Sports
‘No they didn’t’: Inside the Jets’ shocking deadline day trades of Sauce Gardner, Quinnen Williams
Additional reporting by Jeremy Fowler, Stephen Holder and Dan Graziano
AT A STONE church on a hill, in a pastoral town only two miles from their training facility, the New York Jets paid their respect to a franchise icon Tuesday morning in Madison, New Jersey. More than 400 mourners packed into St. Vincent Martyr for Nick Mangold’s funeral Mass, 10 days after the beloved center died because of complications from kidney disease at age 41.
Jets general manager Darren Mougey was among the last to arrive, walking purposefully into the church as a bagpiper filled the crisp autumn air with strains of sorrow. Mougey wore a dark suit and the expression of a man whose mind was racing. Five hours remained until the NFL trade deadline at 4 p.m. ET, and he was sitting on a couple of blockbusters.
Mougey stood in the back of the church (“A beautiful service,” he would say later) and slipped out before it was over, heading back to the office for urgent business. Back at St. Vincent, about three dozen of Mangold’s former teammates from the Jets and Ohio State congregated outside the church after the Mass, exchanging hugs and wiping tears. The casket was placed in the hearse, bagpiper playing again. A solemn moment.
Minutes later, a news flash on social media: Jets cornerback Sauce Gardner traded to the Indianapolis Colts.
Word slowly spread through the crowd of mourners. One of them was Darrelle Revis, a Pro Football Hall of Famer who, once upon a time, was traded by the Jets in his prime. He refused to believe his old team had parted with one of its young stars.
“No they didn’t,” Revis said matter-of-factly, when informed of the trade. “You’re joking.”
Somebody showed him Gardner’s social media post, bidding farewell to New York. Revis shook his head in disbelief. It was real, and it was stunning.
And it wasn’t the team’s only shocking move as the Jets (1-7) pulled off two major trades. They dealt Gardner and defensive tackle Quinnen Williams for four draft picks and two backup players, blew up the core of what once was a top-five defense and fueled a torrent of conflicting emotions in their locker room. This is a story about how the Jets, trying to overturn years of misery, culminated months of planning with two potentially franchise-altering moves in less than two hours.
Tuesday night, Mougey, who had barely slept the previous two nights, was hoarse and drained. He lost his train of thought during a video call with reporters. He apologized, adding, “I’m running with half a brain here.”
TO PREPARE FOR the trade deadline, Mougey and his staff met weekly, starting in Week 4. They discussed the roster in-depth, assigning potential trade value for each player. They studied contracts and comparisons from around the league, adjusting based on the ebb and flow of the season. The goal was to anticipate as many scenarios as possible. They were confident this would eliminate any recency bias.
Three weeks before deadline day, the Colts called and everything changed.
Initially, the Jets had no interest in moving Gardner, team sources said. After all, he’s only 25, a two-time All-Pro under team control through 2030 after a record-setting four-year, $120.4 million contract extension in July.
The Jets told the Colts it would take a Micah Parsons-like deal, the same team sources said — i.e. two first-round picks and a quality starter. Another reference point was the Jalen Ramsey trade in 2019, when the Los Angeles Rams dealt two first-round picks for the star corner.
The Colts weren’t biting.
That shifted a few days before the deadline, as the offers “kept getting richer and richer,” Mougey said. The Colts, coming off a loss after a blistering 7-1 start, were hoping to bolster their chances of a Super Bowl run and coveted an outside cornerback.
The market was drying up — they checked into Deonte Banks of the New York Giants and New Orleans’ Alontae Taylor — and perhaps that drove up the price for Gardner. Anticipating January home games, they wanted to prepare for visiting passing attacks that would look to exploit the comfy indoor conditions at Lucas Oil Stadium.
By Monday, they let the Jets know they “could potentially do” a deal that included 2026 and 2027 first-round picks, a Colts team source said.
