The NCAA Tournament bracket was revealed and it is going to be a fun tournament like it is every season but there was one glaring mistake that the committee made this year that has zero explanation. That is the inclusion of the North Carolina Tar Heels and the omission of the West Virginia Mountaineers.
This isn’t going to win me any friends within the North Carolina Basketball fan base but the Tar Heels have zero business being in the field of 68. It seems as if they were included because the committee chair Bubba Cunningham is the AD at North Carolina. To take this a step further the Tar Heels were included because of their brand power and the name North Carolina on their jerseys.
I have never been one to believe in that conspiracy theory but at this point, there is no other explanation for why the Tar Heels were included in the field. Every year the committee says they value quad 1 wins, well North Carolina was 1-12 in quad 1 games. The committee values teams you beat in the tournament. The Tar Heels beat 2 teams in the projected field and those were American, who won the Patriot League, and UCLA on a neutral floor right before Christmas.
North Carolina went 0-4 against their competition in the ACC. They also missed every opportunity in the non-conference to get a huge win. They lost to Kansas, Alabama, Auburn, Michigan State, and Florida in the non-conference.
It clearly wasn’t quad 1 wins, win against the field, or who North Carolina beat that got them into the field. Let’s look at what was mentioned as to why they got in the field. It allegedly was the metrics. Including the two new metrics that the committee is using in TRank from Bart Torvik and Wins Above Bubble. On TRank the Tar Heels were ranked 25 and their Wins Above Bubble number was 38. That is comparable to other bubble teams. When you compare that to the first team out of the field, West Virginia had a TRank of 51 and a WAB of 43. The Mountaineers also won a lot more quad 1 games than North Carolina and did so in a better conference.
Outside of the two new metrics being better, there is zero reason that North Carolina should have been included. To take this a step further, the bracketmatrix which looks at all of the bracketologists predictions as to who will make the tournament had North Carolina in 20 of the 111 brackets at the start of Selection Sunday, West Virginia was in 111/111 brackets.
It is hard to fathom that a team with the same resume as the Tar Heels, and had a jersey name of Nebraska, DePaul, Rutgers etc. there is zero chance they would have been included in the field. It pays to have your AD as the head of committee, even if they are not “allowed” in the room when the discussion on their team commences. I am finding it very hard to justify this inclusion on anything other than brand power for the Tar Heels. Someone prove me wrong.