At the risk of being sued by the West Virginia Attorney General and Governor, I will give an honest assessment between North Carolina and West Virginia. Normally, I like to do these types of comparisons as blind cases (and typically in criticism of the committee), but since everyone knows the Lunatic Selection Committee is a corrupt organization, we will give transparency to our decision process without hiding the names.
The Lunatic is a little bit disappointed that he doesn’t get a $68,000 bonus for the Tar Heels making the dance, but maybe that helps him not get sued if he comes to the same conclusion that the National Corrupt Athletic Association came to.
Warning – we will get into their entire schedules – I need to be transparent here. This will get long.
In a side note before we get started, this story keeps on giving, as the West Virginia head coach Darien DeVries has just been named the new head coach for Indiana. Sources say that DeVries has signed a six year deal, which is probably wise since the Hoosiers don’t tend to keep their coaches that long before turning on them. Then again, DeVries only coached 1 year at the Mountaineers before looking for greener pastures – so this is probably a match made in heaven. I will have to save my thoughts on that for next week. The actual games need to start to take the priority of the Lunatic’s time.
Records
- North Carolina (22-13, 13-7 in ACC, tied for 4th)
- West Virginia (19-13, 10-10 in Big 12, tied for 7th)
Advantage: North Carolina – you can argue the Big 12 is better than the ACC, but both are power conferences, and the Tar Heels finished in the top 4 while West Virginia finished in the middle of the pack.
Conference Tournament
- North Carolina – beat Notre Dame by 20 and Wake Forest by 9 before losing in the semi-finals by 3 points to Duke (who was missing Cooper Flagg).
- West Virginia – lost by 7 to Colorado in the 2nd round
Advantage: North Carolina – Colorado was 14-19 and was 3-17 in the Big 12 before upsetting TCU in the first round and the Mountaineers in the second. You can argue weakness, but the victory over a much better Wake Forest team easily gives the advantage to the Tar Heels
Predictive Statistics
The committee uses 7 statistics, so lets look at them. Since I am a corrupt selection committee, I will add my two bracketology models that I built ridiculously fast in a day to try to predict the bracket
| STATISTIC | RANKING | ADVANTAGE |
| NET | -UNC (36) -WV (51) | UNC |
| WAB | -UNC (42) -WV (43) | UNC (but really a tie) |
| KenPom | – UNC (33) – WV (53) | UNC |
| Torvik | – WV (34) – UNC (36) | WV (but almost a tie) |
| BPI | – UNC (25) – WV (51) | UNC |
| Strength of Record | – UNC (38) – WV (42) | UNC |
| KPI | – WV (48) – UNC (52) | WV |
| Lunatic predict record | – UNC (32) – WV (45) | UNC |
| Lunatic predict margin | – UNC (28) – WV (47) | UNC |
Advantage: North Carolina – even without my two models, the Tar Heels win based on predictive statistics (especially the NET, which since that is the NCAA’s model, it probably carries the most weight).
Schedule
This gets really subjective. At the top, I am going to put games against the same team. I don’t always get lucky enough that they played both at home or on the road – so I will use my model predictions (home team has +3 over neutral court over +3 on road). The rest I will order by their schedule ranking – which might require me to make an assessment. Because UNC played three more games, their weakest three games will be excluded (an 18 pt victory vs Hawaii, a 19 pt victory vs Miami and a 52 pt victory over 16 seed American). That seems to be unfair to the Tar Heels, but we know I am corrupt.
