117: Carolina and Kansas
Charting previous meetings between UNC and Kansas, plus adding playoff rankings to the college football app.
North Carolina plays at Kansas tomorrow night at 7 p.m. It’s the 13th meeting ever between the two programs and the first meeting at Allen Fieldhouse since 1960.
The two programs are forever intertwined with coaching connections from Phog Allen to Dean Smith to Larry Brown to Roy Williams.
And when these two teams meet on the hardwood, the stakes is high1.
Here is a chart showing the previous 12 meetings grouped by game type, including all seven of the games in the NCAA Tournament.
Kansas is 5-2 in the seven meetings against Carolina in the NCAA Tournament. This includes four consecutive wins in the NCAA Tournament. These are painful losses because each one ended Carolina’s season.
2008 Final Four in San Antonio: Jayhawks led 40-12 one point and advanced to win the National Title game over Memphis.
2012 Elite Eight in Saint Louis: Stilman White played 28 minutes and Carolina was outscored by 13 points in the second half. Kansas later lost in the National Title game to Kentucky.
2013 Second Round in Kansas City: Carolina led by nine points at the half, but the Jayhawks outscored the Heels by 21 points in the second stanza to advance to the Sweet Sixteen. Kansas lost in overtime to Michigan in the next round.
2022 National Championship in New Orleans: UNC led by 15 points at the half, but fell three points short as Kansas won its fourth title.
While Carolina is 2-5 in the NCAA Tournament games, the Heels are 4-1 in the non-conference meetings. The last non-conference win came during the preseason NIT in 2002 at Madison Square Garden.
Kansas is favored by seven points tomorrow, so perhaps the Jayhawks take the lead in the all-time series or Carolina wins its first game against Kansas in nearly 20 years.
Kvetching the playoff rankings
I’ve added the college football playoff rankings to this app. It lists the 25 ranked teams and shows ESPN’s SOR and FEI’s GWD resume rankings alongside it to provide an idea of the valuation of the teams.
A few grumblings:
Why just rank 25 teams? Why not rank them all to get a sense of where teams fall? What is the difference in Missouri and say the 26th ranked team?
Does this need to be a TV show for a reveal? (this is a rhetorical question, money I know)
BYU’s résumé is top 5 in both SOR (4th) and FEI (5th), yet the Cougars show up as 9th in these rankings
Tulane while given a greater than 10% chance to make the playoff at the beginning of the week is absent from the top 25 rankings. The ESPN odds now downgrade Tulane to ~5%
Alabama is ahead of both Boise State and SMU despite losing two games already, guess it’s quality loss season?
Plan to continue to surface more of the data over the coming weeks, so stay tuned. Fremeau has historical CFP rankings listed too, which is fascinating to compare previous seasons.
Thanks for reading this far, and please subscribe if you so choose. Check out the code for the chart, data from sports-reference.com, and you can find me now on Bluesky at heycg.
Apologies for the De La Soul reference. I’ve been listening to this album while building the chart above.