CBS bracketologist Jerry Palm eviscerates UNC, selection committee over controversial tournament bid

Seemingly every year there is a selection or two that gets questioned by the masses when it comes to NCAA Tournament inclusion. This year that honor belonged primarily to North Carolina.

The Tar Heels made the field despite the vast majority of college basketball analysts projecting them to miss the Big Dance. Earning an 11 seed, North Carolina is set to face San Diego State in a play-in game on Tuesday night.

Still, some are trying to process how it happened. Like CBS Sports bracketologist Jerry Palm.

“We were stunned…” Palm said, via John Canzano on Twitter. “Can’t think of another team that had so convincingly proven they were not an NCAA Tournament team to get in the bracket. It’s dumbfounding.”

Who might have earned one of those final NCAA Tournament spots in place of North Carolina is matter of debate, but North Carolina’s resume was the cause of much of the scrutiny. The Tar Heels had a lot of losses to quality teams.

“To me, that’s my biggest takeaway from this whole thing is for North Carolina, I don’t know how they made the tournament and West Virginia didn’t make the tournament,” ESPN analyst Jay Williams said. “North Carolina had 11 opportunities to play against teams in the field. They only won one of those on a neutral court in December.

“They have four losses to teams that didn’t make the tournament. And you talk about a team like West Virginia who had six Quad 1 wins, they beat Iowa State, they beat Gonzaga when Gonzaga was No. 3 in the country. It [seems] like West Virginia is much more deserving to be in the tournament than North Carolina.”

Others immediately cried ‘bias’ when North Carolina made the field. Athletics director Bubba Cunningham was on the selection committee as this year’s chairman.

Cunningham went in depth on the measures taken to avoid bias, noting he left the room several times when North Carolina was part of the discussion. Still, that did little to allay the concerns of many, given the metrics.

Now you can count Jerry Palm amid the growing chorus of analysts speaking out about North Carolina’s NCAA Tournament inclusion. It’s not a small number of them, at this point.