Three Takeaways from UNC’s loss to Cal

Thanks goodness the Tar Heels are leaving the West Coast.

The expansion out to California has not been a good one for the two revenue athletic programs at UNC. Carolina lost their late night trip to Cal on the football side a couple months ago, and the basketball team is currently 1-3 against the schools in the first two seasons they joined. Oh yeah, you forgot about that Stanford win in Chapel Hill last year, didn’t you?

To say this one was frustrating is underselling it, and Carolina limping back to Chapel Hill 0-2 on this West Coast swing has completely evaporated the good will that was built up over the first two months of the season.

As the joke goes, besides that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Here are three of the takeaways from Carolina’s 84-78 loss to the Golden Bears. These may not be what your first takeaways would be, and that’s mostly because these are things that also need to be said.

Hubert Davis lit his seat on fire

The fact is that we all knew the margin for Hubert Davis was razor thin going into the season. The wins over Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio State earlier in the season made it seem like things were moving in the right direction.

Then Carolina lost three of their last four, all losses on the road, and the start Saturday was about as poor as you could ask for. What was especially egregious was how we all knew that Carolina’s three-point defense had been horrid to the point that there was tape circulating all around about what fixes need to happen, and yet the start of the game appeared to look as if this team just didn’t want to listen to anything Hubert was telling them.

Thus a confirmation bias emerges. If you wanted Davis fired before this season you’ve seen nothing to change your mind and you are probably done. It really doesn’t matter if you agree with this stance or not, the fact remains that a significant portion of the fanbase felt this way before the season, and the play since the calendar turned to 2026 has just cemented this pretty loud group.

How Davis and the team responds to this in the next couple of games will tell us what the rest of the season will look like. Carolina has Notre Dame, a resurgent Virginia squad that barely won against SMU Saturday, a Georgia Tech team that beat NC State on the road, Syracuse, then the Blue Devils. If they somehow go 5-0 the fire may die. However, if Carolina can’t score a big win or drops another one to a seemingly weaker team, then there will be a lot more folks checking out.

Free throws are going to be the real death of this team

So here’s what’s funny about these last two losses: If Carolina shoots just a bit better from the charity stripe, all of these defensive issues and made three-pointers are just annoyances and not morale killers. On Saturday, Carolina missed several free throws in a game where they lost by six points. They went 12-18 in the second half from the stripe and 5-10 in the first half. You think that missed eleven points from the line might have helped out when you lost by six? This follows their performance on Wednesday where they lead despite the hot shooting Stanford, but they helped the comeback by going 8-16 from the line in the second half.

The deficit against SMU was more than the free throw disparity, but in general—how much differently are we thinking about this team if they hit, say, 75% of their free throws instead of closer to 60?

The fact is that Carolina is going to be playing several more close games and on top of all of the defensive issues, this one is really can’t be overlooked. That is on coaching, by the way—they aren’t at the line shooting it for them, but it’s a big enough issue that if it isn’t being addressed in practice or emphasized to the point players work on it on their own, then it’s just as bad a coaching mistake as the defensive issues.

Be ready to live with the ups and downs of Derek Dixon

Derek Dixon got the start at the lead guard spot over Kyan Evans for the first time, and that feels like a move you can’t really move back from. It at least answers a call from a big portion of the fan base to acknowledge being a starting point guard just isn’t what Evans can do, and that you need to just sink or swim with Dixon.

Well, Dixon started, and Carolina sank for a good portion of the game.

Just look at the box score and you can see Davis is all-in on Dixon as the lead guard and that’s going to come with ups and downs. That said, it’s hard to argue against this being the wrong call because Dixon played 30 minutes, scored 14 points, went 4-8 from three, and overall was a +5 on the floor versus Evans who scored 0 points, was 0-2 from three, and had the same number of turnovers (2) as Dixon despite only playing ten minutes. Evans was also a -11 when on the court—a remarkable number considering again, he was only on the court for 10 minutes.

Thus even though it’s coming off a loss, the numbers and the product on the court show that the team just seems better with Dixon on the court. It’s incumbent on Davis to keep Evans ready to play so that he can show some of what caught Carolina’s attention last season. Meanwhile, fans are just going to have to ride the ups and downs that go with a freshman guard leading the group. Hopefully the end of the game gave us a preview of how the rest of the season will go.

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