Posted: Fri March 27, 1998 at 9:31 PM ET

Sports Illustrated senior writer Alex Wolff recently spoke with CNN/SI's Mark Morgan from San Antonio -- host to this year's Final Four:

Mark Morgan: Alex, obviously, only one No. 1 seed left, but what a No. 1 seed it is! North Carolina, a very talented, very experienced, very skillful team, very athletic. Is there any weakness that Utah can exploit?

Alex Wolff: All year long people have said that North Carolina's perimeter defense is the one thing that is their Achilles' heel -- Achilles' Tar Heel, as it were. Princeton misses 22 3-pointers -- could have beaten the Tar Heels in the Dean Dome if they had just made the 3. The thing about the 3-point shot with the Tar Heels is that they give you a fool's gold 3. They give you a shot that's maybe a foot longer than you're used to taking. You're tempted into taking it. Michigan State took it, did not make it and lost; Connecticut only made about one out of every three that they took. The only thing about Utah exploiting this is that they're not a real 3-point shooting team, and most importantly they haven't shot 3s all tournament. They've faced pressing teams all tournament so they have not had the opportunity to face a packed-in zone like North Carolina's.

MM: What about the three-headed offensive monster with Carter, Jamison and Williams? North Carolina has three guys who can score and that probably gives them a real advantage over all three of the other teams in this Final Four. What can Utah do? You have to shut one of the three down, you can't let them all do it, right? How do you pick your poison there?

AW: You can't, and Rick Majerus mentioned this on Friday. He mentioned that they can't cheat off Shammond Williams in particular. The one thing we ought to be looking for: Shammond Williams has fielded an awful lot of questions this week about his poor shooting performance last year. Will he be putting a lot of pressure on himself with all the attention that's gone to those statistics?

MM: North Carolina is a very experienced team, as we said. But perhaps no team is as experienced as the Kentucky Wildcats, a team that has seven players back from last year's Final Four, a very deep team with five left from the 1996 championship game. But this is a very different Kentucky team -- no first-round draft picks, no Ron Mercers, no Antoine Walkers. Where did Kentucky get this balance?

AW: As you know, Kentucky, when they recruit, even if they don't have first-round draft picks, they have players. I think what we have here are a lot of really, really good players, maybe not top 25 players, but top 100 or 150 players. That's where the balance has come from. The other thing is this team has become less of a pressure, 3-point shooting team, much more of a halfcourt team. But they still have the ability to press and I think that's something that's going to be in their stead, absolutely, as we go into the national semifinals.

MM: What do you think about the job that Tubby Smith has done in terms of Kentucky? In past years, the Wildcats were a 94-foot pressing team. They don't do that now, they're more of a halfcourt defensive team. Do you look for that to give Stanford some problems?

AW: The fact that Kentucky is a halfcourt team is something that Stanford, maybe, is a little more equipped to deal with. But Kentucky, as Duke discovered, has the ability to put that pressure on and Stanford has had real problems with fullcourt, 94-foot pressure against Connecticut and twice against Arizona.