March Madness: Tar Heels prevail, set sights on UCLA in Sweet 16

March Madness? More like March complete and utter insanity. Despite the brutal officiating on Saturday, the Tar Heels advanced to the Sweet 16 and have the UCLA Bruins in their sights.

North Carolina’s Round of 32 showdown against the top-seeded Baylor Bears was among the worst-officiated college basketball games I’ve ever seen.

That’s evidenced by the outpouring of not only fans but college basketball writers, analysts and TV personalities that have almost universally dragged the officiating crew for the absolutely maniacal final 10 minutes of a game which helped the No. 1 Bears come back from 25 points down and force overtime before their eventual demise.

Regardless, an undermanned UNC team playing the late stages of the second half and overtime 5-on-8 speaks volumes to how good they really are, and how good they can be. And that may not bode well for a UCLA Bruins squad that awaits this upstart group of Tar Heels for a Sweet 16 matchup in Philadelphia. But that, of course, depends a lot on which North Carolina team shows up in the NCAA Tournament’s second weekend.

They’ve shown a lot more consistency, offensive prowess, and tenacity on both ends of the court in recent weeks and appear to be trending in the right direction. After all, this looks nothing like the team we watched lose to Tennessee, Kentucky, Miami, Wake Forest, and Duke by double-digits. Instead, they’re frequently looking like the nearly unbeatable team that smothered Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium in Coach K’s final home game.

Still, the Bruins open up as 2.5-point favorites to beat the Tar Heels next Friday at the Wells Fargo Center and that makes sense, despite the Tar Heels’ recent success. There’s no denying that UCLA played in a better conference this season and had a couple more quality wins than North Carolina — Villanova, Arizona, and USC twice — but they also had a few confounding losses and dropped 2-of-3 to Arizona.

Similar to the Tar Heels, who began the season ranked 19th but quickly dropped out of the top 25, the Bruins entered the season with incredibly high expectations following a surprising run to the Final Four last year. And while they have had a good season and are still obviously in a position to repeat last year’s success, they’ve been nowhere near as dominant as many thought they’d be.

Don’t be fooled. UCLA might come into this game as a slight favorite and the darling of your television’s talking heads, but the Tar Heels have a chance. And if they play the way they did against Marquette in the first round and over the first 30 minutes of their game against Baylor, the Bruins may well need assistance from the same officiating crew that nearly dismantled the Tar Heels’ bid for their first Sweet 16 berth since 2019.

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