North Carolina players celebrate with RJ Davis (4) after UNC’s 68-59 victory over Wake Forest in the quarterfinals of the 2025 ACC Men’s Basketball Tournament at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, N.C., Thursday, March 13, 2025. Ethan Hyman [email protected]
The bracketologists — the smart ones, the good ones, and all the many rest of them — had spoken. North Carolina’s 1-12 record in Quadrant 1 games was utterly and totally disqualifying. The only March drama for the Tar Heels was going to be whether they’d accept an NIT bid or decline for the second time in three years.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to Dayton.
The NCAA selection committee entered the 21st Century, and took the Tar Heels along with it. They’ll play San Diego State in the First Four on Tuesday for the right to play Mississippi in the first round.
By any rational or objective metric, in a quadrant-free world, North Carolina deserved to be in. Not by much, to be sure, but in.
North Carolina had a better NET rating than San Diego State, Texas, Xavier, Boise State or Indiana. It ranked higher in Wins Above Bubble, the gold-standard resume rating the NCAA basketball selection committee added to its teamsheets this summer.
And the Tar Heels fared dramatically better than any of those teams in Ken Pomeroy’s efficiency ratings, which aren’t supposed to measure how well you’ve played — the standard for NCAA tournament selection — but how good you actually are.
In any other year, that might not have been enough. The committee has been stuck on quadrants for decades now, a way to sort the field and parse the data when all it had to go by was the obsolete, borderline-useless RPI.
Finally, under the stewardship of committee chairman Bubba Cunningham, it abandoned the old and embraced the new. That is, yes, North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham, but this was no cynical pivot. And it wasn’t just UNC: Xavier (1-9 in Q1) got in, too.
Over the course of his term on the committee, Cunningham did as much as any chairman in recent memory to add new, better measurements to the NCAA process, in part because he harbored serious and legitimate doubts about the efficacy of the NET, a sort of Frankenstein’s metric that tries to measure how good your wins are with how good we think you are, two very different things.
Under Cunningham’s leadership, the NCAA added WAB and Torvik – a predictive metric similar to KenPom — to the teamsheets, measurements that established Cunningham’s own men’s basketball team as a worthy at-large selection by any criteria but quadrants.
“WAB really is designed, when you get down to trying to compare these teams across the country, how would they compete against the teams around the bubble, and how would they compete against the nonconference schedule that each of the teams that are being considered have played?” Cunningham told CBS Sports HQ on Sunday. “So it really is an interesting metric that we’re using for the first time, and I think we used it, but there’s not any singular metric that we all rely on.”
It’s easy to look at Quadrant 1 record and say, “Well, that’s how they did against good teams, so…” but quadrants draw arbitrary lines between wins (and losses) of roughly equal value, turning what should be a nuanced process that accurately evaluates every team and every game into a random party trick of “what’s somebody’s NET rating today?”
Quadrants date from the days of the RPI, which the NCAA acknowledged did such a poor job of evaluating teams that you had to look at how teams fared against the top 25, top 50, top 100 and so on in RPI just to get a sense of things. With the advent of the NET, an improvement on the RPI but still flawed, the NCAA finally adjusted the quadrants to give more weight to road and neutral-site wins, as they should.
But the demarcations — an opponent NET of 30 or better at home, 50 or better at a neutral site and 75 or better on the road — draw needlessly arbitrary lines between games of equal value. The difference between a neutral-site win over the 50th- and 51st-ranked teams in the NET is negligible in real life, but apocalyptic in the committee’s eyes.
And with the advent of new metrics like WAB, quadrants are as much an artifact of the set-shot era as jump balls after every held ball. There’s a reason we got rid of that, just as there’s a reason there’s a 3-point line now. When something makes the game better, we should embrace it.
North Carolina was facing the same injustice as N.C. State in 2019, when the Wolfpack was penalized for playing a weak nonconference schedule — but still, famously, beat Auburn — despite beating the snot out of those teams. There just wasn’t the awareness then, among the athletic directors and commissioners on the committee, that it’s hard to beat up on even bad teams by those big numbers. N.C. State’s performance and its weak schedule were both baked into its strong NET rating, which the committee chose to ignore.
It helped the Wolfpack’s opponents, though. They got credit for beating an NCAA-tournament worthy team by beating N.C. State. Voila: The ACC had three No. 1 seeds that year.
Unquestionably, North Carolina knew the landscape this season and had 13 chances to win more than one Q1 game. The Tar Heels’ poor Q1 record was not a failure of opportunity, even in a weak ACC. (Unlike N.C. State in 2019, North Carolina played a brutal nonconference schedule.) The Tar Heels wouldn’t have been able to blame the committee for that.
But we all should thank the committee, as basketball fans. The point of the NCAA tournament is to get the 37 most deserving at-large teams into the field, even if they have to win a game in Dayton to prove it. It’s 2025. We can do the math now. We know who they are. North Carolina was, and is, one of them.
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This story was originally published March 16, 2025 at 6:20 PM.
