The North Carolina Tar Heels are playing their best basketball of the season of late, winners of six in a row after a road blowout of Virginia Tech on Tuesday night. Sure, the schedule hasn't exactly been rugged of late, but pounding the bottom half of the ACC is a marked improvement based on where Hubert Davis' team was just a few weeks ago. And their NCAA Tournament hopes have improved accordingly, with the Heels now lurking right outside of Joe Lunardi's Last Four In according to ESPN's latest Bracketology projections.
But the biggest boon to UNC's bubble hopes may not have had anything to do with their own game on Tuesday night. The reality is that the Heels have put themselves in a position where they're relying as much on results around them as they are their own, but luckliy enough one of the most important results broke their way.
Ohio State's wild win over Nebraska is great news for North Carolina's bubble hopes
Two of the teams directly ahead of UNC in the battle for an at-large bid, per Lunardi at least, are Ohio State and Nebraska — and those two just so happened to meet in Columbus on Tuesday night in a game with massive bubble implications. It was about as wild an affair as you'd expect from two teams playing for their tournament lives, but after two overtimes and several big shots from Bruce Thornton and Micah Parrish, the Buckeyes prevailed with a 116-114 win.
Which is exactly the outcome Carolina fans should've been hoping for. Of the two, Ohio State entered Tuesday night slightly ahead of the Huskers in the bubble pecking order, thanks to a significantly better NET ranking and marquee wins over Maryland, Purdue, Kentucky and Texas. (While Nebraska has an identical 5-9 record in Quad 1 games, the Huskers don't have much to hang their hats on beyond a win over Creighton in the non-conference and an OT win over Illinois back in late January, and Ohio State's schedule has been significantly more difficult by just about every metric.)
A Nebraska win on Tuesday would've only muddied the picture further, bolstering the Huskers' resume without necessarily weakning Ohio State's enough to drop the Buckeyes all the way to the wrong side of the bubble. With an OSU win, though, Nebraska's tournament hopes are on life support, and UNC has every chance of overtaking them with a strong showing in the ACC Tournament (or a Huskers loss in their regular-season finale against Iowa). Rather than leaving two teams in UNC's path, this result knocked one down a peg, and that could loom very large on Selection Sunday.