UNC Basketball: Tar Heels on wrong side of NCAA Tournament bubble?

The UNC basketball program is on the wrong side of the NCAA Tournament bubble according to CBS Bracketologist Jerry Palm.

The North Carolina Tar Heels have had a rough go of it this season, struggling to put together an NCAA Tournament resume that resembles anything incredibly deserving of an at-large bid. Because of that, they remain on the proverbial bubble in the weeks leading up to conference tournaments.

There are those that think the Tar Heels are currently on the right side of the bubble, with just enough good on their resume and nothing really bad to speak of. ESPN’s Joe Lunardi falls in that category, believing that if the season were to end today, North Carolina would be one of the last four teams selected to play in the tournament.

CBS Bracketologist Jerry Palm is on the other side of that argument, though, as his Monday morning bracket update places the Tar Heels on the outside looking in. According to Palm, the Tar Heels are one of the first four teams out of the tournament, with Memphis, Michigan and Oklahoma joining them in that group.

And although North Carolina has a NET ranking of 38, better than a number of the teams presumed to be sitting comfortably in the tournament as of now, Palm’s exclusion of them in the field of 68 isn’t completely unwarranted.

After all, the Tar Heels don’t have a single Quad 1 victory this season (0-7) and they’ve only won five games away from the Dean Smith Center. They’ve also been blown out on a number of occasions over the past few months, getting run off the court by Tennessee, Kentucky, Miami, Wake Forest and Duke. Even most UNC fans will admit that their team hasn’t been impressive this season, and there’s really no overly-convincing argument for including them in the tournament.

There’s only one “quality” opponent left on North Carolina’s schedule this season (Duke) and we’ve got no real reason to believe that they’ll go into Cameron Indoor Stadium and upset the Blue Devils, who beat the Tar Heels by 20 in Chapel Hill a couple of weeks ago. They’ve got six other games, however, that are all winnable. They’ll almost certainly have to win at least five of them, if not all of them, in order to cement their place in the NCAA Tournament.

Their first of seven opponents, the Pittsburgh Panthers, comes to town on Wednesday night. A win over the 10-16 Panthers will put the Tar Heels just one win shy of 20 on the season. The closer they can get to 25, while avoiding any bad losses over the season’s final few weeks, the better the chance they are included in the 68 names called on Selection Sunday less than a month from today.

And despite all of their obvious struggles this season, they remain among the ACC’s top four teams with a conference record of 10-4. Even though the conference is having a major “down year,” their position within the Power 5 conference and usual perennial powerhouse league has to be in their favor.

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