North Carolina basketball must be in real trouble. Spend enough time on social media and you'd think the Tar Heels were dropping the sport. Heck, one website has the Tar Heels as a No. 1 seed … in the NIT.
I'm not buying it. North Carolina is in trouble — bubble trouble — but there is a clear prescription for the Tar Heels, not just for an NCAA tournament bid but a fairly favorable seed. And, no, I haven't hit my head on a Franklin Street curb.
First, the bad news: the Tar Heels have played seven Quad 1 games and lost them all (by an unsightly average of 18.6 points). And they likely have just three Q1 games remaining before the ACC tournament — at Clemson on Tuesday (6 p.m. ET, ACC Network), at Virginia Tech (Feb. 19) and at Duke (March 5). If they go 0-10 in those contests and then belly-up at the ACC tournament in Brooklyn, well, they'll miss the NCAA tournament on merit.
It's just not something we should expect. The reason is that North Carolina (16-7 overall, 8-4 conference) has won every other game by a tidy 15.6 points on average. This is the profile of, you guessed it, a bubble team! The absence of a signature win to date is offset by the equally important absence of a bad loss.