Ah, my kingdom for the days of C.D. Chesley or Rick Ray. For area TV viewers, UNC’s Hall of Fame Classic win over Kansas State was another frustrating game to watch. With no pre-game show, the game started on another of ESPN’s stations and switched back to ESPN2 after the first TV timeout, due to an overtime game.

ESPN really should do better planning. They could have put the other game from the Hall of Fame Classic on ESPN2 so that there would be no chance of a game running long. Of course there may be 15-20 minutes they’d have to account for, God forbid, in between the two games. This sort of thing has already happened at least twice on UNC games alone in this young season.

When people are away from the TV and recording the game, their DVR doesn’t know that the first few minutes are going to be on another station. Plus, less tech savvy and older people just don’t get the switching around. They sit there and watch an overtime game they care nothing about waiting for the Tar Heels to come on.

Then, at the end of the game, ESPN immediately switches to some program talking about Johnny Manziel’s drinking problem. Before ESPN, viewers would have been able to hear interviews with the players and would have been able to see the all-tournament team presentation. And there would have been little to no talking about other teams and other games coming up throughout the broadcast.

You’d think with more channels, you’d be able to see those kinds of things but ESPN, which should be called ADHD, can’t stay focused on one thing for very long. They seem to believe that we all care about all sports and that as soon as something is over, you’ve got to go to something else. They already run continuous scrolls along the bottom of the screen about everything, including soccer scores from England, and they do it over and over and over and over again, to the point that when I’m watching, I put painters’ tape over the bottom two or three inches of the screen. I don’t need to be reminded over and over that Josh McCown is going to start for the Browns this weekend.

I’d prefer for ESPN to allow the ACC Network to air any game it wants so that the local folks can actually see a game from start to finish with commentary about that game before and after it. ESPN has way too much power and way too little interest in pleasing the fans of the teams involved in a game.

North Carolina rallied from eight down in the last four minutes to win going away at 80-70 over Kansas State in the finals of the Hall of Fame Classic.

Trailing 67-59 with just over four minutes left, the Tar Heels turned up the pressure on defense and aggressiveness on offense and outscored Kansas State 21-3. A Joel Berry three with three minutes to go put the Heels within a basket at 68-66 before Justin Jackson, the tournament’s most valuable player, tied it with a floater crossing through the lane.

A Kennedy Meeks steal near midcourt resulted in a dunk to give Carolina the lead at 70-68 with 2:01 left. Kansas State freshman Kamau Stokes, who led his team in scoring with 24 points, lost the ball out of bounds and the Tar Heels took advantage with a big three by Joel Pinson that put the Heels up 73-68 with 1:21 to go.

The Tar Heels got the ball back when it went out simultaneously for a jumpball, arrow to Carolina. UNC hit four of five free throws down the stretch and Nate Britt took advantage of a Brice Johnson block to go in for a layup with 10 seconds left for the final tally.

“It was a weird game,” UNC coach Roy Williams said. “They outplayed us for 36 minutes but we were still around.”

Coach Williams said the team works a lot in practice on coming back from six down with three minutes to go. At the 3:28 TV timeout, with the Heels still down five, he told his team that they had a chance.

Jackson, on the way out onto the court after the timeout, told his teammates that they had gone over this multiple times in practice and that it was time to do this together as a team. “When we get stops, we can play with anybody,” Jackson said.

For more on the game plus a box score, please click here.