Liverpool came into the season as slight Premier League favorites, but it’s hard to remember a preseason favorite surrounded by so many question marks.

There was the tragic death of Diogo Jota — a not-to-be-quantified loss that affected and is still affecting the team in ways we can’t begin to understand. And then there was everything else, too.

Liverpool lost Trent Alexander-Arnold, perhaps the greatest passer of the ball to ever walk the Earth, to Real Madrid. The pressing-and-pirouetting prowess of Luis Díaz departed for Bayern Munich. The guaranteed chaos and chance creation of Darwin Núñez left for Saudi Arabia. Oh, and a number of reliable backups found new homes, too: Harvey Elliott to Aston Villa, Kostas Tsimikas to AS Roma, Jarell Quansah to Bayer Leverkusen and Caoimhín Kelleher to Brentford.

Of course, plenty of talent came the other way. Liverpool set the Premier League transfer record twice, first for Florian Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen, then for Alexander Isak from Newcastle United. The seemingly Isak-esque Hugo Ekitike was signed from Eintracht Frankfurt. A pair of young new fullbacks joined: Wirtz’s Leverkusen teammate Jeremie Frimpong and AFC Bournemouth‘s Milos Kerkez. A gigantic teenage center back from Parma, Giovanni Leoni, signed to replace Quansah. And Kelleher’s replacement, Giorgi Mamardashvili, officially joined after a year on loan at Valencia.

For a team that moonwalked to a Premier League title and took the eventual UEFA Champions League winners to penalties last season, that’s a lot of turnover. We knew that the previous roster was good enough to win the league and compete for the European Cup. Given the reputations of the players acquired and Liverpool’s player-acquisition prowess, we could predict that the new roster would also be good enough to do both, but we couldn’t know it.

After five Premier League matches, it seemed like we knew the answer. Liverpool won all five and quickly built a five-point lead over second place, tied for the biggest lead at that point in the season in league history. And then, after nine games, we knew the new answer, which was the opposite of the first answer: they lost four straight matches for the first time in four years, and suddenly found themselves seven points back of league-leading Arsenal.

The season was over — and then they played their two best games of the season, a 2-0 victory over Aston Villa and a 1-0 smothering of a near-full-strength Real Madrid. While all of the new signings seemed to lay the foundation for the next version of Liverpool, the club might’ve turned a corner by going back to what they were doing last year.

How bad have Liverpool been so far?

Here’s how the Premier League stacks up by adjusted goal difference, my preferred team-strength metric: a blend of 70% xG and 30% goals.

You’ve got Arsenal alone out front, then Manchester City alone in second, then Liverpool bunched up with a group of teams that includes Crystal Palace, Chelsea and Brighton & Hove Albion.

If we break that down by offense and defense, here’s how Liverpool compare across the past two seasons:

– Adjusted goals scored: 2.22 in 2024-25, 1.75 in 25-26
– Adjusted goals conceded: 1.04 in 2024-25, 1.29 in 25-26

If we cut out the final four games of last season, after Liverpool clinched the title and when the players and manager were partying in other countries instead of practicing, then Liverpool’s adjusted goals conceded drops down to 0.88.

Now, their schedule has been quite difficult. Per the betting-market-implied power ratings from Pitch Rank, Liverpool have played eight of the 12 best teams in the Premier League, and the two games against clubs outside the top 12 were both on the road.

But that’s still not enough to explain the gap between last year and this year. There’s simply been a significant decline — on both ends of the field.

What made them worse?

Given that the manager is still Arne Slot, it makes sense to look into the personnel changes as the main driver in the difference between this season and last season. Here’s the percentage of Premier League minutes played by all the departed players last season:

– Díaz: 70.1%
– Alexander-Arnold: 69.2%
– Jota: 35.0%
– Núñez: 33.1%
– Kelleher: 26.3%
– Tsimikas: 24.5%
– Quansah: 14.5%
– Elliott: 10.8%

And here’s how it looks for the new guys:

– Kerkez: 73.3%
– Wirtz: 67.4%
– Ekitike: 64.1%
– Mamardashvili: 40.0%
– Isak: 27.9%
– Frimpong: 9.6%
– Leoni: 0.0%

Beyond all of the ins and outs, there have been significant changes among the players who were on the team last season, too. Cody Gakpo has played 88% of the league minutes after featuring in little more than half of the minutes last year. Dominik Szoboszlai has played every minute after about three-quarters of the minutes last season. And Conor Bradley has leapt up to about half of the minutes after playing just over 20% last year.

