This will be the first time Penn (2-6) has hosted a No. 1 team at the Palestra and just the third time its has played a No. 1 team. The event is also the first time a Philadelphia-area team has hosted a No. 1 at the Palestra since 1962 and the fourth time overall.
North Carolina (7-0) is coming off an 86-77 victory over Kentucky on Saturday in front of 24,252 fans at Rupp Arena, and a 66-55 win at Ohio State in a game that was played eight days ago before a crowd of 19,049 at Value City Arena in Columbus.
Still, Williams does not expect those outings to fully prepare his Tar Heels for what they will encounter at the Palestra, where there are 8,722 seats.
They will all be filled tonight.
"At Rupp and Ohio State, those places were so much bigger," Williams said. "But they were not like the Palestra. There'll be, what, eight-, nine-thousand people at the Palestra? They'll sound like the 24,000."
For Williams, who guided Kansas for 15 years, the 52-year-old Allen Fieldhouse was much like the even-older Palestra, which opened in 1927. Allen is almost twice as big as the Palestra, with a capacity of 16,300, but that arena has the same feel as its Philadelphia counterpart.
"I love both," said Williams, who now works out of the state-of-the-art Dean Smith Center. "They are old gyms, and I like old gyms."
Williams, who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in September, is 113-30 at North Carolina. The Tar Heels gave him his first national championship in 2005.
This year, North Carolina has won its first seven games for the first time under Williams and has all the ingredients necessary to make another run at the title.
