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UNC Basketball: Tar Heels’ NCAA Tournament outlook following ACC loss

By Blake Cockrum

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MARCH 11: Leaky Black #1 of the North Carolina Tar Heels dribbles as David N'Guessan #1 of the Virginia Tech Hokies defends during the second half in the 2022 Men's ACC Basketball Tournament - Semifinals at Barclays Center on March 11, 2022 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The Hokies won 72-59. (Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MARCH 11: Leaky Black #1 of the North Carolina Tar Heels dribbles as David N'Guessan #1 of the Virginia Tech Hokies defends during the second half in the 2022 Men's ACC Basketball Tournament - Semifinals at Barclays Center on March 11, 2022 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The Hokies won 72-59. (Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images) /
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Here’s where the UNC basketball program stands following a disappointing loss to the Virginia Tech Hokies in the ACC Tournament semifinals

The ACC Tournament semifinals version of the North Carolina Tar Heels looked similar to the one we saw in games against Tennessee, Kentucky, Miami, Wake Forest, Duke, and Pittsburgh earlier this season.

In case anyone’s forgotten — or desperately tried to erase them from memory — those games were all blowout losses for the Tar Heels. Some were at home and some were on the road, but they were most definitely all ugly. And they were the cause of North Carolina’s NCAA Tournament bubble status for the majority of the season.

While they’ve worked themselves safely off of the bubble and into the tournament’s 68-team field, they still had a chance to work their way up the seed list and off of what could very well be the dreaded 8/9 line, where almost no team wants to find itself come Selection Sunday.

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But here we are, just one day before brackets are announced for the 2022 NCAA Tournament, and North Carolina remains an 8-seed (East Region) in Joe Lunardi’s latest projections, which take into account the Tar Heels’ latest blowout loss, this time to the Virginia Tech Hokies in the ACC Tournament semifinals.

And the 1-seed in UNC’s region? None other than the defending national champion Baylor Bears. But what’s more interesting is the Tar Heels’ current projected opponent in the Round of 64, the ninth-seeded Creighton Blue Jays.

I, for one, would love to see that matchup.

Call me petty and unrelenting, but I still blame Creighton for the Tar Heels’ 2012 national championship bid falling short. It was against the Blue Jays that UNC point guard and Bob Cousy Award-winner Kendall Marshall broke his wrist in a play that would easily be called a flagrant 2 in today’s college basketball.

So yeah, maybe the Tar Heels are staring down the barrel of a top-ranked team in the first weekend of the tournament, but give me every bit of that first-round game against Creighton and we can call it even.

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