UNC coach Williams not eager to face KU

University of North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams has made it clear he’s not looking forward to a possible meeting against Kansas University in the NCAA Tournament.

“It’s like oral surgery. I wasn’t looking forward to that (last month), and after it was over with, I was looking forward to it even less,” Williams said Tuesday.

Williams, who coached at KU for 15 years before taking the UNC job in 2003, expressed similar thoughts last month when he said a KU-UNC meeting would be “the worst day of my life.”

The two teams are three victories apiece away from meeting in the Elite Eight in Syracuse, N.Y.

“I didn’t want it. I don’t like it,” Williams said of KU and UNC being in the same regional. “If we play Kansas, that means we’ve won three games and they’ve won three games and everybody should be elated about those other three games, and we’ll see what happens.

“There’s not going to be any storyline. I’m not giving a thousand quotes. I am not playing Kansas. It’s Oakland and Alabama A&M. If you can make a huge article out of that, then that’s good. I’m playing Oakland or Alabama A&M (Friday in Charlotte),” Williams said before Oakland beat Alabama A&M on Tuesday in the NCAA opening-round game.

Asked about how he’d feel seeing his former KU players across the floor, he said: “I have no idea, and I don’t care. And I would say that to God, much less to you. If I allowed myself to think like that, I might have a reaction, but I’m not. It’s going to get too much attention. It ticks me off because of the attention it’s going to get.”

KU coach Bill Self said Tuesday talk of playing North Carolina down the line would not be a distraction this week.

“I’ve been asked a lot about Illinois, not much about Carolina this week,” Self, the former Illinois coach, said. “We talked about this. I can’t believe our players are thinking about anything other than the two-game tournament this weekend. I don’t see it as a distraction this week. Next week it could be a potential distraction if we both advance.”