Dirty dancing

Selection Sunday is one of my favorite days on the sports calendar. All eyes are on the young men and women who have piloted their basketball teams to whatever records, accolades, and championships they could, while millions of adults — with far too much at stake for children without fully-developed front cortices to ruin — watch to see what seed their favorite team is awarded. Or, if their team will make it at all. This year’s selections seem to be one of the most controversial to ever exist, or I just have a really bad recency bias.

In case you missed it, the 22-13 UNC Tar Heels made it to the NCAA tournament, which tips off this week. They will ‘host’ the San Diego State Aztecs in one of the play-in games tonight at 9:10 in Dayton, Ohio. That’s right, the UNC squad who lost on three separate occasions to Tobacco Road rival Duke — including twice in one week — landed as an 11-seed and could make its way into the later rounds of the tournament. If the Heels win tonight, they will face off against six-seeded Ole Miss in the first round later this week.

In fact, UNC was the last team to make it, behind Texas, Xavier, and its first opponent, San Diego State. The first four teams out were 19-13 West Virginia, 19-13 Indiana, 17-15 Ohio State, and 24-10 Boise State.

The saving grace, if you’re a UNC fan — and feel free to use this bit of information to defend your beloved blue and white when they get swiftly removed in the first round — is that UNC has the highest NET rating out of all eight teams that were on the bubble, with a ranking of 36. Texas was ranked at 39, followed by Ohio State at 41, Boise State at 44, Xavier at 45, West Virginia at 51, SDSU at 52, and Indiana at 54.

I do not have the ability to explain exactly what all the NET entails, but if you curse the RPI for high school sports, you would banish the NET to oblivion. The NET is like RPI, but somehow more complicated. Add in quadrant wins, and it makes for a confusing time. The most important thing to know, here, is that North Carolina played better competition and had harder games throughout their season, especially in their wins.

But one factor of the NET, the quadrant wins, shows UNC is a bit lackluster, which if you’re a Duke fan, isn’t any breaking news. Going just 1-12 in quad-1 wins, the Tar Heels didn’t show out against their tough competition this year. Their only quad-1 win (for all intents and purposes, we’ll dub these as ‘powerhouses’) was against UCLA. Their losses were to Kansas, Auburn, Michigan State, Alabama, Florida, Louisville, Wake Forest, Pitt, Duke, Clemson, Duke again … and Duke once more. Talk about kicking your rival when they’re down, Blue Devils.

UNC has a very bad resume, in the eyes of many, and the fact of many people in the sports world, myself included (but it was still better than N.C. State, who fired their coach just a year removed from their Cinderella run). Take another team on the bubble, like Indiana, who had a quad-1 record of 4-13. If the NCAA is going to put so much weight in quad-1, why didn’t a team that did better, objectively speaking, get in over the team with a worse record? In fact, Indiana’s only losses for the entire season came to quad-1 teams — to me, that says they’re more deserving of being in the play-in games at the very least.

Resumes aside, the biggest black mark on the committee this year is UNC’s Bubba Cunningham. The current athletic director is set to receive a $68,000 bonus for his school’s team making the tournament, according to Carolina Insider and the New York Post, with more bonuses to be had if the Tar Heels continue dancing to the championship.

Cunningham is a sitting chairman of the selection committee but says he left the room when the Tar Heels’ fate was being discussed, according to multiple reports.

Allowing someone with a vested interest to even sit on the committee, let alone possibly influence decisions affecting their bonuses, is something that should not go unnoticed.

If Indiana having three more quad-1 wins than the Tar Heels wasn’t enough, West Virginia went 6-10 and Ohio State went 6-11 versus their quad-1 opponents. Neither of those teams are dancing in March.

Boise State lost in the Mountain West tournament championship game and didn’t make it to the play-in game. The Broncos even beat Clemson, who neither Duke nor UNC could best this season, and yet they didn’t make the tournament, because as the adage goes, “the tiebreaker goes to the Blue Bloods.” We need to put a stop to that.

I have a lot of opinions in sports, and I’m usually pretty loud about them, yet not everyone agrees. I think everyone — outside of Tar Heel fans — can agree here that this was massive oversight by the NCAA and its selection committee.