UNC notes: Williams using more timeouts?

It's widely known -- love it or hate it -- that North Carolina coach Roy Williams prefers to let his team play through a run, rather than call a timeout and settle his players down, because he thinks it helps them in the long run to play through adversity.

So its another sign of how much the current Tar Heels -- now 2-6 in the ACC -- have faltered, that Williams called early timeouts in losses at Virginia Tech and Maryland.

"It's been hard for me, because I don't really believe in that,'' he said during Monday night's radio show. "I think it helps your team in the long run to be able to handle adversity, and I believe that from the bottom of my heart. And yet, at Virginia Tech, and yesterday [at Maryland] ... there's been three of the last six or seven games that I've called a timeout, and I've been so dadgum mad at myself for having called a timeout, but I thought it was the right thing to do at the time for this team.

"So I do believe it is something different with this team, because they have shown me that they haven't handled it as well. I've had teams in the past, even when Bobby [Frasor] and Tyler [Hansbrough] and Danny [Green] and Marcus [Ginyard] and those guys were freshmen, we'd have some runs by the other team -- and long term, that made that team so much stronger and they could handle things and do what we needed to do. But with this team, I have [in] at least three games called a timeout, and in years past I would have never called a timeout."

DEFENSIVE DOLDRUMS: The defensive performance against Maryland was so bad on Sunday that only one player -- freshman John Henson -- qualified to be named UNC's defensive player of the game. The criteria? A 2-to-1 ratio of good plays to bad, Williams said. -- Robbi Pickeral