The Jets didn’t shop the Colts’ offer to other teams, but they were emphatic about having mercurial wide receiver Adonai Mitchell included in the package, according to a Jets team source. Mitchell, a 2024 second-round choice, was buried on the Colts’ depth chart, but the Jets had positive scouting reports on him and a glaring need at receiver.
By the time Mougey left for the funeral, the trade was close to the goal line. He probably could’ve pushed it across early that morning, but he hit the “pause” button out of sensitivity to the day’s events.
The first-year GM didn’t know Mangold personally, but he’s keenly aware of what the team’s 2006 first-round pick meant to the franchise. He sees Mangold every day in the Jets’ fieldhouse, where mural-sized photos of Ring of Honor members hang from the rafters.
So Mougey made the two-mile drive to St. Vincent, hoping word of the looming deal wouldn’t leak. The last thing he wanted was a news alert disrupting the mourners, and in that case the Jets did a good job keeping both trades under wraps, so good that rival executives were surprised when the deals were announced.
“I did not expect this at all,” said an AFC executive who had dealt with the Jets.
GARDNER AND HIS brother, Allante, also one of his agents, were notified by the Jets around the same time — 12:15 p.m. on Tuesday. Sauce got a call from Mougey, Allante from Nick Sabella, the Jets’ senior director of football administration. They had no inkling that one of the biggest NFL trades of 2025 was in the works, according to Allante, who called it a sound business decision by the Jets.
“They couldn’t turn it down, and Ahmad [Sauce] deserves to be on a winning football team,” Allante said.
Recalling his conversation with Sabella, Allante Gardner said, “It was almost like he was saying, ‘This is going to hurt, but we have to do it for the future of the organization.'”
Sauce was supposed to be part of that future.
Only four months earlier, the Jets had locked in arguably their most popular player with an extension that made him the NFL’s highest-paid cornerback. Gardner loved the idea of playing his entire career in New York. He proclaimed his desire to help change the losing culture.
Coach Aaron Glenn, too, was giddy, saying Gardner and wide receiver Garrett Wilson (four-year, $130 million extension) were “foundational players.”
“I want them here for a long time,” Glenn, who has significant say on personnel decisions, said at the time.
For the Jets, with 14 consecutive non-playoff seasons (the longest active drought), the extensions provided a feel-good vibe at the start of training camp. It’s highly unusual for a team to flip a player so soon after extending him, but Mougey and Sabella structured Gardner’s deal in a way that allowed them to escape with minimal cap ramifications — only $13.75 million in signing bonus, with rolling guarantees that will be absorbed by the Colts.
That decision wasn’t an accident; Mougey said they wanted to make it a tradable contract, just in case. In essence, it made Gardner more desirable. As a different league source said, “If Sauce didn’t have an extension, do Jets get two [first-round picks]? Probably not.”
The Jets didn’t sign him to trade him four months later, but the landscape changed because of their subpar record and the desire to buttress their rebuild with draft capital. Though no one ever criticized Gardner publicly, there was internal concern about his ball production (three interceptions in 55 games) and high penalty rate (14 in his past 25 games).
Gardner is considered the most flawed of the elite corners, with one NFC executive saying, “Never been a huge Sauce fan, so that was a great deal to me that you just couldn’t pass up.”
An AFC executive added, “[The] lack of interceptions and penalties have always been the issue with [Gardner], but otherwise a really good player.”
Glenn praised Gardner’s talent but also suggested the change of scenery might be good for him. In his post-trade comments, he made it sound as if no player is untouchable.
Thirty years ago, Glenn’s coach and mentor, Bill Parcells, expressed the same sentiment to him when trade rumors were swirling. The Hall of Famer told Glenn, a young corner at the time, that he’d trade his wife for the right price. That always stuck with him.
Jets owner Woody Johnson recently called Gardner and Wilson “great talents,” saying their contract extensions were important to the organization. Try to imagine Johnson’s reaction when, only two weeks after making that comment, his top football lieutenants informed him of their plans to trade Gardner.
Actually, it wasn’t what you might have expected.
