5 reasons UNC won’t win the National Championship

2. North Carolina can’t get to the line

In the tournament, you’re certain to run into a game where you can’t hit your shots, from inside or outside. It’s a normal occurrence in basketball, and it’s really difficult to get through six games where your offense is always clicking. It’s just that, at the wrong time in the NCAA tournament, it can spell your doom.

When it does happen, you need to be able to fall back on something else to generate points. Though North Carolina is a prolific offensive rebounding team that plays a lot around the rim, they’ve really struggled with a key aspect of getting easy points — generating free throw attempts. Their 33.1 percent free throw rate — which is good for just 247th in the country — is shockingly low. The team has had a lower free throw rate in just three of the last fifteen years. Perhaps not coincidentally, two of them were years UNC either wasn’t in the tournament, or didn’t make it past the second round (2003 and 2013).

While last year’s squad made the championship game with a free throw rate even lower (32.2 percent), it hasn’t been a good look historically for NCAA champions. In fact, no national champion has ever struggled to generate free throws at a rate worse than North Carolina’s this year. While their participation in the championship game last year obviously means it could happen, it’s not a great sign that every national champion within the last 15 years has made it happen more at the charity stripe than North Carolina this year.