2024 NCAA: North Carolina Included as Fourth No. 1 Seed
Transcript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:03 Mike, the four number one seeds in the 2024 NCAA tournament.
00:07 UConn, the number one overall seed.
00:09 Houston, the top seed in the South region, followed by Purdue in the Midwest.
00:13 And there was some conversation about who would be the fourth and
00:17 final team on that one line.
00:18 Many thought after Iowa State won the Big 12 tournament,
00:21 the Cyclones might slot into that fourth and final one seed.
00:25 The committee decides it's North Carolina.
00:27 Do you think the committee made the correct decision?
00:30 >> I do.
00:32 There were a couple of reasons for that.
00:34 Iowa State played one of the weakest non-conference schedules in
00:37 the entire country.
00:39 It ranked in the 300s.
00:40 I don't know the exact number, but there's 360 teams.
00:43 So if you're in the 300s, you're scraping the bottom, certainly.
00:46 And that was what Iowa State chose to do with this team.
00:49 Now, I'm not critical of that.
00:50 I think you schedule to whatever you think your team needs to be in peak
00:54 condition, to be in peak running form when you start your conference play.
00:58 That's what you're out there to do.
00:59 And if it costs you a seed line, if you're at the top of the field, okay.
01:03 And if it costs you getting in at the bottom of the field,
01:07 as has happened to Pitt, it's your problem.
01:10 You have to deal with it.
01:11 You have to live with it the way you chose to schedule.
01:14 And in this case, Iowa State chose that schedule, okay.
01:19 But you can't have a one seed with that schedule.
01:21 Even as good as the Big 12 is, you can't have a one seed in which the best
01:26 non-conference opponent you played was probably Iowa, which wasn't anywhere.
01:31 I guess you could say they were near the field if you want to be really generous.
01:36 But in reality, when the committee was talking, if the word Iowa came up
01:41 without State attached to it, it didn't last very long on the board.
01:45 [MUSIC]