The University of North Carolina’s men’s basketball team spent part of December being crushed by Kentucky. January brought humiliations at Miami and Wake Forest. February included being embarrassed on its home court by Duke and Pittsburgh and requiring overtime to beat a woeful Syracuse.
Then came March. The Tar Heels went over to Duke and spoiled Mike Krzyzewski’s final game at Cameron Indoor Stadium on March 5. Then, in overtime on Saturday in Fort Worth, they upset Baylor, the No. 1 seed in the East region and the reigning national champion, to advance to the round of 16 in the N.C.A.A. tournament.
Each signature victory is of the stripe that can redeem any misbegotten season. But both? As Roy Williams, who retired as North Carolina’s coach last year but was in the stands on Saturday, might say: “Daggum.”
The eighth-seeded Tar Heels, who blew a 25-point lead with less than 11 minutes remaining in regulation before recovering, will meet either St. Mary’s or U.C.L.A. on Friday in Philadelphia.
They — and any other team remaining in this year’s men’s tournament — might be hard-pressed, though, to author a greater work of suspense than their 93-86 downing of Baylor, the first No. 1 seed to lose this year.
Yes, Baylor won the tipoff, and with Kendall Brown’s dunk off a fast break, built a 4-0 lead in all of 68 seconds. Then U.N.C. seized it and did not even allow the game to be tied until there were 15.8 seconds remaining and Baylor had improbably erased a performance by the Tar Heels that had seemed more likely to wind up in the record books than in overtime.
Freshman Dontrez Styles opened overtime with a 3-pointer and U.N.C. managed — this time — to hold on.
“It was just something,” said Armando Bacot, one of North Carolina’s star players. “It was stressful, for sure.”
In the first half — after which the Tar Heels led by 13 — Baylor struggled mightily behind the arc and its turnovers fueled Carolina’s rise and accounted for 15 of the Tar Heels’ 42 points before the intermission.
So did R.J. Davis, a sophomore from White Plains, N.Y., who scored 30 points to lead U.N.C. by day’s end.
The chaos of Saturday’s game was, in many respects, a fitting mark in North Carolina’s topsy-turvy debut campaign under Hubert Davis, who succeeded Williams.
The Tar Heels started to rise after the 9-point loss to Pittsburgh on Feb. 16 and have lost only once since, to Virginia Tech in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament. Krzyzewski marveled over them this month, once his own team, then ranked fourth in the country, was done in by players like Bacot, a 6-foot-10 junior who collects rebounds with the zeal of an Internal Revenue Service agent, and Brady Manek, who transferred from Oklahoma and came into Saturday’s game leading North Carolina in 3-pointers.
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“We knew the potential of this team coming into this season, and we just wanted to turn it around,” R.J. Davis said on Friday. “We knew after the loss to Pitt, that wasn’t the way we wanted to play. So from that point on, I think we just turned it around and started to compete. And everyone bought into their roles and that’s kind of what we’ve been buying into.”
Helped along by a flagrant foul, Baylor got around to buying into the majesty of being a No. 1 seed. There is only so much a team can do, though, on an afternoon when it trailed by 25.
Waco-based Baylor, at least, avoided the overlapping indignities of a long trip home after a miserable loss, and, thanks to a victory over Norfolk State on Thursday, the ignominy of being the earliest exiting departing champion in tournament history.
Very little else went quite as the Bears hoped.
Baylor could not manage a basket for a stretch of close to four minutes in the second half. U.N.C. took that interlude and scored 13, building a lead of 24.
Much of that came from Manek, whose 9 points in the first half came to feel small by the end of the second, when he had 17. It is virtually certain that he would have finished with more than 26 points, but he was ejected with just more than 10 minutes to play after a flagrant foul.
His dismissal proved the catalyst for the kind of Baylor onslaught that, less than two hours earlier, would have seemed like a surefire route for them to Philadelphia.
One shot after another, one opportunity after another exploited, the Bears looked like the team most expected to swagger through Dickies Arena and advance.
“We knew that as a team we weren’t going to give up, and we decided to apply pressure a lot more and be assertive out there,” said Adam Flagler, a Baylor guard. “So once we got into those diamonds and traps, we were able to get some stops and get some easy looks, and therefore got the run going.”
Baylor’s late success in pressing North Carolina, Hubert Davis said, had two consequences: It forced the Tar Heels to speed up and led to turnovers.
“They did not want to go home,” he said of Baylor.
Eventually, with less than 16 seconds left, the Bears’ tied the game at 80, where the score would stay until overtime.
The 3-pointer by Styles to begin overtime let U.N.C. regain control. Bacot made a free throw. Baylor effectively hung around until 78 ticks remained, with the Tar Heels up by 6 after a flurry of free throws and layups from both teams.
Then, though, time ebbed further, and the score did not change much, with Baylor, which earned a share of the Big 12 Conference’s regular-season title, squandering chances that could have drawn them closer to salvaging an afternoon and a season.
“At the end of the day, it’s hard making shots in that second game, and both of us don’t have deep benches and usually the numbers will probably back that up,” said Scott Drew, Baylor’s coach. “But they had two guys that came out of the gate shooting it well.”
Drew said he thought his team had displayed “the heart of a champion” by staging the comeback it did.
But North Carolina, a team maybe to forget not long ago, became the program to play on in March.
Kansas, another No. 1, got through a scare from Creighton.
Soon after Baylor was ousted from the tournament, Kansas avoided being another No. 1 seed from the Big 12 Conference to go out in similar fashion.
Kansas fended off No. 9 seed Creighton, 79-72, in the Midwest region in Fort Worth, Texas. The Jayhawks, an experienced team that features seven seniors, advance to face the winner between No. 4 Providence and No. 13 Richmond. Kansas had lost its last two round of 32 games, but advanced to the final 16 for the third time in five years and the 24th time overall.
With the victory, Kansas (30-6) tied Kentucky for the most men’s Division 1 victories all time at 2,352. No. 2 seed Kentucky was stunned in the first round by No. 15 seed St. Peter’s on Thursday, so the Jayhawks can surpass the Wildcats in this tournament.
North Carolina ranks third with 2,320 victories.
After Kansas led by as many as 9 points, Creighton freshman Trey Alexander (14 points) hit a long 3-pointer over Remy Martin to cut the deficit to 73-70. Creighton big man KeyShawn Feazell scored on a layup off a dribble penetration pass from Alex O’Connell (16 points), to slice it to 73-72.
After an errant pass by Alexander, Kansas’ Ochai Agbaji stole the ball and scored on a wide-open dunk in transition to give Kansas a 75-72 edge. Agbaji, the Big 12 Conference Player of the Year and a projected N.B.A. lottery pick, finished with 15 points and eight rebounds.
Kansas big man David McCormack then swatted an attempted layup by Alexander under the basket, and Kansas got the ball back.
Martin (20 points, seven rebounds) extended the lead with two free throws and Jalen Wilson hit two more to make it 79-72. He finished with 14 points and 14 rebounds. Kansas went 19 of 20 from the foul line.
Creighton freshman Arthur Kaluma put on an impressive performance by posting 24 points and 12 rebounds, the highest scoring output for a Creighton freshman ever in the N.C.A.A. tournament.
Creighton (23-12) played without its defensive anchor, the 7-foot-1 sophomore center Ryan Kalkbrenner, who injured his left knee during the team’s first-round victory Thursday against San Diego State. Kalkbrenner averages 13.1 points, 7.7 rebounds and 2.9 blocks. Fortunately for Kalkbrenner, his injury did not appear to be a torn ligament.
