CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — North Carolina effectively submitted its finalized body of work to the NCAA Tournament selection committee two nights ago, by way of another damaging loss in a significant moment, this time a wild heartbreaker suffered against Duke in the ACC Tournament semifinals.
And an anxious weekend figured to be ahead for the Tar Heels, left to wait to learn their precarious NCAA Tournament fate. But one-by-one in the hallway outside of the team’s locker room that night, from Elliot Cadeau to RJ Davis to Seth Trimble, a sense of confidence came to be projected from the UNC players, rather than feelings of dread or impending doom.
Cadeau and Trimble said it wouldn’t be a nervous lead-up to Selection Sunday and the bracket reveal, despite the obvious holes that remained on Carolina’s season-long résumé. Anticipation and excitement were the words Trimble used about the countdown to the selection show, as the Tar Heels sought to keep their season afloat.
“I think we’ve proved that we belong in the NCAA Tournament,” Trimble said. “The team that we’ve been the last 10 games, I know we’ve dropped two games to Duke. But the team that we’ve been, how we’ve been playing, how we’ve dominated the rest of the ACC, a lot of other teams in the ACC haven’t done that. I mean, we all think we’re a tournament team. So that’s fully what we’re expecting.”
That belief was confirmed and rewarded on Sunday night, when UNC became the last at-large team to make the 68-team field. The Tar Heels’ case projected to be a down-to-the-wire proposition as this past week of conference tournament action around the nation gave way to the weekend, a close battle for the NCAA’s final at-large spots among other candidates such as Boise State, Indiana, San Diego State and Xavier. Now, Carolina will meet San Diego State, opening NCAA Tournament play in a First Four matchup of No. 11 seeds.
So the once-mighty ACC landed as a four-bid league this season, with UNC (22-13) joining Duke, Clemson and Louisville in the bracket. Carolina finished 13-7 in ACC play, while at-large teams from the SEC such as Georgia, Arkansas, Vanderbilt and Oklahoma were placed in the NCAA Tournament field with losing conference records — further underscoring the ACC’s issues. Oklahoma went 6-12 in SEC league play.
Last month, on the night of Feb. 10, the Tar Heels filed out of Clemson’s Littlejohn Coliseum dejectedly, shouldering a 14-11 overall record on the season after getting blasted by the Tigers. At that point, UNC’s NCAA hopes felt bleak, if not altogether in ruins. But from there, the Tar Heels put together an 8-2 finish across their last 10 games, losing only to Duke, an eventual No. 1 seed in the NCAA field. Carolina piled up six of those wins during its late-season push by an average margin of 20.2 points per victory.
And in the end, coach Hubert Davis‘ Tar Heels delivered just enough with which to convince the 12-person NCAA Tournament selection committee, chaired this season by UNC’s Bubba Cunningham, their own athletics director.
Carolina certainly didn’t lack for high-profile matchups against some of college basketball’s best. But from Kansas’ Allen Fieldhouse and the loaded Maui Invitational in November, to road games at Louisville and Pittsburgh in January, to Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium in February and the now-completed ACC Tournament of the last week, these Tar Heels weren’t able to cash in on a laundry list of profitable opportunities. In December, UNC led Florida, another eventual No. 1 seed in the NCAA bracket, by four points in the game’s closing four minutes and 82-79 with 2½ minutes to go, before falling short.
“We’re an NCAA tournament team,” RJ Davis said confidently Friday night in Charlotte, N.C., at the Spectrum Center, seated a few feet between Cadeau and Trimble. “We’ve shown and proved it. I think the way we’ve battled and stayed gritty when things didn’t go our way. And we kept our momentum. We battled through adversity. I mean, that’s what March is all about. That’s what winning basketball is all about. We’ve consistently shown improvement throughout this whole (ACC) tournament, this whole weekend. So we are an NCAA Tournament team, and when we get in it, we’re going to make some noise.”
Ultimately, UNC’s glaring 1-12 record in Quad 1 games in the NET rankings didn’t prove to be an albatross. The Tar Heels’ non-conference strength of schedule registered as elite, the seventh-most challenging slate in college basketball, per Ken Pomeroy’s database. No major-conference team in the country played a more difficult schedule during the non-league portion of the season. But UNC defeated only one team (UCLA) that cracked the NCAA bracket on Sunday as an at-league choice.
Carolina played eight games this season against opponents ranked among the top 10 in the AP Top 25 poll. And the Tar Heels squared off against five teams — Duke, Auburn, Florida, Alabama and Michigan State — who were projected to earn lofty NCAA Tournament seed assignments either on the No. 1 or No. 2 lines in the 68-team bracket. But none of those high-profile matchups produced victories for UNC.
The selection committee uses a number of metrics and rankings systems when sorting and evaluating teams for NCAA Tournament inclusion. Those criteria include wins against the bubble, the Kevin Pauga Index (KPI), strength of record, the Pomeroy rankings (KenPom), the Bart Torvik rankings, the Basketball Power Index (BPI), and most notably, the NET rankings, which separate a team’s results into easily digestible — and perhaps oversimplified, some might argue — quadrants for measuring the value of victories and losses.
Beyond those many Quad 1 missed opportunities, Carolina’s other metrics suggested a solid-enough résumé for a team worthy of receiving an at-large berth. On Sunday, the Tar Heels checked in at No. 36 in the NET, No. 33 in KenPom, No. 25 in BPI, No. 36 in Torvik, No. 54 in KPI, No. 38 in strength of record and No. 37 in wins against the bubble.
Previously, only four teams who ranked among the top 36 in the NET on Selection Sunday had missed out on making the NCAA field — 2019 NC State (No. 33 in the NET), 2019 Clemson (No. 35), 2024 Indiana State (No. 29) and 2024 St. John’s (No. 32).