Johnson, known in the past for meddling, was pragmatic and professed his faith in Mougey and Glenn, according to a Jets team source.
FOR THE JETS, trapped in a losing vortex for the better part of two decades, history always repeats itself.
Twelve years ago, first-time GM John Idzik wanted to accelerate the rebuilding process, so he traded his most valuable asset for first- and fourth-round picks. And so Revis, arguably the greatest cornerback of his generation, was traded to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on April 21, 2013.
And there Revis was Tuesday, paying respect to Mangold, only two miles from where one of the most shocking trades in team history was going down. Once he absorbed the news, he praised the move.
“I guess this is kind of a similar path for Sauce,” Revis said. “In this situation, I think the Johnson family is trying to look to the future, getting these draft picks for him. It’s been a tough year, really tough for the organization, but I think the future is always bright and you can always turn things around.”
With the returns for the Gardner and Williams trades, the Jets hold five first-round picks over the next two drafts — two in 2026, three in 2027.
“It starts with trying to find a franchise quarterback,” said Revis, who played with Tom Brady on the New England Patriots’ 2014 Super Bowl championship team. “I think those guys have been trying to do that for the last couple of years.”
For the last 50, but who’s counting?
TWO WEEKS AGO, Williams learned from a reporter that he was on the verge of 100 games in a Jets uniform — 98, to be exact.
“You hear that?” he said in a joking way to a teammate at the next locker. “I never thought I’d make it.”
He didn’t — at least not with the Jets.
In that moment, Williams had to know there was a chance he’d be traded by the deadline. His camp had made it known that the former All-Pro coveted a change of scenery, league and team sources said.
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Williams, who went 27-2 in two playing seasons at Alabama, was worn down by losing. He arrived in 2019, was drafted No. 3, and the closest he came to a winning season in New York was 7-9 as a rookie. In fact, he experienced more losing than just about every player in team history.
Of the 73 players with at least 100 games played as a Jet, the lowest winning percentage belongs to current long-snapper Thomas Hennessy — a .300 mark from 2017 to present. Williams (.306) would be right behind him, second on the list.
“I think the world knew I was frustrated being there so long and still losing,” Williams said Wednesday at his introductory news conference with the Dallas Cowboys.
Williams foreshadowed his feelings with his infamous tweet in February, saying, “Another rebuild year for me I guess” — his response to the news that quarterback Aaron Rodgers was being released. That social media post didn’t sit well with folks in the organization.
The losing, coupled with a subtle position switch (he was used primarily as a 3-technique tackle instead of his usual spot at nose tackle), fueled his unhappiness. His usual production wasn’t there; he had only one sack — coincidentally, a takedown of former teammate Rodgers on the first play of the season (a 34-32 home loss to Pittsburgh).
Unlike the Gardner deal, the Williams trade came late and fast. Talks with the Cowboys intensified Monday, Jets team sources said. The Jets made it clear to Dallas that they had to be blown away to part with one of the league’s best defensive tackles. Another team, reportedly the Jacksonville Jaguars, made a strong push. It was an ideal situation for the Jets, who had two teams interested.
After returning from the funeral, Mougey finalized the trade — Williams for a 2026 second-round pick, a 2027 first-round pick and backup defensive tackle Mazi Smith.
Here was the clincher for the Jets, a team source said: They negotiated the right to get the better of the Cowboys’ two first-round picks in 2027, as Dallas has its own selection and the Green Bay Packers’ pick from the Parsons trade. That could have huge ramifications in the Jets’ favor if Dallas (3-5-1) has a losing season in 2026.
With a stockpile of draft capital, the Jets have the resources to trade up for a quarterback in ’26 or ’27 or use the picks to pry a veteran away from another team. They wanted flexibility. Well, they got it.
“More than anything,” Glenn said, “we want to make sure we build this team in our vision.”
JETS WIDE RECEIVER Allen Lazard checked his phone Tuesday and saw a text from a close friend. It simply said:
“OMG.”
Lazard figured it was a trade, so he checked X and saw the Gardner news. The Williams news broke a short time later.
