UNC’s Cormac Ryan takes his place in lore of the Duke-North Carolina rivalry
In the delirium of North Carolina’s 84-79 victory at Duke on Saturday night, which came with all the intensity and noise and drama befitting this rivalry, Hubert Davis was getting emotional about the guys who came back; about Armando Bacot and RJ Davis, in particular. For it was this kind of game on this kind of stage, with these kinds of stakes, that compelled them to return.
“They came back for this,” Davis said, tears starting to well. “They came back to experience this. ... And for them to go, ‘Wow, we came back for this, and we were able to do this.’ It’s just really, really cool. And we always say there’s more to be said and more to be done.
“But they’ve said a lot already this year.”
Indeed, Saturday night was part of why they returned. Bacot arrived at UNC in 2019, Davis in 2020. They’d never been on a team that’d won an ACC championship, until now. They’d never been on a team, until now, that appeared in early March to be a lock for no worse than a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament. This is part of why they stayed, for something like this.
And it was also, too, part of why UNC’s incoming transfers made the decision to come to Chapel Hill in the first place. The emotions are always different for players who began their college journeys somewhere else; the connections always a little more shallow than they might be if they’d been in one place for years. And yet, Cormac Ryan will always have this.
He’ll always have what he did here Saturday night at Cameron Indoor Stadium: the 31 points, the six 3-pointers, the shot after important shot he made, one after another, especially in the second half; some of those shots feeling like daggers in the moment and, if anything, their significance rising in hindsight. It has been something of an up-and-down season for Ryan, a shooter whose shot has sometimes betrayed him.
He has endured rough stretches and rougher stretches from the perimeter; games where the ball simply refused to go in, despite his mechanics remaining constant. It was just a matter of time, he said after making six 3-pointers in UNC’s victory against Virginia on Feb. 24, and of course he missed eight of his nine 3-point attempts the very next game. That kind of season.
More and more, though, Ryan has provided signs that any slump is a thing of the past. He was at his best here on Saturday, with the Duke student section — raucous and noisy and smelling of sweat and cheap beer — at its best or its worst, depending on one’s perspective and tolerance. Some of those students were relentless in their heckling of Ryan.
They talked about his sister and his Irish heritage. They talked about his 32.4% 3-point shooting percentage, which entering Saturday was his lowest since his freshman year at Stanford. They talked about his age, with Ryan turning 25 last October, just before the season. More than a few of them kept chanting for Ryan to “get a job, Cormac.”
“Are you going to have a job?” one shouted at him at halftime.
Well, his job on Saturday night, it turned out, was to be the difference. And so those same students could do nothing, most of the time, but stand there and take it, again and again, as Ryan made shot after shot. One of those students, hoarse and angry-sounding at the end, kept screaming F-bombs at Ryan, over and over, when he stepped to the free-throw line, UNC leading by four, with 16 seconds remaining. It was loud enough that Ryan certainly had to have heard it.
The cursing came from the bleachers.
Swish.
More cursing.
Swish.
And then a bit of quiet.
“Huge,” Hubert Davis said of Ryan, whose 31 were the most he’d ever scored in a college game. “... Obviously, his ability to make shots, but even or just as important is (his) experience. Having a guy that’s been at this stage ... he understands what it takes.”
Davis mentioned the 3s, yes, and every one of them felt crucial, especially in the second half, but “defensively, his presence, his leadership in the huddles during halftime, before the game – it just meant so much to this team and this program.”
But, indeed – it had to be nice to see the shots fall. And on this night, too.
Three of Ryan’s 3s came in the second half, all of them after Duke, which trailed throughout, had made a shot on its own end in an effort to try to spark a rally. After Duke cut UNC’s lead to seven, Ryan pushed it back out to 10. After Duke made it a six-point game with about four minutes to play, Ryan pushed the lead back out to nine.
Duke’s Kyle Filipowski cut it back down to six with a 3 of his own and then ... yes: Ryan’s final 3, with 98 seconds to play, extended UNC’s lead once again. Amid a memorable postgame celebration, Ryan and his teammates did not interact like Ryan had only been at UNC for the past eight months. It was, to the contrary, as if he’d been around for years.
“Psychotic, man,” is how Bacot described Ryan, and he meant it as a compliment. “We’ve got a psycho on our team.”
RJ Davis used the same descriptor: “Psychotic.”
“Same amount of points as how old he is,” Harrison Ingram, the steadiest member of UNC’s four-man transfer class, said of Ryan. And that crack about Ryan’s age, too, was all in good fun.
Ingram, at least, shed some light on all the psycho talk.
“He’s an intense guy,” he said of Ryan. “He’s just one of those guys that, everything is a competition to him, no matter what it is. Whether to keep drinking water, or first to get on the bus or first to get off the bus. Like, everything’s a competition.”
This wasn’t the first time that Ryan had thrived in this environment, among the noise and the hate. His previous college-best of 28 points had also come in Cameron Indoor, during Notre Dame’s victory in this building in 2021. Maybe there was something about the place that nourished him, that he fed off of, “but I couldn’t tell you,” Ryan said.
“I wish I could play more games here.”
It wasn’t anything he heard from any heckler Saturday night, and maybe that was a good thing. There wasn’t any fuel that way, he said. And though he’d been at UNC for less than a year, he said the greatest memory he’d take from Saturday wasn’t the shots he made or the points, but the significance of this — of clinching UNC’s 22nd outright ACC regular-season championship.
The allure of such an accomplishment helped bring Bacot and Davis back. But it was also why Ryan and some others came, too.
“I want to be remembered for 17-3 in the league,” he said, deflecting the thought that he’d be remembered otherwise. “I want to be remembered for taking not just a share (of the ACC championship) but the whole thing of the regular season title — especially after a year that, you know, a lot of people doubted Carolina last year.
“A lot of people wrote them off.”
And now Ryan helped author the comeback story, and did so in a particularly satisfying way.
When the buzzer sounded, he and his teammates made their way toward the Duke student section and celebrated a bit. The students responded by hurling water and trash in their direction, soaking the floor and the belongings of a few reporters along press row. It was another sign of the anger that permeated this place in defeat, the frustration. Ryan was responsible for a lot of that, too.
“I love playing in these environments,” he said. “I love being in front of the fire.
“I love it. And I know these guys love it too.”
By then they’d already gone public with their diagnosis that Ryan was crazy — but their kind of crazy. The good kind, so long as it’s on your team. Sometimes a team needs some of that, and perhaps it bodes well for UNC that another memorable player, Tyler Hansbrough, became known as “Psycho T.”
Psycho C? Well, perhaps Saturday was a start for Ryan.
His 31 points were the most any UNC player had scored in a game against Duke since Antawn Jamison’s 35 in a victory in 1998. They were the most any UNC player had scored here, at Cameron Indoor, since Hubert Davis’ 35 in 1992.
“But we lost,” Davis said, walking out of his postgame news conference, when he heard mention of the stat. “We lost.”
More than 30 years later, Davis still remembered. What Ryan did here will linger, too. In his only game in this building as a UNC player, he entered the lore of the rivalry. It was his night, and the Tar Heels needed everything he provided.