And then, in the other direction, Andrew Robertson has seen the biggest fall-off: just over a quarter of the minutes after playing nearly 75% of the time last season. And while there are no other major downshifts, there have been a number of minor declines in the same area of the field. Midfielders Ryan Gravenberch (from 90-plus percent down to about 75%), Curtis Jones (half the minutes to just over a third), and Alexis Mac Allister (about 75%, down to just over 60%) have all been on the field less often.

So, broadly speaking, this new and significantly worse version of Liverpool has featured a number of different things: a left back other than Robertson; a full back other than Alexander-Arnold; a midfield frequently without Mac Allister, Jones or Gravenberch; Gakpo being the ever-present left winger; and a new center forward.

There’s always going to be a new center forward, and Alexander-Arnold isn’t walking through that door again after a brief return on Tuesday, but Liverpool’s return to form in the past two matches has coincided with changes to a bunch of those changes. Robertson started both matches; last season’s backup right back, Bradley, did the same on the other side. The midfield of Szoboszlai, Mac Allister and Gravenberch played every minute except for the few when Jones replaced Mac Allister against Madrid. And Gakpo only played about half of the minutes — or about as much as he did last season.

How much change is too much change?

If you look at Liverpool’s major personnel decisions over the past 10 months, they don’t really make a lot of sense together. They signed their two 30-plus superstars, Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah, to big-money contract extensions. They weren’t able to keep their 27-year-old superstar, Alexander-Arnold. And then they signed outfield players this past summer who are currently 26, 24, 23, 22, 21 and 18.

In other words, they have two more years to get the most out of arguably the two best players at their positions in Premier League history. And they did just spend more money on transfer fees in a single window than any club in the history of the sport. However, the majority of that money went to players who still aren’t even in those prime years between 24 and 28 — Isak, 26, is the only one who really fits the Salah and Van Dijk timeline.

Instead, it seems like they tried to build the next great Liverpool team while also hoping that those players would all be able to contribute to the final years of the current great Liverpool team. But the foundation of even the strongest team can handle only so many changes at once.

Soccer is a game of interdependencies — little relationships all across the field that ultimately produce whatever it is that we think of as a team’s style or tactics.

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Slot: An impressive win over an incredible Real Madrid side

Arne Slot heaps praise on Liverpool’s performance, especially Conor Bradley, following their crucial 1-0 win over Real Madrid in the Champions League.

Liverpool won the league last season with a more controlled approach than the one they had under Jürgen Klopp. They didn’t dominate field position as much as they had in the past, they didn’t press as aggressively, and they became a better defensive team despite allowing the opposition into their attacking third more often. They were also able to play this way because they had a generational passing talent in Alexander-Arnold, and the best player in the world for large stretches of the season in Salah — two players who can create the same number of opportunities even if you give them fewer possessions.

However, they were also able to play this way because of their midfield, the one area where Slot made a major personnel change by installing Gravenberch as a play-every-minute stalwart at the base. While you wouldn’t call any of the three midfielders elite passers or defenders, they were all good enough at just about every aspect of playing midfield: passing, moving, carrying, pressing and recovering. This allowed Liverpool to defend deep, press high, spring fast attacks or develop measured long-string possessions.

But then they lost Alexander-Arnold and his passing from deep. Salah got a year older. Wirtz came into the midfield and made it much more one-dimensional. Kerkez slid in as the new left back and while he can run, he’s nowhere near the passer Robertson is. Rather than being a sometimes contributor who mostly crashed the back post, Gakpo turned into a high-touch, high-volume winger as a starter. And whoever is playing up top now, neither one of them can press as well as Jota, Díaz or Núñez.

