Standards are high when you’re a North Carolina basketball player, as Brice Johnson was reminded on Saturday.
Johnson, one of the team’s key players, found himself on the bench for 8:37 of the first half against UCLA. Why? Because he used some foul language and Williams was none too happy about it.
“Coach got mad at him and took him out. Period. The end,” Williams said, via CBS Sports’s Gary Parrish. “It’s not a story.”
“I kind of used some bad language and Coach was really pissed off at me about it,” Johnson said. “It put a fire under my butt. And when I got back in there, I was ready to go.
“Coach told me, he said, ‘Hey, you go sit at the end of the bench, if you say anything else you can go to the locker room.’ So I was worried about [whether I was going to] get back in there. Because he looked past me about four times in the rotation.”
Parrish stated that this wasn’t the first time Johnson has been talked to about language, and there were kids behind the North Carolina bench, so clearly this is a pet peeve for Williams. Whatever the case, by Johnson’s own admission, the benching worked: when he finally returned to the game, he went off for 27 points and 9 rebounds, and the Tar Heels won the game. Coach knows best.