The entire locker room responded in an “OMG” kind of way to the blockbuster moves. Edge rusher Jermaine Johnson posted on social media his support for the organization, but added, “I’m sick.” Running back Breece Hall said, “It sucks, but it’s the nature of the business.”
Glenn, charged with motivating a team that saw two of its best players traded for draft capital that won’t help it win in 2025, addressed it briefly in a team meeting. His message: Change in the NFL is a constant; change creates opportunity. Will his players buy it? There could be an answer Sunday (1 p.m. ET, CBS) when the Jets host the Cleveland Browns (2-6) — a game that could have huge draft implications.
Two miles down the road, on a blue-sky Tuesday, former Jets from the 2000s and 2010s were grappling with a different kind of shock. Only 15 years ago, Mangold anchored an offensive line that helped the Jets to the AFC Championship Game — their last playoff appearance.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Revis said.
The Jets have taken part in the circle of recovery and renewal for a half-century, trying to overcome the past while looking forward to a brighter tomorrow.
And so Revis, one of the best to ever wear a Jets uniform, did just that.
“With all these draft picks, I can kind of see the chess moves being made on the board,” he said, his voice competing with the tolling bell atop St. Vincent.
Sports
World’s tallest teenager Olivier Rioux makes collegiate basketball history for Florida Gators
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The Florida Gators were up big in the fourth quarter of their win over North Florida on Thursday, yet fans had one big request for head coach Todd Golden.
They wanted to see Olivier Rioux, the world’s tallest teenager at 7-foot-9, make his collegiate debut, as chants of “We want Ollie!” swept through the arena.
Golden granted the vociferous crowd’s wish with 2:09 left to play in the game when he inserted Rioux. In Rioux’s two minutes of action, he didn’t even touch the ball because of the attention he commanded.
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North Florida guard Dante Oliver, left, and North Florida forward Nestor Dyachok, right, guard against Florida center Olivier Rioux, center, during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game in Gainesville, Florida, on Nov. 6, 2025. (Chris Watkins/AP Photo)
“It felt great,” Rioux said. “The support from everybody was amazing, even on the bench and even the fans. I think everybody supported me. I’m very grateful.”
Rioux’s appearance lit the whole arena up. Even North Florida forward Trey Cady smirked when he measured himself against a towering redshirt freshman. Rioux became the tallest player ever to step on the court in college basketball history.
When asked about making history, Rioux quipped, “It’s another day, I guess.”
Golden said the requests for Rioux to come into the game began at halftime.
North Florida guard Trey Cady, front right, defends against Florida center Olivier Rioux (32) during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game in Gainesville, Florida, on Nov. 6, 2025. (Chris Watkins/AP Photo)
“There’s people yelling at me at halftime about playing him,” Golden said. “I’m like, ‘Listen, it will happen. The time will come.’”
Rioux is 2 inches (5 centimeters) taller than former NBA giants Gheorghe Muresan and Manute Bol, and 3 inches taller than popular big men Yao Ming, Tacko Fall and Shawn Bradley.
Golden credited the Canadian native for his work ethic despite not getting a lot of playing time.
“He’s put in a lot of great work,” Golden said. “To his credit, he’s kept a great attitude without getting a lot of reward in terms of playing time and opportunity.”
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Olivier Rioux (32) of the Florida Gators looks on from the bench during the first half of a Hall of Fame Series game against the Arizona Wildcats at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Nov. 3, 2025. The Wildcats defeated the Gators 93-87. (David Becker/Getty Images)
Golden stressed the importance to his players at halftime of building a big lead, so young players like Rioux could get a chance to play.
“I talked to the guys at halftime when we’re up 24 and I expressed to them the importance of getting off to a really good start so we can get some of the younger guys and some of the guys from down on the bench an opportunity to play and to get some rip,” Golden said. “Obviously the game was in our control and thought it would be a good opportunity to get him out there and get his first college experience, and I think he was pretty excited.”
