Quoting a UNC professor who was a student at UNC in the 1980s, ESPN.com indicates that the Carolina Way in basketball has disappeared.

Dr. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld said under Coach Dean Smith, Tar Heel basketball was all about sportsmanship and selflessness.

Colloredo-Mansfeld, who serves as the chair of North Carolina’s anthropology department, said he didn’t recognize what the Carolina Way embodied once he returned to Chapel Hill as a professor in 2008.

“When I got back, it was associated with victory, and the thought that we were winning both in the fields and in the classroom,” he said. “It seemed to, at times, be a kind of bragging that was going on rather than an ideal that there was something more important than victory.”

He went on to say, “I feel that what happened to the Carolina Way was we lost sight of what I thought Dean Smith was trying to talk up on the basketball court, that there are more important things than just winning.”

Colloredo-Mansfeld went on to say, “Part of what Carolina Way was, I think, was Dean Smith trying to say again that there’s something more than just the victories here. That spirit is not here. That spirit cannot be here until the administration says there is something more than the success of our revenue sports. When the administration says that, we’ll see again a Carolina Way.”

Assistant basketball coach Hubert Davis acknowledged that things had changed. “We were motivated by ‘we.’ I would say this generation is motivated more on ‘me,'” Davis said. “And I would love that to change.”

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