North Carolina
UNC returns to top 25 in latest AP Poll
After dropping 4 straight contests to shut out the month of November and head into the ultimate month of the calendar yr, North Carolina has discovered its groove and returned to the highest 25 within the newest AP Ballot.
At present driving a 4 recreation profitable streak earlier than ACC play will get into full swing, the Tar Heels sit at No. 25 within the nation.
Wins over Ohio State and Michigan have helped change the course of the season and added a Quad 1 win to their resume.
Guard Caleb Love has emerged as a constant playmaker, significantly within the help division, whereas Preseason ACC Participant of the 12 months Armando Bacot has dominated the opposition.
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Love has recorded 22 assists over the past 4 video games and Bacot has tallied 20 or extra factors in three of their final 4 contests.
The most important distinction within the final month has been on the offensive finish, because the North Carolina offense has remodeled right into a well-oiled machine.
Help numbers have elevated and the sharing of the basketball has led to a extra assured and profitable unit in Chapel Hill.
Because the eight-day hiatus involves an finish on Friday, the Tar Heels will journey to Pitt to renew ACC play in a matchup with the Panthers.
North Carolina
Live Updates: LSU Baseball vs. North Carolina (Chapel Hill Regional Championship)
No. 2 seed LSU remains alive in the Chapel Hill Regional after taking down Wofford 13-6 in Sunday afternoon’s elimination game.
With their backs against the wall after trailing 5-0 in the first inning, Jay Johnson and his program rallied back while piecing together a 20+ hit game.
Now, all attention shifts to LSU taking on the North Carolina Tar Heels once again in the Chapel Hill Regional Championship.
If North Carolina wins Sunday’s game, the Tar Heels are the Regional Champions. If LSU wins Sunday’s nightcap, it would face North Carolina again on Monday in a winner-take-all Regional Championship game at a time to be announced.
Here’s a look into both programs starting lineups, what Jay Johnson said ahead of the showdown and live updates from Sunday in Chapel Hill:
LSU’s Starting Lineup |
North Carolina’s Starting Lineup |
---|---|
3B Tommy White |
CF Vance Honeycutt |
2B Steven Milam |
LF Casey Cook |
1B Jared Jones |
1B Parks Harber |
LF Josh Pearson |
RF Anthony Donofrio |
SS Michael Braswell |
DH Alberto Osuna |
C Brady Neal |
C Luke Stevenson |
DH Hayden Travinski |
3B Gavin Gallaher |
CF Jake Brown |
2B Alex Madera |
RF Ashton Larson |
SS Colby Wilkerson |
RHP Thatcher Hurd |
RHP Aidan Haugh |
What Jay Johnson Said:
“This is a little more than what we did in Hoover, but it’s the format,” Johnson said on Saturday night. “We knew that going in. That’s why we threw Gage yesterday and Luke [Saturday], so that we didn’t have to do that. It’s my first time in four years I haven’t been sitting on 2-0, but the best wins I’ve had in my career, including Omaha last year, came in elimination games. I have full confidence in our team we will execute. Our goal isn’t just to get out of here now. Our goal is to have the best day we’ve had as a team tomorrow.”
LIVE UPDATES:
[Make sure to refresh your browser for the latest information. Scroll down for the most recent updates each inning].
