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North Carolina played Texas inside a football stadium Saturday afternoon, and Roy Williams didn't throw any Presbyterians out. So for at least one day, he was back to normal.

He's been through a lot lately, and that partly explains why he lost his mind last week in a scrimmage game against a tiny school from South Carolina that he had no business playing in the first place. He said some things afterward that made no sense at all, which leads us to believe it was the meds talking, so we gave him the benefit of the doubt. Williams apologized on Friday.

Sort of.

And then Saturday, we went down to Texas and ran into another guy from the North Carolina foothills who kicked his butt. So it was another long week in the life of Roy.

Basketball coaches sometimes forget they're just basketball coaches, and that's when they get into all sorts of trouble. That's why so many of them are always claiming to be something other than basketball coaches, claiming to be teachers or professors or credit card salesmen when in fact they're just basketball coaches.

Williams, to his credit, has never claimed to be anything but. Even when he was driving from Chapel Hill to Greensboro selling calendars all those years ago, he was just a basketball coach looking to make extra money for himself and his wife Wanda. You get the impression that maybe Wanda was the one who got him to sort of apologize Friday, reminding him he'd gotten a little above his raising, as they like to say up in the mountains.

No word from the Presbyterians if they'd bought his contrition or not.

Witnesses differ on what happened next, but everyone agrees that the Presbyterian said something to one of the Carolina players, and Williams heard it. What happened next is subject to interpretation, too, but the bottom line is Williams pointed out the poor guy and told him to shut up.

"Yeah, I'm talking to you," he said.

Then he sicced security on him, and the next thing you know the Presbyterian was being dragged from his seat. Then they concocted some story about him being drunk, when everybody knows Presbyterians don't drink, and they said some other things about him that weren't true and the next thing you know he was being banished from the church of Chapel Hill by Williams himself.

Or so said some of the scribes who were there.

Williams then took it out on the rest of the Presbyterians in a 103-64 beating. He spoke about it afterward, albeit briefly. He suggested no one can buy a ticket to a UNC game and pull for the other team. He suggested if it had happened on a playground he would've handled it different.

"But I'm from the mountains," Williams explained.

Please.

There was a lot of reaction to it in the coming days, people wanting Williams to clarify his remarks and his actions, people wanting to hear what the Presbyterian had to say. He said he wasn't drunk and that he'd been invited down there by a friend, and all he said anyway was "Hey Deon, don't miss it!" when Deon Thompson stepped to the free-throw line in the otherwise quiet cathedral of Chapel Hill basketball.

Williams heard it, and that set into motion the events that led to all that followed. He was still explaining it days later, and on Friday he sort of said he was sorry.

"It's a non-issue," he said. "It may not be a non-issue to anybody, but I guarantee you it's a non-issue to me. Add one thing, I'm sorry it happened. I wish it hadn't happened."

Then he brought up something about New York and said sportswriters had no idea what it was like to be yelled at in a basketball game, which only happens 100 times or so a season so that's a non-issue, too.

Listen, there are a lot of basketball coaches in this state and a lot of schools that play basketball. But there's only one that wears the name of our state on the front of the uniform, so rightly or wrongly, some people judge us by what Williams and his basketball team do or say. When he had a fan removed from behind his bench after telling him to shut up, it made us all look bad.

He deserves to be poked in the ribs a little, but not his shoulder. Besides, imagine what the nation would be saying had this been Mike Krzyzewski.

Roy said he was sorry, and that made us all look good again. But then he went down to Texas and lost Saturday to another North Carolinian inside a football stadium, which just confused a bunch of people from the mountains.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com