diggy” Coit was held scoreless. Still, those reinforcements give Kansas a much different look than their group from a year ago: deeper, faster, with more on-ball playmaking ability and less of a load on point guard Dajuan Harris Jr. Add all that up with an outstanding frontcourt, and the preseason No. 1 billing is justified.
As for the Tar Heels, we saw the nucleus that gives them a chance to beat anyone in the country—and the flaw that could doom them in March. Returning All-American RJ Davis was a known commodity in the backcourt, but the Heels have quite the three-headed monster emerging at guard with Cadeau and Seth Trimble. Trimble returning to North Carolina after testing the portal waters in the spring has become a transformational move, one that’s seen him elevate his game from defensive specialist into legitimate two-way threat. He was fabulous Friday night with 19 points, applying constant pressure on the rim. Meanwhile, Cadeau is one of the nation’s best passers and another paint touch wizard. The two rising stars lightened the load on Davis and were electric in the second half as the Heels mounted their furious comeback.
That said, Carolina’s flaws up front were exposed at times in their first real test of the season. The Tar Heels staff struck out on top targets to replace longtime center Armando Bacot in the portal this offseason, instead landing on a platoon with returner Jalen Washington and undersized Vanderbilt transfer Ven-Allen Lubin at the five while veteran glue guy Jae’Lyn Withers mans the four. The Heels were shredded inside in the first half and outscored in the paint 30–12 in the opening 20 minutes, looking outmatched against Hunter Dickinson, KJ Adams Jr. and Flory Bidunga down low. But in the second, the bigs held their own, with Withers surprisingly making three triples and Lubin effective around the rim. The forward spots will never be a strength for this Tar Heel team, but it needs to not be a weakness if North Carolina is to compete for a national championship.
But the most important part of Friday’s game was that it got played in the first place. And if those 40 minutes of highly entertaining basketball are any indication, we’re in for one heck of a men’s college basketball season.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Kansas-UNC Showdown Was Everything Early-Season College Basketball Should Be.