UNC sneaks into NCAA Tournament, Tar Heels AD assures he sat out of committee talks

When North Carolina failed to take down Duke in the semifinals of the ACC Tournament on Friday, many presumed that was the end of the Tar Heels’ March Madness hopes. That wasn’t the case, though.

UNC was included in the 68-team field for the NCAA Tournament, sneaking in as the final at-large team and set to play against San Diego State in one of the First Four games. The Tar Heels making the Big Dance was arguably the biggest surprise of Selection Sunday; they hold a 22-13 record but only went 1-12 in Quad 1 games.

Adding to the controversy, UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham served as the chairperson of this year’s 12-person selection committee. When asked about UNC’s inclusion in the bracket during CBS’ broadcast of the tournament reveal, Bubba said that “all the policies and procedures” were followed and he recused himself from any discussions surrounding his school’s basketball team.

“I was not in the room for any of that,” Cunningham told CBS Sports.

[MORE: 2025 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament bracket here]

Sun Belt commissioner Keith Gill, who is the vice chairperson of the committee, backed up Cunningham’s claim.

“I managed all the conversations we had about North Carolina, and we had quite a few,” Gill told CBS Sports. “Our policies require the AD of any school to recuse themselves and actually leave the room for those discussions. They’re not allowed to participate in the vote as well. We followed those and had a lot of discussions about North Carolina. Saturday night, we took our final vote and we voted in four teams in the field and we had a contingency vote.

“The contingency vote, that was the last team in the field, and it was based on Memphis–UAB. If Memphis won that game, then that was going to free up a spot in the tournament and that was going to be North Carolina. If UAB had won, then Memphis was going to be in the tournament, UAB would’ve been in the tournament and North Carolina would’ve been the first team out.”

Luckily for the Tar Heels, the expected result of the AAC Conference Championship Game occurred and Memphis beat UAB. So, there was no bid stealing on Sunday.

Cunningham’s self-recusal of all discussions surrounding UNC has been standard practice for committee members who have any affiliations to certain schools. However, Cunningham provided some insight into why the first four teams that missed the tournament didn’t make it, with West Virginia being the first team out. Indiana, Ohio State and Boise State followed West Virginia, respectively.

“We had a lot of metrics and we added a couple this year. We added Torvik (T-Rank), we added WAB and those were the ones that were discussed frequently,” Cunningham said. “All of the predictive metrics, the result-based metrics have been around for quite some time, so we used a few additional ones. The last four teams that were out, it was a tough call. The next team out was West Virginia. They had an outstanding year.

“Unfortunately, (West Virginia guard) Tucker DeVries was hurt and player availability is something that we talk about quite a bit. Indiana was close. Ohio State was close. Boise [State] was close. We had a lot of conversations about these teams as well.”

North Carolina was ranked ahead of three of those four teams in both T-Rank (which measures efficiency while removing pace) and WAB (Wins Above Bubble; measures a team’s extra wins beyond what a typical bubble team would have against its schedule). However, West Virginia was ranked higher than UNC in both of those metrics.

While much of the attention on the bracket was focused on UNC, the SEC made history. It had 14 teams named to the tournament, breaking the Big East’s record of 11 from the 2011 tournament for the most schools from one conference ever in an NCAA Tournament.

Cunningham said that having to spread out the 14 teams was one of the toughest parts about setting this year’s bracket.

“We spent a lot of time on that today,” Cunninham said. “We didn’t move anybody off a seed line, but we really had to move people around to minimize the conflict early. When you have four different regions, we made sure that we only had at most four [SEC] teams in one region so that we could spread them out the best we could. We had a couple of contingency brackets where we actually had five [SEC teams in one region].”

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