I am also going to mark the 8 games that WV played with Tucker DeVries
| UNC | WV | Advantage |
| @ 20 Kansas (L 3) | @ 20 Kansas (W 1) | WV |
| @ 24 Louisville (L 13) | vs 24 Louisville (L 9)* | WV* |
| @ 61 Pitt (L 8) | @ 61 Pitt (L 24)* | UNC* |
| vs 1 Duke (L 3) | @3 Houston (L 16) | UNC |
| @ 1 Duke (L 17) | 3 Houston (L 14) | UNC (based on 6 pts for home court) |
| 1 Duke (L 13) | @7 Tex Tech (L 22) | UNC |
| vs 2 Auburn (L 13) | 9 Iowa St (W 7) | WV |
| vs 4 Florida (L 6) | vs 8 Gonzaga (W 8)* | WV* |
| 6 Alabama (L 15) | vs 12 Arizona (W 7)* | WV* |
| vs 11 Mich St (L 3) | #12 Arizona (L 19) | UNC |
| @ 22 Clemson (L 20) | #25 BYU (L 4) | WV |
| vs 27 UCLA (W 2) | @25 BYU (L 21) | UNC |
| 46 SMU (W 15) | @ 30 Baylor (L 3) | UNC |
| 61 Pitt (W 1) | @ 50 Cincy ( W 13) | WV |
| vs 67 Dayton (W 2) | 50 Cincy (W 3) | WV |
| vs 69 Wake Forest (W 9) | 71 UCF (W 7) | UNC |
| @ 69 Wake Forest (L 1) | @ 73 Utah (W 2) | WV |
| 81 Stanford (L 1) | 73 Utah (W 11) | WV |
| @ 90 FSU (W 11) | 73 Ariz St (L 8) | UNC |
| vs 103 ND (W 20) | @ 75 Kan St (L 13) | UNC |
| @ 103 ND (W 1) | 78 TCU (W 18) | WV |
| 109 GT (W 3) | @78 TCU (L 5) | UNC (but close because TCU is a better team) |
| 110 Virginia (W 15) | @86 Col (W 8) | WV (based on home court and Col being rated better) |
| 125 Cal (W 26) | vs 86 Col (L 7) | UNC |
| 132 NC State (W 24) | 88 Georgetown (W 13)* | UNC* |
| @ 132 NC State (W 2) | 95 Okla St (W 19) | WV |
| @ 133 Syracuse (W 6) | 139 Robert Morris (W 28)* | WV (but I feel weird about saying Syracuse is close to Robert Morris)* |
| @ 167 VT (W 32) | 221 Massachusetts (W 6)* | UNC* |
| 184 Elon (W 14) | 252 Iona (W 43)* | WV* |
| 202 BC (W 6) | 277 Bethune-Cookman (W 23) | UNC (based on BC being a better team) |
| 214 La Salle (W 26) | 319 NC Central (W 34) | UNC (based on LaSalle being a better team) |
| 222 Campbell (W 16) | 336 Mercyhurst (W 21) | UNC (based on Campbell being a better team) |
Advantage: North Carolina – I have UNC 17-15, and if I remove the 8 games DeVries played, I have UNC 14-10. I am sure that people could disagree with my ranking. We could also rank the schedule based on game performance and make it more complicated, but I don’t have time for that.
Quad 1 Record
- West Virginia (6-10 – Adjusted Margin 2.858)
- North Carolina (1-12 – Adjusted Margin 5.523)
Advantage: West Virginia – but it is not as clear. Winning games has to matter which is why I give this to WV. But if you look at adjusted margin, UNC actually did better. It should be mentioned, UNC played 5 of those games on neutral courts and only 2 (Duke and Alabama) at home. You can claim that they got 13 chances and only one once. But 6 of those games were on the road (where those teams don’t lose), and 4 were neutral court games against the 3 #1 seeds and one of the #2 seeds. If you take away the top 2 seeds is 1-5. Two of WVs Quad 1 wins were road games against teams that did not make the tournament and 2 were on the neutral court when DeVries was playing. The metric looks bad for UNC, but when you dive into it, the answer isn’t as clear.
Quad 2 Record
- North Carolina (8-0 – Adjusted Margin 11.385)
- West Virginia (4-3 – Adjusted Margin 1.650)
Advantage: North Carolina – I don’t think we need to dive into the 3 losses WV had and the 10 point difference in adjusted margin.
Quad 3 Record
- West Virginia (4-0 – Adjusted Margin 29.879)
- North Carolina (7-1 – Adjusted Margin 23.593)
Advantage: West Virginia – But once again I almost gave this to UNC. Remember the one loss is to Stanford – it is crazy to me that a 20-13 ACC school is only a Quad 3 win. Still the adjusted margin favors WV, so I will give it to them.
Quad 4 Record
- North Carolina (6-0 – Adjusted Margin 26.113)
- West Virginia (5-0 – Adjusted Margin 32.498)
Advantage: Neither – I am not going to give UNC the advantage for winning one more game. And I am not going to give WV the advantage for adjusted margin, especially since Boston College and Miami from the ACC count as Quad 4 games.
Last 10 games
- North Carolina (8-2) with both losses being to Duke
- West Virginia (5-5) with one loss being to Colorado
Advantage: North Carolina – yes, West Virginia lost to more ranked teams during that time, but they also lost to Colorado and their losses to BYU and Texas Tech were 20 point blowouts.
Lunatic’s Final Decision – North Carolina. The conference record, conference tournament, predictive stats, and last 10 games all favor taking the Tar Heels. The only thing that favors West Virginia is the Quad 1 record, but when you look at the entire schedule and account for games teams got blown out, it does appear UNC did better. That, of course, is very subjective, but I think it still leans towards the Tar Heels.
Of course, as I type this, the Tar Heels have taken a 29 point lead over San Diego State. There is no doubt in my mind that North Carolina belonged in the field – that is why my bracketology included them over the Mountaineers. We could debate if West Virginia should have been in over other teams. Personally speaking, I always think the committee over-ranks the Mountain West, but if the Lunatic had his way, he would rather see 3 teams make it as at-large teams from the Mountain West over the 8th place team from the Big 12 (or the 14th place team in the SEC). That can be a debate for another time that the Lunatic is feeling corrupt.