North Carolina will probably not become champions of the NCAA male basketball tournament. However, shortly after the group of 68 teams was presented on Sunday, he had already won the title of the most commented team of the tournament.
With six national championships, Tar Heels are one of the most historic university basketball programs. But this was not one of its vintage seasons. At 22-13, they had produced one of the most polarizing curriculum in the country due to its 1-12 record against the most valuable opponents at its time, what the NCAA calls “Quadrant 1”, which values the highly qualified equipment, particularly on the road.
North Carolina had a 8-0 mark in “Quad 2” games and played a calendar classified in the ESPN more grades in the country, according to ESPN. Because North Carolina did not win the ACC Tournament, she did not win an automatic position in the NCAA tournament, and her destination was based on her value on the estimation of the NCAA tournament selection committee.
That committee is chaired by Bubba Cunningham, Atlético de Carolina del Norte director. And when North Carolina was selected on Sunday as the last team in making the group, he instantly created a controversy as teams such as West Virginia, Ohio State, Boise State and Indiana, among the first four who stayed out, questioned what the Tar Heels separated.
Did North Carolina obtain an advantage because its Atlético director presided over the committee?
Keith Gill, vice president of the Selection Committee, told CBS after the parenthesis group was announced that the committee’s policies “require the announcement of any school to be challenged and that they really abandon the space for those discussions and that they are not allowed to participate in the vote also.”
Cunningham said: “I wasn’t in the room for any of that.”
Gill said North Carolina won her place after a “contingency vote” taken on Saturday night that depended on the result of the American Athletic Conference Championship game between Memphis and UAB. A victory of Memphis, the favorite, would have held the conference in an offer, as expected, and allowed North Carolina to remain in which UAB was maintained.
“Memphis won, and that put North Carolina in the countryside,” Gill said.
The explanation did not stop discussing whether North Carolina deserved a general offer, nor stopped the discussion about the optics of the last team presented by its athletic director, the selection committee, despite the guarantees that all impartiality policies were followed. The Atlético de West Virginia director described him as a “terrible tragedy” that the mountaineers were the first team that was out, publishing in X that “our curriculum was better than several teams in the field.”
Against the competition “Quad 1”, the first four teams left out, everyone had favorable records compared to North Carolina. Western Virginia had 6-10, the state of Ohio was 6-11, Indiana was 4-13 and Boise State was 3-6.
