“The ceiling is the roof”: When Michael Jordan gave North Carolina students a questionable idiom ahead of their game against Duke

Michael Jordan once said that the ceiling is the roof to students attending the University of North Carolina, leaving them a bit confused. 

Before Michael Jordan took to NBA hardwood in 1984 and averaged 28.2 points per game en route to winning ‘Rookie of the Year’ honors, he was a Tar Heel. Jordan attended the University of North Carolina for three years before declaring for the NBA after having completed his junior year at UNC. 

Michael Jordan scored 12 points in his debut for UNC, against Kansas and only continued to get better. His career high as a collegiate athlete came in January of 1983 when he scored 39 points against Georgia Tech. Some of the personal record he holds however, are against UNC’s rival university, Duke.

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The highest number of field goals he’s ever had in a collegiate game was 13 and this was against Duke and he’s also the all-time leading scorer against the Blue Devils with a total of 159 points dropped on them over the span of 7 games. 

Michael Jordan gives University of North Carolina students a strange pep-talk. 

It’s fair to say that Michael Jordan has seen his share of Duke-UNC rivalry games and so he decided to give students of his alumni a pep-talk prior to this rivalry game. His speech was going well until he ended it off by saying, “The ceiling is the roof.” This, of course, makes absolutely no sense.

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The 6x NBA champ definitely wanted to say something on the lines of ‘the sky is the limit’ but must’ve fumbled the delivery and it turned into yet another ‘Michael Jordan meme’. Perhaps he was pointing out the fact that the game was taking place in a football arena and with these arenas having no roof, technically, the roof is the sky. 

Regardless, of the technicalities of the sky being a roof, Jordan most definitely looked back at this someday and thought to himself, “What does that mean?”