The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee unveiled its 2025 bracket on Sunday, and there was one shocking moment that stood out above all the rest: North Carolina’s name was called as one of the last four teams in the 68-team field
Usually, the last several teams in and out of the bracket are of similar quality but in different ways. Take Xavier, Texas, West Virginia and Indiana, for example. All had some strengths and all had some notable deficits. North Carolina, however, was almost all deficits.
As it has been noted ad nauseam in the moments since the reveal, I’m sure, North Carolina was 1-12 in Quad 1 games this season — the win being a neutral-court victory over UCLA, a 7 seed in this bracket. Seven of the Tar Heels’ Quad 1 losses were to teams seeded 1 or 2. Three of those, of course, came to arch-rival Duke.
It’s bracket time! Play for a Nissan Armada and Final Four® trips by joining our Men’s and Women’s Challenges.
But they also had two losses to non-tournament teams along with a Quad 3 loss to Stanford.
As for their other 21 wins — the only other one over an NCAA Tournament team was over Patriot League champion American.
I’ve been doing NCAA Tournament bracket projections for a very long time. There has never been an at-large candidate that had so thoroughly proven it was not an NCAA Tournament quality team yet still gets into the field.
Some speculation has been making the rounds that North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham, who also serves as selection committee chair, had a role in making sure his team received a bid. Decisions like this invite such speculation, but the committee has very strict rules about members not being allowed to discuss or vote on their own team or teams in their conference.
That rule is strictly enforced, so it’s highly unlikely Cunningham swayed any decision-making in this case.
There was some mention of the metrics on the team sheets working in North Carolina’s favor some. That is especially true of the predictive metrics, which primarily try to predict scoring margins. In order to do so, scoring margin heavily influences those systems.
The problem with that, however, is that the committee always tells us that this is a results-oriented process and scoring margin isn’t a factor. But you can’t rely on predictive metrics to help make decisions and still say that scoring margin isn’t a factor. The fact that the NET — a predictive metric — is used to put teams in quadrants makes this process at least a little scoring margin based.
Also, there are teams in the bracket seeded nowhere near their predicative metric rankings. Gonzaga is top 10 in the NET and an 8 seed. Memphis is in the mid-40s in predicative metrics, and the Tigers are a 5 seed. So, obviously, they don’t always carry the day.
Every once in a while, we get a team that pretty clearly does not belong in the bracket, like North Carolina this season, and it seems that those teams always win a game or two. Tournament success can’t be used to judge the committee on selections because tournament results are not available to use as criteria. The vagaries of single-elimination tournaments mean that sometimes lesser-quality teams win games.
Will North Carolina go on a similar run of wins? Time will tell. But one thing for certain is that the Tar Heels’ resume does little to convince anyone they deserved to be invited to the party on Selection Sunday.
March Madness 2025: Committee reveals official NCAA Tournament bracket seed list from 1-68
Kyle Boone
UNC decision seemingly ends Mike Woodson era at Indiana
While North Carolina was a stunning inclusion, one of the most notable omissions from this field as the Tar Heels accepted their invitation was Indiana — the committee’s first team out. The Hoosiers had a bit of a late run to try to get into the field, winning four of their last six, but it just wasn’t enough.
Last month, it was announced that coach Mike Woodson would be stepping down at the end of the season after four seasons at the helm of his alma mater. Woodson led the Hoosiers to the NCAA Tournament in his first two seasons, but Sunday’s snub marks the second straight season Indiana will not go dancing — and it also marks the end of the Mike Woodson era in Bloomington.
