While we’ve gotten an early look at this year’s North Carolina Tar Heels men’s basketball team in the exhibition games against BYU and Winston-Salem State, Monday night will mark the official season opener for 2025-26. Tomorrow night, they will welcome Central Arkansas into the Smith Center to kick off this season, as they look to bounce back after an iffy 2024-25.
Their journey to what will, hopefully, be a good season will begin against the Bears, so let’s preview tomorrow night’s action.
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For a team with ACC title and deep NCAA Tournament run hopes like UNC has this year, a season opener against small conference opposition is mainly about staying healthy and trying to work through some things for both the marquee non-conference games and the ACC slate. Obviously, losses aren’t unheard of in these type of games. The 2004-05 team famously started their season losing to Santa Clara, and everything turned out just fine for them. However, even the so-so to below part Carolina teams in recent years have generally been able to handle business in these type of games.
The ideal performance from UNC in this one is just something that’s not still close a couple minutes into the second half. No, they don’t need to be up 20 points at the 10 minute mark of the first half, but if the Central Arkansas’ bench is going nuts because they just hit a three to get within three with eight minutes left, that’s going to be a little concerning.
As for what the Bears will bring to the table themselves, it’s going to be a little hard to tell. As you might expect for a small conference team in this day and age, their roster is pretty different from what it was last year. Between seniors moving on and transfers out, their four leading scorers from last year are gone. Sophomore Cole McCormick is their leading scorer among returnees, and he was fifth with 8.2 points per game. That team also wasn’t particularly great, going 9-24.
On the other hand, as you also might expect, they brought in a bunch of transfers. That being said, a number of those transfers were players from a level below Division I. Frankly, I have no idea how to project what those types of player will then do on the DI level. Obviously, there are diamonds in the rough all over the place, but I can’t pretend to have the knowledge or scouting ability to determine how any of these players will handle that step up. Having as much turnover as they do from a team that was already pretty bad probably isn’t ideal, but it’s also possible they can take a step forward if one or two transfers hit.
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UNC starting off a season against Central Arkansas is never going be the most remembered game of the year. A performance, whether it’s really good, really bad, or somewhere in the middle, doesn’t have to have any impact on the games that follow it. That being said, we finally get to watch this new look team in action that counts, and it sure would be nice to see them put in a good performance.
