The university had already won a NCAA Tournament championship when North Carolina began play for the 1966-67 basketball season, but the program was in an interesting place.
A couple years prior, Frank McGuire had been forced out as Carolina head coach following a recruiting scandal, and his assistant Dean Smith was hired. The first couple years of his tenure didn’t produce immediate results and he was famously hung in effigy following a loss to Wake Forest. His Tar Heel team finished that season and the next one with winning records, but they had yet to play, let alone have any sort of success, in the postseason.