Mar 17, 2016; Raleigh, NC, USA; North Carolina Tar Heels head coach Roy Williams (C) questions a call against the Florida Gulf Coast Eagles during the second half at PNC Arena. Mandatory Credit: Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

UNC avoids potentially historical FCSU scare

RALEIGH — North Carolina coach Roy Williams didn’t have to raise his voice at halftime.

Up by just one point against a 16-seed, the top-seeded Tar Heels knew they weren’t playing well. Other than FGCU’s 10 turnovers, nearly every statistic on the sheet gave that much away.

A 21-14 rebounding deficit, FGCU’s 60 percent from the floor, the Eagles’ 22-16 edge in the paint.

“It’s one of the worst halves we played all year long,” Williams said afterwards.

Williams didn’t need to yell the poor play out of his players or remind them of what was at stake. The motivation is the same for every team, every year: win and extend the season. Lose and go home while other teams are still playing for their shot at a national title.

“Coach came in halftime, he didn’t yell at us a lot,” point guard Joel Berry said. “He was saying we had to pick up our intensity. They came out being the aggressor, and we were just laid back thinking they were going to bow down to us.”

The 16 seed certainly wasn’t doing any genuflecting, and it felt like UNC could be on the verge of the worst kind of history.

That thought — the potential of being the first one-seed to lose to a 16 — infiltrated the players’ minds, rattling them in the first half as they struggled to find momentum amidst FGCU’s momentum-building layups and flexes.

“It’s sitting in the back of your head because you don’t want to be that No. 1 seed that’s the first one to ever get beat by a 16 seed,” Berry said. “It was there in my head, and it was probably in the other guys’ heads too. I think that’s why we came out a little bit shaky.”

But with measured yet emphatic words from Williams at halftime, the Tar Heels found the necessary wakeup call to get back on track for a 83-67 win.

Keyed by five quick points on a Marcus Paige 3-pointer and a layup by Berry (14 points, six rebounds) UNC finally gained control of the game with a 22-6 run to open the second half.

“That was an opportunity for us to get going,” Paige said of his shot. “For that to go down, it kind of ignited us in the second half.”

After allowing FGCU (21-14) to score at will in the first half, UNC clamped down on defense and held the Eagles to just 30 percent in the second half. Brice Johnson erupted for a career-high eight blocks, swatting nearly everything that came near him.

It was a turnaround reminiscent of UNC’s opening game of the ACC tournament where it took a big second-half run to overcome a slow start against Pittsburgh.

“It just took us a while to get going, similar to the way it took us a while to get going against Pitt,” said Paige, who finished with 10 points in his penultimate PNC Arena appearance. “Now there’s no time for that and no room for that … There’s no time to tiptoe into a game and not be the aggressor not with as talented a team as we have. We’ve got to take it at them, whoever it is, make them play our style of basketball.”

And like that Pittsburgh game, the Tar Heels (29-6) hope that this second half can help ignite momentum moving forward.

“You can’t build on anything we did on the first half,” Paige said. “But we played better in the second half. We went back to our lockdown defense where we held them to 30 percent from the field. Did a little bit better on the boards and got up and run and started playing Carolina basketball.

“So we can build off of what we did in the second half. We would’ve liked to be able to build what we did the whole game but having some positive things down the stretch and getting the lead out and being able sit down the last couple of minutes is something we wanted.”

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