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WOLFERETTI: UNC’s undeserving NCAA bid has shown the nation what NC State fans have known all along…

Published

9 months ago

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UNC fans are going to hate this one, but deep down, they know it’s true. UNC’s brand name is propped up by favorable treatment and yes, even a hint of downright CHEATING.

The Tar Heels slipped into the NCAA Tournament on Sunday as the last team selected, leaving out teams with much more deserving resumes such as West Virginia, Indiana, and Ohio State.

UNC was 1-12 against ‘Quad 1’ opponents this season and even lost to a ‘Quad 3’ team. Meanwhile, West Virginia had 6 ‘Quad 1’ wins and no losses below Quad 2. They beat four Top-25 teams and 3 of those were inside the Top 7 at the time. In fact, they are now the first unanimously projected team to miss the NCAA Tournament in history. And you can even make a great case for Indiana to be pissed off. The Hoosiers went to East Lansing and beat Michigan State on their home floor and even beat Purdue at home.

But, UNC did have a NET ranking of 35, while WVU was 54. Which makes you wonder, what the heck is this all about? If it’s not about beating good teams to get into the tournament, is it about having a hard schedule? Even if you lose, the tough schedule seems to be the way to bolster your NET ranking and that’s really the reason we see UNC in the Tournament today.

But even with that taken into consideration, it’s nearly impossible to make a case that UNC should be in the tournament over these teams. That is unless your argument includes NCAA revenue generation or the having your AD in the room (or standing right outside the door) as the selection process is going down.

This has caused Jon Rothstein of CBS to call UNC’s selection the biggest miscarriage of justice he’s ever seen.

But let’s be real, while the rest of the nation is in shock, NC State fans expected this.

This is the school that for years was winning ACC Championships with unmatched talent, only to find out later that the ‘unmatched talent’ didn’t have to go to any real classes. For many elite athletes, there was no balancing school and athletics. It was basically an athletics program paired with a diploma mill. That is downright cheating and the only reason their brand name wasn’t tarnished was because the NCAA decided not to punish them. That is despite, confirmed in-court, findings that athletes were enrolled and passed courses they did not attend and were not taught by anyone (ie. fake classes).

They had a few fall guys, but no penalties were brought down by the NCAA on the ‘untouchable’ UNC brand.

Now, we can go into how this brand stays protected ON the court, by looking at their insane free-throw disparities year after year, which I dug into and wrote about a few years back. But it’s more important to note how they seemingly stay protected OFF the court.

From 1980-1997 John Swofford was the Athletics Director for UNC. He then went on to be the ACC Commissioner from 1997-2021. So for 25 years, the ACC was run by one of their own.

NC State fans have been aware of this racket for years, but no one reports on it because most of the journalists from the Triangle won’t touch these stories, and they won’t touch them because the majority of them and their bosses studied at UNC’s Hussman school of journalism and media.

Anytime someone wants to wade into these waters, it’s met with a narrative that the old cow-tipping farm boys in Raleigh are coming up with conspiracy theories again. And while nobody from this area buys it anymore, it’s bled into the national hive-mind that NC State fans are a bunch of crazy, off-their-rocker, sports fans with little-brother syndrome and expectations that are much too high for who they are.

But looky-looky, UNC seems to have tipped the scales a little too far this time, and the rest of the nation is starting to see what we’ve been seeing…

They are putting 2 and 2 together. They created fake classes. There are statistical anomalies with foul calls year over year. They had their guy running their conference for 25 years. And now Bubba Cunningham, their athletics director, happened to be the chairman of the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee, and UNC happens to be the last team selected over obviously much more deserving teams.

It’s a pattern, and this time it’s a little too obvious. In fact, it’s so obvious that the governor of WVU is launching an investigation into the situation, also calling it a ‘miscarriage of justice’ but adding it was ‘robbery at the highest level.’

Here is how basketball fans all and pundits over the nation are viewing it…

 

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A post shared by Kent Padgett (@kentsports24)

Welcome to the show, people. It’s time to realize that the ones you dubbed as ‘crazies’ were the good guys all along. Wrap your head around it. It’s reality. UNC’s untarnished brand is a facade and it has been for a very, very long time.

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