Rioux’s next chance to get on the floor is when the Gators take on Florida State on Tuesday at 7 p.m. ET.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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THE NORTH CAROLINA TAR HEELS are used to being under a microscope. This is a program with six national championships and the jerseys of icons such as Michael Jordan and James Worthy in its rafters and that has always brought the fair share of the scrutiny that comes with being a blue blood.
But in most seasons, UNC is fielding complaints about its talent, consistency and success. In 2024-25, the vitriol was different. After receiving a First Four slot as an 11-seed in the NCAA tournament, the Tar Heels were widely viewed as undeserving.
With an 8-6 record in its last 14 games of the regular season and a résumé void of signature wins, North Carolina making the field created so much controversy that West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey held a news conference in the wake of Selection Sunday to accuse the selection committee — led by UNC’s athletic director Bubba Cunningham — of a fraudulent process and a “miscarriage of justice” (the West Virginia Mountaineers missed the tournament as a result of North Carolina’s inclusion).
“Last season was hard, and we worked, we fought, and I know we weren’t the best team, but I give my guys just the most kudos in the world for how much adversity and how much we fought through,” said Seth Trimble, the team’s top returning scorer. “And then just hearing the naysayers. I mean, we heard them all year long. We heard them during the tournament. We heard them right before the tournament. It was nothing new.”
Coach Hubert Davis’ four years in charge of his alma mater have featured yo-yo finishes: a run to the national title game as an 8-seed in his first; missing the tournament altogether in his second. Two years ago, he led the Tar Heels to the Sweet 16 as a No. 1 seed, finishing with 29 wins. Last March, it was a lackluster 22-13 season and a first-round tournament loss.
Cunningham says he is confident in Davis’ ability to lead the program after extending his contract through 2030 earlier this year. But in his fifth year at the helm, another subpar season could mean Davis cannot consistently meet the standard in Chapel Hill, risking hot-seat talk turning into a storyline.
“I mean, can we win a national championship every year? No. Do we have aspirations to win it? Yes,” Cunningham told ESPN. “And are we going to continue to support our program, our coaches and our students with the resources to get to that level? Absolutely. That’s our ambition and we’re not going to back off of it.”
North Carolina did lose four of its top seven scorers from last season to the transfer portal and opened this season with its lowest ranking (No. 25) in the preseason AP poll since 2005, but the Tar Heels aren’t exactly underdogs as the 2025-26 season gets underway. Freshman Caleb Wilson is a confident, five-star recruit who anchors the No. 8 recruiting class in the country, one of the best in recent years for the Tar Heels. Plus, the return of Trimble and the additions of 6-foot-6 European star Luka Bogavac and 7-foot Arizona transfer Henri Veesaar should give the Tar Heels a chance to avoid another nerve-racking Selection Sunday. Still, it’s clear that North Carolina is trying to find itself — and perhaps a new identity — in the shifting landscape of college sports.
And if UNC’s prestigious past no longer guarantees a prestigious future, that puts even more pressure on Davis and his team. The Tar Heels’ fan base won’t accept that as an excuse for falling short.
“Even before I was head coach — as an assistant when I was here and when I played here — the expectation here is for every season for this program to have a chance [to win a national title],” Davis told ESPN. “And when I say the standard is the standard, that’s what I mean. And whether you get to the championship game or you make the NCAA tournament and lose in the first round like we did last year, the standard is the standard.
“Those are the expectations every year, regardless of whether we went to the championship the first year or not.”
A YEAR AFTER Matt Doherty won a national title as a reserve guard on a UNC team led by Jordan, Worthy and Sam Perkins — all future NBA stars — he went to a party with his teammates to celebrate that next season’s Elite Eight run.
Although North Carolina had just lost to Georgia in the 1983 regional final, he still expected a celebration for making it to the cusp of the Final Four. Instead, a Tar Heels fan made sure he knew his team had missed the mark.
“I remember going out one night and some guy said to me, ‘You guys suck,'” Doherty recalled. “I wanted to fight him.”
