UNC Basketball: Joe Lunardi releases latest Bracketology

ESPN Bracketologist Joe Lunardi has released his most recent bracket prediction for next season and the UNC basketball program is a relatively high seed.

After becoming the first team to miss the NCAA tournament after being ranked pre-season number one, Hubert Davis and the UNC basketball program is looking to bounce back in 2023-2024.

It began with cleaning house and some roster turnover that included six players leaving the program via the transfer portal, including star Caleb Love. Now that there have been four transfer commitments through the portal, the Tar Heels are receiving some respect in the polls (ESPN ranked them in their way-too-early top 25 released yesterday) and now from ESPN bracketologist, Joe Lunardi.

The Tar Heels come in as a no. 4 seed in the Midwest region. This may surprise some, but Hubert Davis has replaced the players that left Chapel Hill with good talent and bench depth that may otherwise not have been in the program last season. We’ve heard about Hubert not using his bench, but at one point, it almost felt like he didn’t believe that he could without them making a mistake. It appears that the makeup of the new roster may give him the flexibility to do that.

Joining the Tar Heels in the mid-west region, is Michigan State as the No. 1 seed, Tennessee as the No. 2 seed, and Creighton as the no. 3 seed. Based on the current projections, Lunardi has the Tar Heels playing the first weekend of the NCAA tournament and potentially matching up with Kentucky in the second round.

Just like the previous two seasons, the ACC continues to receive no respect in the media or bracketology. Lunardi projects that the conference will receive five bids again in 2024 with No. 1 overall seed Duke, No. 4 seed UNC, No. 9 seed Miami, No. 10 seed Clemson, and No. 11 seed Virginia in the play-in game. Tyler Nickel’s new school, Virginia Tech, is in the first four out.

As we’ve mentioned in other articles regarding way-too-early polls this is all for fun, games, and speculation during the off-season. All of this can change at any given moment with incoming transfers and/or recruits. The transfer portal is still open until May 11th and plenty of things can change over the course of the summer.

However, even with the pre-season expectations that the UNC basketball program failed to live up to last year, this still should be a sigh of relief for fans to see the Tar Heels as high as a four seed following the disappointing 2022-23 season.

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