UNC Basketball: Tar Heels to face familiar foe in NCAA Tournament?

Does the UNC basketball program have a date with destiny in the first round of the NCAA Tournament?

I wrote yesterday about the Tar Heels’ projected positioning in the upcoming NCAA Tournament and the possibility that their Round of 64 opponent could be a familiar one; one that North Carolina fans universally share a deep and passionate hatred for.

That opponent, if it comes to pass, is Creighton. That hatred stems from a 2012 NCAA Tournament meeting between the two teams in which All-American point guard and Bob Cousy Award winner Kendall Marshall was injured on a dirty play that would likely be cause for an ejection or suspension in today’s college basketball landscape.

I consider myself an entirely rational individual and one that tends to quickly let bygones be bygones, so I’m either wrong about that or my ire for the Creighton basketball program to this day, nearly a decade in the making, is well-deserved.

That 2012 UNC team is one that many still revere as arguably the most talented in the nation that season and probably the only one that could’ve gone toe-to-toe with John Calipari’s Anthony Davis-led Kentucky Wildcats team in the National Championship game and stood a chance of winning. After all, North Carolina had Kentucky on the ropes in their meeting earlier that season and the Tar Heels had only gotten better in the months that followed.

But I digress.

Following a season in which the Tar Heels spent the majority of their time on the proverbial NCAA Tournament bubble, they finished strong with a handful of conference victories, including one against Duke at Mike Krzyzewski’s Cameron Indoor Stadium farewell party, and ultimately earned a 3-seed in the ACC Tournament.

While being safely off of the bubble, the Tar Heels played themselves into what many fear will be an 8/9 game in the tournament’s first round. That dreaded portion of the bracket leads to a date with a 1-seed — unless it’s the 2018 Virginia Cavaliers of course — and typically doesn’t fare that well for either the 8 or 9-seed.

Sure, the Tar Heels have seen some success as an 8-seed in years past, and nobody is saying that they haven’t. In general, though, that’s not the hole that fans want to see their team have to climb out of in the win-or-go-home crown jewel of the college basketball season.

But this year, there could be a perk to being in that 8/9 slot for UNC fans, particularly if the bracket plays out the way that ESPN Bracketologist Joe Lunardi believes it will. This particular group of UNC players may not fully understand or embrace the history between the two programs — many were still in grade school at the time — but the fans sure do.

A potential date with top-seeded Baylor in the tournament’s first weekend isn’t necessarily what I want as a UNC fan, but a chance at ending the Bluejays’ season just two hours into the big dance…that I could live with.

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