When you make one change — say, losing Alexander-Arnold — you can figure out how to account for it elsewhere on the field because everything else is staying the same. But Liverpool lost Alexander-Arnold, replaced Robertson, stopped using last season’s midfield, turned a backup winger into a starting winger, and completely revamped the center-forward spot — all at the same time.

It’s impossible to understand how all of those changes will affect each other, but the clear result was a team that both couldn’t control the ball like it used to and couldn’t defend like it used to. For all of the attacking talent on the field, Liverpool couldn’t work the ball into the final third as consistently as they did last season, so they generated fewer shots and fewer touches inside the box.

And then when they lost the ball, all the opposition had to do was hoof it long and profit. (Liverpool have faced 62 long balls per 90 minutes this season — a 15-pass increase since last season, and the most any team has faced in any of the past four Premier League campaigns.)

The lineup Slot used against Madrid, though, feels like the right amount of incremental change to keep this team competitive. This was against one of the five best teams in the world, and the performance was even better than the result:

The midfield of Mac Allister, Szoboszlai and Gravenberch is the only area of the team where all of the players are at or right before their prime years. It was a strength last year and it should continue to be, especially with Szobszlai looking like he might now be one of the best players in the Premier League. That trio makes Liverpool just robust enough without the ball that they don’t have to totally dominate possession to stand a chance, but the group is also technical enough to dominate possession.

Across the back four, the center backs are automatic choices at this point. Perhaps because of the solidity provided by the midfield, Bradley had his two best games of the season — able to make runs forward to open up space for Salah, or to carry the ball forward as a means of ball progression. On the left, I’m not sure Robertson can play every game, but he remains a better option than Kerkez, who still is something of a wild card in possession and doesn’t complement Bradley quite as well on the other side.

Across the front three, Wirtz might not get the shots for himself that Gakpo does, but he’s so much more secure with the ball at his feet. Playing him as part of the midfield turns Liverpool into a much more open transition-fest; playing him in addition to the midfield makes the team even more secure with the ball and just opens up all kinds of new opportunities to create chances. It’s worth noting that Wirtz didn’t take a shot against Madrid, but he created five chances and was on the field for almost all 17 of Liverpool’s shots.

While Salah likely will never replicate what he did last season, he has shown some signs of life over the previous two matches, too. After attempting 19 take-ons and completing just four over the first 11 Premier and Champions League games, he attempted 18 and completed 10 against Madrid and Villa. Last year, Liverpool’s pass maps were heavily slanted toward Salah and Alexander-Arnold. Maybe what we saw on Tuesday is what’s needed to get the most out of Salah from here on out:

Now, this isn’t to say that all is fixed. It’s only two games. The team still seems über reliant on the presence of Gravenberch to make the midfield work. Frimpong would be a totally different proposition than Bradley, who hasn’t been able to stay healthy so far in his young career. It’s November and Salah’s attacking output is half of what it was last season. This setup squeezes out either Isak or Ekitike, and who knows what’ll happen if Van Dijk or Ibrahima Konaté get injured.

On top of that, Villa and Madrid really didn’t test Liverpool’s apparent weakness against the long ball. And it’s unlikely that Manchester City will either on Sunday.

But the team we’ve seen in the past couple of games just makes way more sense than what we saw over the first three chaotic months of the season. That was a completely different team than the one that did so well last year. And while this current iteration does still feel different, it’s more of an evolution from last season, rather than something totally new.

I doubt, too, that this is what anyone at the club had in mind come the end of the summer. Otherwise, well, we probably would’ve seen some version of this XI from the jump. You don’t sign two strikers and an attacking midfielder if your long-term plan is to play a formation where the attacking midfielder slot is already occupied and there’s room for only one forward. This setup only really has room for two of the five new outfield signings. But the reality of the situation is that Salah and Van Dijk are still on the team, the midfield Slot chose last season was too good to break up, and it was really hard to watch Tuesday’s match and not see a group of 11 players who could challenge for another Champions League title.

So, for now, Liverpool might have to look backward in order to go forward. There’s a new version of this team hidden somewhere inside this roster, one that gets most of the new guys on the field together and plays at a high level. But it’s already November, and we still haven’t seen it.

As for the team that played against Madrid? We already know most of them are good enough.

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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“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. 

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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.”