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Like it or not, and a lot of you don’t, North Carolina is an NCAA Tournament team
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There’s a certain prestige associated with being at the top of one’s class. As there should be. Striving to be the best is a virtue no matter what the pursuit.
But as the old joke goes, the person who graduates last in his or her class at medical school is still called “Doctor.”
So while social media is already filling up with righteous indignation over North Carolina’s surprise inclusion into this year’s NCAA Tournament bracket, there is one incontrovertible fact about the Tar Heels’ selection as the last team into the field.
Okay, make that 3 incontrovertible facts.
No. 1 is that the quality of teams on both sides of this year’s bubble is all the evidence needed to prove that the NCAA field shouldn’t be expanded beyond the current 68.
No. 2 is that Joe Lunardi is a charlatan who, with the assistance of ESPN, has convinced the college basketball world to give his “Bracketology” widespread credibility. Because even though his predictions are educated guesses based on actual data, they’re still nothing more than guesses.
The more important issue at hand is that, regardless of whether you think UNC is deserving or not, it’s still an NCAA Tournament team.
It no longer matters how many Quad 1 wins the Tar Heels did or didn’t have, that they play in a conference the national pundits love to dump on or how close they came to being left out.
And it was as close a shave as you can get without drawing blood.
The only metrics that matter now are the numbers on the scoreboard when Hubert Davis’s team takes on San Diego State at the First Four in Dayton on Tuesday for a shot at getting into the main draw as the No. 11 seed in the South Region.
There’s actually a legitimate case that can be made to support the committee’s choice of UNC as the last team into the field beyond the fact that its brand name is to college basketball what Alabama’s is to football. And the conspiracy theory that its athletic director Bubba Cunningham was the chairman of the selection committee.
For the record, Cunningham followed protocol by dismissing himself from the room while the Tar Heels’ candidacy was being discussed. In his absence vice-chair Keith Gill of the Sun Belt Conference led the process, which he said in a post-reveal interview on CBS’s selection show, was done strictly by the numbers.
The problem is that the numbers the committee deemed most important weren’t the same as those being touted by Lunardi, as well as legitimate college basketball experts.
For whatever the reason, their metric of choice this year was Quad 1 victories. That happens to be the biggest area in which UNC’s résumé was lacking. The 22-13 Tar Heels had only 1 quality win – against UCLA in late December – in 13 opportunities.
But rather than dismissing the Tar Heels because of that one blemish, as everyone else was quick to do, the selection committee focused more on several of the other metrics used to form their decisions. Those that take into account factors such as schedule strength, wins above the bubble, recent performance and NET ranking.
Things that reflect a team’s entire body of work.
And UNC isn’t the only one to benefit from that broad interpretation of the analytics. Xavier also got in with just a single quality win, making the Musketeers and Tar Heels only the second and third teams since the metric was introduced in 2018-19 to do so.
In reality, the call on UNC probably shouldn’t have been as close as it was.
Not only does it have a NET of 36, which would have been the second-best ever to be left out of the Tournament field behind Indiana’s No. 29 last year, but it also ranked No. 1 among the last 4 in and first 4 out in the KenPom and Torvik ratings, Basketball Power Index, Out of Conference Strength of Schedule, Strength of Record and Wins above Bubble.
Even with all that going for them, it took a furious comeback from a 24-point second-half deficit to lose by just 3 against top-seed Duke in the ACC Tournament and the good fortune to have all but 1 potential bid-stealing conferences go chalk with their championships for the Tar Heels to squeeze their way into the bracket.
It wasn’t until Memphis escaped an upset bid by UAB in Sunday’s American Athletic Conference final that their spot in the field was finally secure.
Call them lucky if you want. Or even undeserving. But like that med student who barely skates by to earn the title of doctor, make sure you call the Tar Heels an NCAA Tournament team.
Because like it or not, that’s what they are.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.