By the time Doherty was hired as the school’s head coach nearly 20 years later, the expectations were magnified. He’d carried the weight of wearing a North Carolina jersey as a player, but his attempt to uphold the school’s ambitions in the years that followed legendary coach Dean Smith’s retirement was more difficult than Doherty had ever imagined.
“You had high highs and low lows,” Doherty, who was fired in 2003, told ESPN. “And so dealing with that — the self-talk, the isolation — [because] you’re surrounded by a staff, your players, 22,000 fans, the athletic director, the chancellor, but you feel all alone. And so who do you talk to?”
Doherty is the one person in the North Carolina stratosphere who understands Davis’ plight. He is the only head coach the Tar Heels have fired over the past 75 years after he amassed a 53-43 record over three seasons (2000-2003), which included an eight-win season and only one NCAA tournament appearance. Although he knew that a program searching for its first national title since 1993 would place a heavy burden on his shoulders, Doherty quickly learned that the program had no appetite for losing. That reality has only been more challenging for Davis & Co. as they navigate the new compensation structures and transfer portal. Doherty said North Carolina, like other blue bloods, relied on its brand for too long in recruiting battles even as the landscape minimized the impact of that factor.
“I think they were slow to adopt the mindset and I don’t blame [Davis] for it,” he said. “I think it really was an institutional mindset: ‘We are North Carolina and we don’t pay players and this is a special place.’ And no one talks about being part of the Carolina family anymore. No one talks about academics. And so it comes down to two things for recruiting: ‘What are you going to pay me and what’s my path to the NBA look like?'”
After producing nine first-round NBA draft picks between 2016 and 2022, the Tar Heels have graduated only one in the three years since. Top high school recruits who might have picked North Carolina over programs without the same legacy and basketball pedigree — see: the No. 1 prospect in the 2025 class, AJ Dybantsa, who chose BYU — have rejected UNC’s overtures in recent years as the new financial rules have leveled the playing field.
As the negotiation battles for elite transfers and recruits unfolded last spring, the same North Carolina program that has historically been anchored by some of the game’s greatest college big men failed to land an elite power forward or center in the portal. Undersized and limited in the paint for the first time in years, the Tar Heels could not overcome their flaws and the struggles of former All-American RJ Davis.
“Obviously, last year we were small,” Davis said. “Playing at our level, you have to have size, you have to have positional size, and pretty much every game that we played, we were smaller than our opponent. And where it hurt us the most was rebounding.”
As the struggles progressed, everyone around the program could feel the gray cloud around Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels hadn’t adapted to the new rules of college sports the way their neighbor down Tobacco Road had, landing only one recruit (Wilson) ranked inside the top five of the SC Next 100 in the four recruiting cycles since NIL was adopted compared to three for Duke.
“He’s had some great winning seasons, he had an opportunity to win it all and he had some seasons that didn’t go so well,” former North Carolina star Raymond Felton said. “But that’s part of it, man. I support [Davis] 100%. I think he’s done a great job so far and he’s dealing with a lot that’s changed in the game of basketball with the NIL stuff and then the transfer portal and kids just being able to leave whenever they want to if they’re not happy.”
When Cunningham hired Davis — a former UNC star and assistant coach — to follow Roy Williams in 2021, he told him to be prepared to adapt. But he did not know what that would entail. Between a multimillion-dollar investment in football and talk of a new arena that could generate more revenue, UNC athletics — and UNC men’s basketball, by extension — has had to navigate all of this as the rules that govern college sports rapidly change.
As a result, Davis and his staff are tackling the greatest challenge facing every team: How do you build a winning program and then do it all over again a year later when anything short of a Final Four draws side-eyes and boos from fans?
“I think what Carolina has been really good at for 50 years is identifying elite high school talent that develops into great collegiate players and then onto the NBA,” Cunningham said. “And I think we’re still really good at that, but … I also think you need some transfers and some of the older players, and I think you need a mix. So I do think the transfer portal and NIL have added to the complexity for the coaches and the general managers to say, ‘OK, what is the right mix for us to be successful and what’s the right mix for us at this institution?'”