Top First:
Thatcher Hurd (LSU) pitching
Honeycutt: Fly out to center field
Cook: Fly out to center field
Harber: Strikeout
Score Update: LSU 0, North Carolina 0
Bottom First:
Aidan Haugh (UNC) pitching
White: Groundout to shortstop
Milam: Strikeout
Jones: Walked
Pearson: Two-run homer to right field (LSU 2, North Carolina 0)
Braswell: Fouled out to catcher
Score Update: LSU 2, North Carolina 0
Top Second:
Thatcher Hurd (LSU) pitching
Donofrio: Fly out to left field
Osuna: Strikeout
Stevenson: Strikeout
Score Update: LSU 2, North Carolina 0
Bottom Second:
Aidan Haugh (UNC) pitching
Neal: Single to right field
Travinski: Strikeout
Brown: Groundout to pitcher, Neal advances to second base
Larson: Fly out to left field
Score Update: LSU 2, North Carolina 0
Top Third:
Thatcher Hurd (LSU) pitching
Gallaher: Strikeout
Madera: Groundout to second base
Wilkerson: Fly out to left field
Score Update: LSU 2, North Carolina 0
Bottom Third:
Aidan Haugh (UNC) pitching
White: Groundout to third base
Milam: Single up the middle
Jones: Walked, Milam advances to second base
Pearson: Fly out to right field
Braswell: RBI single to right field, Milam scores. Jones advances to third base (LSU 3, North Carolina 0)
Neal: Fouled out to third base
Score Update: LSU 3, North Carolina 0
Top Fourth:
Thatcher Hurd (LSU) pitching
Honeycutt: Strikeout
Cook: Groundout to first base
Harber: Double down the right field line
Donofrio: RBI single to right field scores Harber (LSU 3, North Carolina 1)
Osuna: Single to left field, Donofrio advances to second base
Stevenson: Strikeout
Score Update: LSU 3, North Carolina 1
Bottom Fourth:
Aidan Haugh (UNC) pitching
Travinski: Single to center field, advances to second base on error
*Pitching Change: Kyle Percival replaces Aidan Haugh*
Brown: Walked
Nippolt (pinch hitting for Larson):
Other LSU News:
What He Said: Jay Johnson Reacts to LSU’s Loss to North Carolina in Chapel Hill
The Bracket: The Updated Chapel Hill Regional Bracket, LSU Set to Face North Carolina
The Betting Odds: What are LSU’s Chances of Winning the College World Series?
Join the Community:
Follow Zack Nagy on Twitter: @znagy20 and LSU Country: @LSUCountry_FN for all coverage surrounding the LSU program.
North Carolina
North Carolina GOP’s extreme ticket may backfire with voters | Opinion
The campaign website of Hal Weatherman, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, lists his top five priorities as: “Donald Trump, building the wall, deporting illegals, Second Amendment and pro-life laws.”
But on the Republican Party’s statewide ticket, Weatherman is a relative moderate.
Driven by MAGA fever, the North Carolina Republican Party is offering voters in a purplish state the most extreme lineup of statewide candidates in modern North Carolina history.
On a ticket that will be headed by Trump, now a convicted felon, the Republican candidates include: For governor, current Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a candidate known for his inflammatory statements on race and LGBT people and a background that includes multiple bankruptcies and failure to pay taxes; for attorney general, Rep. Dan Bishop, a Freedom Caucus warrior who as a state lawmaker sponsored the notorious “bathroom bill” that targeted transgender people and triggered national boycotts of North Carolina; and for superintendent of public instruction, Michele Morrow, an activist who thinks public schools indoctrinate children and has called online for the execution of prominent Democrats.
Rob Christensen, a former longtime News & Observer political columnist who has written a book on the history of North Carolina politics, “The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics,” said the Republican Party has shifted far to the right under Trump and is now nominating “fringe candidates.”
“What’s going on here is what’s going on nationally. If you look around the country, there are really right-wing people that have been put forward by the Republican Party,” he said. “I don’t know that you would call them conservative. It’s anti-establishment, it’s populist, it has a strong racial edge to it, it’s anti-gay, its really anti-modern.”
Such nominees invite defeat, he said, but the party is so in the thrall of Trump that it can’t do otherwise. “It’s almost like a spell has been cast on the Republican Party,” he said.
A state that sent Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate for 30 years has a strong conservative streak, but Christensen said North Carolina voters have preferred more moderate candidates for governor.
“We’ve had a fair number of conservatives elected in this state — Helms being the most prominent example – but when it comes to governor, North Carolinians have tended to want a centrist, somebody who was going to build the roads, fund the schools and try to get businesses to come to the state,” he said. “We have no history of electing really right-wingers to be governor.”
Simon Rosenberg, a national Democratic strategist known for accurately predicting that there would be no red wave in the 2022 midterm elections, said Republicans choosing extreme candidates have led to Democratic victories.
