Kansas basketball: KU announces home-and-home series against North Carolina

Two of the most storied programs in college basketball history will now face off in the regular season as part of a home-and-home series announced by the two schools today.

According to a KU news release, the series will begin Nov. 8, 2024, at Allen Fieldhouse. The second matchup will take place Nov. 14, 2025, at the Dean E. Smith Center in Chapel Hill.

Kansas enters the 2023-24 season as the winningest program in college basketball history with 2,385 wins. North Carolina is currently third with 2,347.

“These will be two great games from programs whose rich histories are intertwined so much,” Kansas head coach Bill Self said in the news release. “It will be a special day in both Chapel Hill and Lawrence when we play and I am looking forward to it.”

The game in Chapel Hill will be KU’s first in program history. Meanwhile, Kansas hasn’t hosted North Carolina since 1960 when the Tar Heels beat the Jayhawks 78-70. The Tar Heels were led by Hall of Fame head coach Frank McGuire, and their roster featured a future, national championship-winning Kansas head coach in 5-foot-9 guard Larry Brown.

The Jayhawks were coached by Dick Harp, along with an assistant by the name of Ted Owens who was in his first year coaching at Kansas and would later succeed Harp as head coach at KU for nearly 20 years.

Harp was the man in charge of the infamous 1957 Kansas team featuring future Hall of Famer and All-American Wilt Chamberlain, who led the Jayhawks to the national title game against McGuire’s Tar Heels. The Jayhawks tragically lost in triple overtime after North Carolina players triple-teamed Chamberlain and purposefully held on to the ball for long periods of time on offense (before the shot clock was instituted) to prevent Chamberlain from scoring – though he still managed to finish the game with 23 points and 14 rebounds and was named the NCAA Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player.

The Kansas-North Carolina connection grows

The 1957 national championship game was the start of what would be a decades-long connection between the two programs.

Although the Tar Heels won the national championship in 1957, it wasn’t until a coach by the name of Dean Smith took over that the North Carolina program became the powerhouse that it is today.

However, Dean likely would not have been the coach he was if not for his Kansas roots.

Dean was born in Emporia, Kansas and played at KU under the legendary Phog Allen. In fact, he was on the 1952 national championship team – KU’s first NCAA title in school history – and would stay on as an assistant coach under Allen following his playing days until 1955.

It was under Allen, nicknamed the “Father of Basketball Coaching,” where Smith really learned to play and coach the game of basketball and would later carry that influence onto his players and coaches during his time in Chapel Hill where he would become college basketball’s all-time winningest head coach at the time of his retirement in 1997 with 879 wins.

Smith first arrived at North Carolina when he was hired by McGuire in 1958 and was a coach on the Tar Heels team (featuring Larry Brown) that beat KU in Lawrence in 1960. Brown later joined Smith’s staff at North Carolina as an assistant from 1965 to 1967.

In 1983, Brown was hired as KU’s head coach and led the Jayhawks to their second NCAA title in school history in 1988.

Brown’s successor would be none other than North Carolina assistant coach Roy Williams, who played for and studied under Smith for many years before making the move to Lawrence.

Williams went on to have an incredible 15-year run at Kansas that featured hundreds of wins, several NCAA Final Four appearances, and multiple All-Americans before returning home to Chapel Hill (at Smith’s request) to take over as head coach in 2003.

Over the years, the Jayhawks and Tar Heels have faced off 12 times and remain dead even at 6-6.

The two teams have faced each other seven times in the NCAA Tournament, where Kansas holds a 5-2 lead, with the last meeting coming in 2022 in the national championship game where KU would avenge the 1957 loss and beat the Tar Heels for the Jayhawks’ fourth NCAA title.

There is a lot of history between these two programs, and it will be interesting to see how the next two chapters are written when KU welcomes the Tar Heels to Lawrence starting in 2024.