OVER THE SUMMER, a young podcaster spotted Wilson — a projected lottery pick in the 2026 NBA draft — on campus.
And, well, Wilson did the rest.
“I don’t like Duke, I don’t like NC State, I don’t like Wake Forest,” Wilson said in the viral clip. “This year we’re putting belt on everybody. I’m talking real belt, sparkle, bedazzle. You already know what time it is. Stay up. Tar Heels winning the damn game.”
UNC’s freshman Caleb Wilson has some words for Duke, NC State and Wake Forest! 😂 pic.twitter.com/0IgVRtB4i3
— Donté J Harvey (@dontejharvey) September 5, 2025
Months before his first game, the 6-foot-8 prospect had thrown the first punch against his school’s biggest rivals. Asked if he regretted his comments, the No. 5 recruit in the SC Next 100 for 2025 doubled down.
“I didn’t care,” he said of the reaction. “Honestly, I’m not a ‘say it and hide my tail’ kind of guy. If I say it out of my mouth, then that’s what I mean. Let me back it up when I get on the court.”
Every great North Carolina team has had a star with the swagger Wilson oozes. Davis says he believes in this season’s team as much as any that he has coached in Chapel Hill, in part because of Wilson, who understands the pressure that comes with trying to return the Tar Heels to the pinnacle of the sport — and seems to love it.
By all accounts, Wilson has spent the offseason showcasing a dominance in workouts and practices that has excited his teammates about what’s ahead.
“We have incredible talent and [Wilson], since he got here, he has surprised me a lot with his playmaking ability and just how smart of a player he is,” said Veesaar, the former Arizona standout. “I didn’t think it was possible coming out of high school. I knew he was a freak athlete and a really good player, but just the way he can actually read the game and pass is what has really stood out to me. I think he’s going to help us elevate our game.”
Of course, North Carolina is bigger than only one player. But Wilson is in Chapel Hill to help UNC start a new chapter and prove that Carolina is still Carolina — and he’s not alone. Veesaar was one of the top targets in the portal. Trimble, the only returning player who averaged double figures a season ago (11.6 PPG), is due for a breakout season. And Wilson is one of three top-60 recruits in Davis’ top-10 class. That ranking doesn’t include Bogavac, who has played professionally in Europe since he was a teenager.
It’s undeniable UNC has more players with potential than the proven commodities of past years. Davis says this season’s group is “coachable.” And this team won’t suffer the same physical disadvantages that hurt the program in past years.
Former NBA agent Jim Tanner was also hired as general manager to help the program identify and attract more elite players moving forward.
The ultimate test of these Tar Heels will be whether they can advance past the first round of the NCAA tournament after failing to do so two of the past three years. And with the program’s future spot in college basketball’s pecking order potentially on the line, blocking out the noise could prove more difficult than it has ever been — especially if the turbulence of last March carries over into this season.
“You’ve got to embrace that people aren’t rooting for you,” Trimble said. “People want to see you fail. People hate you. People hate the jerseys that you put on and you’ve just got to accept it, and you’ve got to go on the court with that extra motivation, with that extra confidence knowing that they want to see you lose.”
Davis, however, is notoriously difficult to rattle. He has disconnected from the internet and all of its vitriol. If there are any doubters out there, he doesn’t pay attention to them, he said.
“I’m not on social media,” Davis said. “[I’m] focusing on what is real and what is real is that it’s my job to, as the head coach, lead this program to the best of my ability. And that’s something that nothing will take my focus off of.
“[The] other thing is there are highs and lows in anything you do in your life. I’ve never seen or experienced anything where it was all sunny days. I’ve just never experienced that, so if that’s not possible, then on those rainy and stormy or cloudy days, those are the days to learn from and grow from. And if you look at it from that perspective, there are a lot more sunny days than cloudy days.”
The second-year quarterback will be reevaluated after the Commanders’ Week 12 bye.
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