{"id":443,"date":"2012-02-08T02:44:32","date_gmt":"2012-02-08T08:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.227.157.91\/~kenpom\/wp_blog\/is-tonight-a-mustwin-for-unc\/"},"modified":"2012-02-08T02:44:32","modified_gmt":"2012-02-08T08:44:32","slug":"is-tonight-a-mustwin-for-unc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/is-tonight-a-mustwin-for-unc\/","title":{"rendered":"Is tonight a must&#45;win for UNC?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/kenpomeroy\/status\/166394632765325313\" title=\"tweeted it on Sunday\">tweeted it on Sunday<\/a> but it\u2019s worth repeating this morning: There\u2019s a strong case that the suddenly offensive-minded Florida State Seminoles are the favorite to get the one-seed for the ACC tournament. FSU is tied with North Carolina at 7-1 in conference play and Duke is a game behind at 6-2 in what is basically a three-team race for regular season honors. <\/p>\n<p>Nobody is going to make the case that Florida State is better than UNC. Well, hold on, I am sure a few people might. FSU did beat the Tar Heels by 33 in their only meeting, after all. But a home win in isolation <a href=\"http:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/the-head-to-head-fallacy\/\" title=\"provides surprising little information\">provides surprisingly little information<\/a> on the relative strength of the two combatants. And considering the other 20 or so games played by both teams, I\u2019m comfortable stating the UNC is better than Florida State purely based on each team\u2019s entire body of work. <\/p>\n<p>However, the best team doesn\u2019t always win its conference and at this point it\u2019s reasonable to suggest that Florida State is the favorite \u2013 or at worst co-favorites with UNC &#8211; to win the ACC regular-season. That\u2019s pretty amazing considering if, before the season, someone broached the idea that UNC wasn\u2019t the best team in the nation, they were asked to re-take College Hoops Analysis 101. <\/p>\n<p>The reasons the \u2018Noles are the favorite are that (a) their remaining schedule is easier and (b) they own the tiebreaker over UNC. The Tar Heels play the first of two games against Duke tonight and have two more games against Virginia while the Seminoles have but one game against each. <\/p>\n<p>I ran the Simulator after Duke\u2019s loss on Sunday and it indicated that Florida State and UNC had roughly equal chances of winning the top seed. However, that didn\u2019t consider that FSU owns the tiebreaker in a two-way dead-heat with UNC, which occurs in about 7% of the simulations. Thus, accounting for these cases, the simulator spits out the following chances for a regular-season title in advance of tonight\u2019s Duke\/UNC and Florida State\/Boston College match-ups\u2026<\/p>\n<pre>FSU  45%\nUNC  34%\nDuke 18%\nUVa   2%\nMiami + NC State 1%\n<\/pre>\n<p>Note: Simulator assumed that all other tie circumstances besides UNC\/FSU were broken by coin flips.<\/p>\n<p>The Seminoles actually have a 28% chance of owning sole possession of first place after tonight if you buy the percentages listed on my site. Sure, Carolina will probably beat Duke, but a Blue Devil win wouldn\u2019t be anything close to the upset of the year. And it would be a nightmare scenario for the Tar Heels\u2019 chances of winning the ACC, since like Florida State, Duke has an easier conference schedule than Carolina remaining. <\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t like throwing around the term \u201cmust-win\u201d because if UNC lost tonight and won their remaining conference games, I expect they would still be ACC regular-season champs. But having to rely on winning at Duke and at UVa to do that isn\u2019t a good position to be in. So yeah, it\u2019s pretty close to a must-win for the Tar Heels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I tweeted it on Sunday but it\u2019s worth repeating this morning: There\u2019s a strong case that the suddenly offensive-minded Florida State Seminoles are the favorite to get the one-seed for the ACC tournament. FSU is tied with North Carolina at 7-1 in conference play and Duke is a game behind at 6-2 in what is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}