CHARLOTTE – While the rest of the college basketball world watched and marveled at an upset-filled NCAA Tournament last year, that resulted in no team higher than a four seed reaching the Final Four, one noteworthy member of the hoops community paid it no attention.
Armando Bacot chose to not watch. Really, he just couldn’t.
After helping North Carolina reach the national championship game the previous season, and started last campaign ranked No. 1 in the country, Bacot and the Tar Heels were nowhere to be found in the tens of millions of tournament brackets filled out because they didn’t make the field.
UNC went 20-13 and did not receive an at-large invitation, and then quickly decided it wouldn’t play in the NIT. So, 53 weeks ago, following a loss to Virginia in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals, Carolina’s season came to an end. So did Bacot’s interest in all things related to the big dance.
“Not one game,” he replied Wednesday, when asked how much of the tournament he watched last spring. “I didn’t watch those, man.”
Now, Bacot loves college basketball. He watches ACC games all the time, watches teams from other leagues, even late-night games from out west. He gobbles up a ton of college hoops.
But the biggest weeks of the year for his sport? Nope.
“I just couldn’t watch it, honestly,” he said Wednesday at Spectrum Center. “It was a tough watch because it was one of those things where you go from being in that situation to nobody caring about you, so I didn’t watch it at all.”
Still, the tournament is everywhere. It engulfs social media. People talk about it. And it’s on TV in restaurants, bars, just everywhere.
“I was in Miami, I was having a little fun,” Bacot said, smiling.
Okay, but even in Miami, especially with Florida Atlantic and Miami in the Final Four.
“I had a private room,” Bacot said. “So, I told him (to change it).”
A year later, Bacot is in Charlotte and the Tar Heels are the one seed in the West Region. He won’t only watch the big dance this time around, he’s in it front and center.
Carolina (27-7) opens play Thursday afternoon against Wagner (17-15) in what it hopes is a six-game run to the program’s seventh NCAA title. But even though Bacot used the Covid year and returned for a fifth season in Chapel Hill hoping to return to the NCAA Tournament, he had no idea it would be possible for a long time after missing out.
He loved the additions the team made through the transfer portal, bringing in Harrison Ingram from Stanford and Cormac Ryan from Notre Dame, in particular. And he was thrilled when Elliot Cadeau reclassified and enrolled at UNC to run the point.
But Bacot still didn’t quite know what the Heels were and if they’d get back on this stage.
“I wasn’t really sure going into this year how good we would be,” he said. “I had no clue if we would be a good team because there was a lot of different pieces, and I didn’t really know like how good everybody would be until we actually got on the floor.
“Until then, I was just like, ‘Man, I don’t want that feeling again.’ It was tough.”
Until a Saturday morning last October in Boca Raton, FL. A secret scrimmage with FAU opened his eyes.
“FAU, with the amount of guards they had, and just how they played, and I saw how great we played, we could be defensively,” he said, before recalling what he said at the ACC Tipoff in Charlotte not long before Halloween.
“So, after that, I was like, ‘man, we have a chance.’ I was telling my people; I didn’t want to tell y’all to like jinx it. But we could win the ACC, I think would be like a top-five team.”
Carolina won the ACC regular season by two games and advanced to the conference tournament championship game before falling to NC State.
Usually, stingy defense has been the anchor of the Tar Heels’ success. It’s almost as if Bacot knew what he was talking about last fall.
And, it’s as if he knew then night clubs in Miami and other activities would be pushed back into late April or May this time around. The Heels weren’t missing the dance again, and this time may hang around for a while.
