DAYTON, Ohio — RJ Davis connected on all six of his 3-point attempts and finished with a team-high 26 points to lead North Carolina to a 95-68 First Four rout of San Diego State on Tuesday.
Jae’Lyn Withers added 10 points and 10 rebounds for North Carolina (23-13), which advances as the No. 11 seed to play No. 6 Ole Miss on Friday in a first round South Region game in Milwaukee.
“I think we did a good job of sticking to our game plan and playing Carolina basketball,” Davis said. “We got on transition, we shared the ball, and that’s what got us going.”
Davis, who came out of the blowout with seven minutes left, hit his final trey of the game with 7:36 left, putting North Carolina up 82-42.
The six triples from Davis matched North Carolina’s single-game NCAA Tournament record, set four times previously by Shammond Williams, Marcus Paige and twice by Caleb Love.
Davis surpassed the Tar Heels’ record for best overall 3-point shooting effort in an NCAA Tournament game. Current North Carolina coach Hubert Davis went 5-for-5 in an East Region semifinal on March 22, 1991, in a 93-67 win over Eastern Michigan.
Nick Boyd and Wayne McKinney III finished with 12 points apiece for San Diego State (21-10), which finished the season in disappointing fashion one year after reaching the Sweet 16 and two years after losing in the national final to Connecticut.
San Diego State took its worst loss since a 30-point defeat in the Sweet 16 to eventual national champion UConn in April 2023.
North Carolina was under heavy scrutiny as the final team selected by the NCAA Tournament committee because of its poor record against Quad 1 competition and the fact its athletic director was the chair of the selection committee.
The Tar Heels spent most of the first half silencing those critics, building a lead that grew to 24 points. RJ Davis capped the first half in appropriate fashion, sinking a desperate 3-pointer as the shot clock was expiring to send the Tar Heels to the locker room with a 47-23 advantage.
“We know we deserve to be here,” said North Carolina’s Seth Trimble, who scored 16 points. “We’re not looking to send a message to anybody else. We’re just looking to compete as a team and be the team that we know that we’re capable of being. And I think we did that tonight.
“We’ll go through that when we get to Milwaukee and go from there. I mean, we hear what people say. We don’t really care about it. Is what it is. We’re focused on us.”
RJ Davis added, “We hear the noise, but we don’t really pay attention to it. We stay within ourselves. … We’re just focused on what we have to do, not really paying too much attention to what’s being said about us and whatnot, just our preparation.”
Davis came out of halftime and another trey to begin the scoring, starting a 6-0 run that put North Carolina up by 30. The margin topped out at 40.
The Tar Heels, who got 12 points from Ven-Allen Lubin, shot 52.6 percent from the floor, including 14 of 24 (58.3 percent) from 3-point range.
San Diego State made 39.7 percent of its field-goal attempts and went 8 of 27 (29.6 percent) from long distance.
“I thought we had a decent game plan,” Aztecs coach Brian Dutcher said. “We knew we had to take the fast break away, and we didn’t do that to start the game. They got they built momentum on the break, then they started making some threes. They made 14 for the game. I think they make seven on the game on the season, seven or eight. So they shot the ball well, obviously our game plan was not good enough.”
–Mike Petraglia, Field Level Media
