Today's Take: Avoiding the Letdown, Improving the Seed Line

Every weekday, Inside Carolina senior reporter Greg Barnes weighs in with his thoughts on the latest in Tar Heel sports. Barnes has been the preeminent reporter and expert analyst on UNC athletics for two decades. Watch his full daily thoughts above.

Today’s Take from Greg Barnes:
“We’re more than two thirds of the way through the regular season. At this point in time, Carolina is pretty much, in terms of the metrics, a fringe top 25 type team. So when you look at all the projections, they’re right on that five to six seed line for the NCAA tournament. I think North Carolina is pretty solidly in the tournament right now, unless they collapse. But on the flip side, because we have so much game data in place, they’ve got to play a lot better than they have been playing the first two thirds of the season to really improve upon their seed line.

“The good example is St John’s. Last year St John’s won 12 of their final 13, won the Big East, and they were able to move up from a four seed projection to the two seed. That speaks to the challenge here, because so much of this data is already baked in to the way that the NCAA networks — there’s no recency bias, and that’s by design. That’s what the NCAA selection committee wants. So how you play the first day of the season counts the same as the last day of the regular season. That’s what the selection committee wants. That’s how they look at this information.

“So keep playing like Carolina has been playing, and you’re probably looking at a five or six seed. Play a little bit worse, then you’re going to bring in that seven seed line. Play a little bit better, you maybe can get up to that four seed. But you can’t struggle against a team like Syracuse. This is a team that you should beat by double digits, and the more that you can take care of business against this type of opponent, the more breathing room you have when teams like Duke show up on Saturday.”