Well, now we know why the Palestra is sold out tonight.
The place is almost completely full eight minutes before tipoff, and I'd say it's at least 60-40 Carolina blue.
I'll check in here throughout the night as events warrant. Which I don't think they will, but if there are any good rollouts, or celebrity sightings, or stuff like that I'll note them.
The game is on ESPN2, of course, so I doubt I'll have to say much about the game.
Okay, off we go...
UPDATE: So as you noticed by now, there wasn't really much spectacular. North Carolina won, 106-71, shooting 57.3 percent from the field for the game and averaging 1.30 points per possession.
The game was close enough to be interesting for pretty much the whole first half, though. I was amazed by how tight Carolina's man defense was at the perimeter, but Penn did a good job of getting around it and shot 56.7 percent from the field in the first 20 minutes. The score was 50-37 UNC at halftime.
The final score may look like a blowout, and it was, but I never thought the Tar Heels were running up the score. The game was played at such a fast pace -- 82 possessions for UNC, 85 for Penn -- that the points total just pretty much happened. Nothing Belichick-ian about it, that's for sure.
Tyler Hansbrough was simply awesome. I've been impressed enough watching him on TV, but seeing him work on every possession in person is something totally different. Look at what he did in the minutes he played:
Name |
Min |
FG |
FT |
3pt |
OR |
DR |
TR |
A |
S |
TO |
Blk |
PF |
Eff |
Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
T. Hansbrough |
25 |
12-16 |
5-8 |
0-0 |
7 |
3 |
10 |
0 |
1 |
1 |
0 |
1 |
36 |
29 |
Tyler Bernardini was the talk of the Penn side of things, scoring 26 points on 10-of-17 shooting. I don't know how serious Roy Williams was when he said this, but he said after the game that "I told our staff, 'Why the Dickens didn't we recruit him?'"
And I will say this for the atmosphere: From the time I wrote the original post to around 3/4 of the way through the first half was without question the loudest I've heard the Palestra in a while, probably going back to the '06 Holy War. Both sets of fans were really into it, with every seat in the place filled and quite a few fans standing along the back wall across the floor from press row.
Oh, and it should be noted that Bill Raftery called out the Penn student section on the ESPN2 broadcast during the second half, hoping they would show up like that for Ivy League games. We'll see about that.
I'll let the Inquirer and Daily News writers do the rest of the talking tomorrow morning, but for now, you can listen to the Penn and North Carolina postgame press conferences. Both have plenty of good quotes in them.
There's also a good photo gallery from the Inquirer.
And a hello to all of you coming over here from the Raleigh News and Observer's ACC Now blog, one of my favorites on the college sports landscape.
As I said in the previous post, I spent seven summers in your neck of the woods and remember it fondly. Feel free to stick around on this side of the cyber-Mason-Dixon Line -- Duke comes here Jan. 9 and I'll be there as well.
