Those aren't the only reasons why he feels ill, literally, when he thinks about the Kansas game. He was ill.
"I'm throwing up in a towel over there. I'm sick as a dog," Williams said. "It's the first time in 21 years as a head coach I've ever leaned over to an assistant and told him to stand up and call a play."
Steve Robinson called something called B-23, one of the few that worked that Saturday night in San Antonio, but it was Williams who needed the vitamins. He looked up from his misery to assure Robinson:
"I patted him on the knee. I didn't want to barf on him, so that's all I did."
Williams this week revealed that he contracted a stomach bug the morning of that Final Four game. It knocked him off his feet for 3 days; on Sunday, in fact, he only received a few visitors in his hotel room.
Then again, any observer might have deduced that Williams was sickened at his own team's performance.
The Heels gave up an 18-point first-half run from which they never recovered. Adrenaline carried them through the first 6 minutes of the game. Then, they went flat.
"We definitely didn't come out like we wanted to," said Tyler Hansbrough, last season's consensus national player of the year. "I think maybe we were blown away a little bit with everything that's involved with the Final Four and didn't come out prepared."
"We were kind of relieved to get over the hump and just get to the Final Four," said shooting guard Wayne Ellington.
"It's probably the worst game I ever played," said point guard Ty Lawson.
It was not, Williams insists, the worst game he ever coached. But it will stay with him, especially because he was hammered for not stemming Kansas' run with timeouts.