“We saw in 2022 that the extremist candidates that Republicans ran across battleground states all lost and Democrats dramatically outperformed expectations,” he said. “I think that Republicans are in danger of replicating that same losing strategy in both North Carolina and Arizona in particular, where you have candidates that are far out of the mainstream.”
Rosenberg said “fear and opposition to MAGA has been the driving force” behind Democratic victories in recent cycles and North Carolina’s Republican ticket will add to that force.
“The Republican Party of North Carolina is presenting itself as one of the most extremist parties in the country,” he said. “I don’t think many moderate voters in North Carolina are going to go for that in the election.”
Republican Party staffers did not respond to my calls to Republican state headquarters.
Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said offering voters an extreme ticket is self-defeating: “People are looking for common sense, not crazy.”
Whatever Republicans have done wrong in choosing their statewide ticket, they’ve done one thing right: They’ve given voters a clear choice.
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com
North Carolina
Take a lesson in pomp and circumstance from these NC commencement addresses | Tom Campbell
It’s graduation season and in school after school you hear “Pomp and Circumstance” being played. Most of us can’t remember who delivered our commencement address, much less anything said, but you and I might benefit from some current commencement messages.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld spoke at the Duke Commencement. He shared his “three real keys to life.” They are: “Bust your ass. Pay attention. And fall in love.”
Astronaut Zena Cardman spoke at UNC, saying “It can be tricky to stay present while also looking forward to an imminent future, but I’d encourage graduating seniors to think about what’s right in front of them, here and now. Who will you carry with you into this next stage? What do you value? What do you want to improve for others? The answers to these questions can be found in the present and will carry through a lifetime.”
Nobel prize winner, chemist David MacMillan, gave NC State grads three admonitions. “Learn from others, but always follow your own path. Failure is just another word for experience. Laugh every day; you don’t always have to take yourself too seriously.”
Mandy Cohen, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, admonished Wake Forest Grads to embrace the school’s motto, “Pro Humanitate,” (For Humanity).” “In this increasingly complex world that makes it too easy to believe the illusion that we live in a binary world of us and them, I hope you will see people, all people. Listen. Seek understanding, and not just with those who think like you.”
Ronnie Barnes, ECU alumni and head athletic trainer of the New York Football Giants, spoke at the Greenville commencement. “Resilience is not is not reserved solely for the gridiron or the playing field,” Barnes said. “It’s what enables us to pick ourselves up when we stumble, to push through the pain when it seems insurmountable and emerge stronger and more resilient on the other side.”
Graduates of North Carolina’s Institute of Political Leadership heard former Senator Richard Burr and former Congressman David Price.
Price told the group to think of themselves as part of something greater than the sum of its parts. “It’s one thing to win an election,” Price said. “It’s quite another to another thing to make institutions work. That’s the real test of democracy.”
“Politics has always been a contact sport,” Burr said. “When elections were over David and I put the gloves in a drawer. We didn’t bring them out until the next election time came. Today, the gloves stay out. It’s hard to find consensus when it’s a perpetual fight.”
Burr continued, “Imagine you go to class. A professor every day has to say to the class, and ask by unanimous consent, that we actually do something today. And one student says, ‘Nahh, I don’t think so.’ That’s the United States Senate. We’re taught the rules are 60 votes to get something done. No, the rule is nobody objects.”
But the address attracting the most attention came from filmmaker Ken Burns, who spoke at the Brandeis University graduation.
Burns told the audience that we have inherited a nation that is great and good, but in recent years we have incubated, “habits and patterns less beneficial to us: our devotion to money and guns and conspiracies, our certainty about everything, our stubborn insistence on our own exceptionalism blinding us to that which needs repair, especially with regard to race and ethnicity. Our preoccupation with always making the other wrong at an individual as well as a global level.
“Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties.
“I have had the privilege for nearly half a century of making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of “us” and also “we” and “our” and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it’s that there’s only us. There is no them.”
Burns violated the tradition that commencement addresses should be apolitical, saying, “There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route.
“The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems…. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.”
Let those who have ears listen.
Tom Campbell is a Hall of Fame North Carolina broadcaster and columnist who has covered North Carolina public policy issues since 1965. Contact him at tomcamp@carolinabroadcasting.com.
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