Last week, the Associated Press announced that its panel of college basketball voters ranked North Carolina #1 in the AP’s annual preseason poll.

This week, the Tar Heels, with four starters back from last year’s NCAA Tournament runner-up, will begin their 2022-23 schedule with a home exhibition Friday against Johnson C. Smith University.

Perhaps that makes it a good time to answer this intriguing question: How often does a preseason #1 team actually go on to win the national championship?

Here’s the short answer: not often.

In fact, the last team to do it was coach Roy Williams’ 2008-09 Tar Heels, who went from top-ranked status in the October preseason to cutting down the nets the following April, never falling from the AP poll’s top five during the roughly five months of basketball in between.

Going back to the 1985 NCAA Tournament, the event’s first with an expanded 64-team format, only six of the 37 preseason #1 AP teams, or about 16 percent, went on to capture the NCAA title. Joining the 2009 Tar Heels on that list are 1990 UNLV, 1992 Duke, 1996 Kentucky, 2004 Connecticut and 2007 Florida. Interestingly, approximately half of those preseason #1 teams (18 of the 37) did advance to the Final Four.

No program has produced as many preseason #1 teams as UNC’s 10, and the Tar Heels’ track record for living up to that hype with an NCAA title run is better than average historically.

Two of the previous nine UNC teams that received the #1 preseason AP ranking ended up cutting down the nets during March Madness at the end of the season, with coach Dean Smith’s 1982 Carolina squad alongside the 2009 Tar Heels as national champions, and Williams’ 2016 Heels coming oh-so-close to joining them in that regard.

 

Featured image via Todd Melet

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