UNC Basketball: ACC and NCAA Seeding Update

Where did the season go? The next time the Tar Heels take the court, the calendar will have turned to March and there will only be three regular-season games left. Two weeks from today, the ACC Tournament will be in full swing, and in two and a half weeks, we will all know UNC’s NCAA tournament placement.

Speaking of those tournaments, let’s dive right into where things stand after our update last week. We’re going to dive into where things stand in hanging an ACC regular season title banner and their NCAA Tournament seeding, as well as where that stands in terms of playing their first two games in Charlotte.

ACC Regular Season Title

It’s time to shift the focus to the ACC goals. If you ask coach Hubert Davis and the team, the goal has always been to get their first ACC regular season title since 2019. That said, the first marker of achieving that is knowing you have wrapped up a double-bye in the five day grinder that is the ACC Tournament.

Entering Saturday, while I spoke of Carolina very likely already being there, it wasn’t assured. In fact, even with their win against UVA, there were still a couple of permutations out there where losing out would have cost Carolina a top four ACC seed. That said, I also realized something after the game that I didn’t see anywhere else.

That was the last post on the site formerly known as Twitter, where I had gone through the standings to note that a win on Monday would clinch a two-seed. The Tar Heels did, in fact, win, and so they have clinched no worse than the two seeds in the ACC Tournament. Credit goes to the Tar Heels Tribune’s R.L. Bynum for doing the math and coming to the same realization on Tuesday morning.

I won’t bore you with all the reasons why, and in fact, Tuesday’s results make the math even easier to understand now. With Wake stumbling against Notre Dame, they have seven losses, and since Carolina could only end with as many as six, that means even if they finish in a tie with Virginia, they get the tiebreaker thanks to their win in Charlottesville.