With Big Four closing in on NCAA tournament sweep, different stakes for UNC, NC State

Our postseason cup runneth over. Only a few months after all four of North Carolina’s ACC teams were bowl-eligible for the first time ever, a season after two of them made the Final Four, there’s an outside possibility that the Big Four could all make the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2005.

And that’s not the kind of thing that used to happen every year, either, like some of the tales of ACC yore. It happened in 2005, 2004 and 1991. That’s it. Now, three teams, that used to happen all the time — in 21 other seasons — but not since 2018. That three-tournament gap has only occurred one other time since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985.

Still, three seems assured even if Wake Forest still has a lot of work to do to make it four, although the Demon Deacons are trending in the right direction. Duke, North Carolina and N.C. State are all safely in as things stand, even if none of them is likely to be seeded highly enough to stay close to home in Greensboro. Barring some epic collapse, that means that Saturday’s game in Chapel Hill actually means less — in the big picture, if not to N.C. State or UNC in the moment — than it does in most years.

It’s a game neither team desperately needs to win and both teams can afford to lose, at least from a seeding and selection perspective. The stakes in this one are purely existential. Fittingly, it also has the most potential to go either way of any game in this very lopsided series in a long, long time.

With both backcourts filled with high-variance, higher-volume, no-conscience, hot-and-cold shooters, anything could happen. With the Wolfpack finally having the bulk to at least be something less than utterly helpless against Armando Bacot inside — not just D.J. Burns, but Greg Gantt and Ernest Ross and Ebenezer Dowuoma — there’s at least the possibility of losing that battle and winning the war.

But since N.C. State has won in the Smith Center only twice in the past 18 years — and not since 2018, a year after the Wolfpack lost by 51 — there’s always the heavy weight of history pressing down on the Wolfpack. A year ago, North Carolina brought out all the big guns, honoring the newly retired Roy Williams and the 1982 team, leaving nothing to doubt.

Last year’s N.C. State team was emotionally unequipped to handle that environment and physically unequipped to handle the Tar Heels, but this year’s squad has shown it’s a different bunch. Whether that’s enough to pull off an upset remains to be seen, but the Wolfpack has shown it’s capable of outshooting anyone on any given night. The same is true of the Tar Heels, whose effective field-goal percentage has been above 50 percent in all but three of their wins and below it in all five of their losses.

Either way, it’s mostly pride on the line for both teams, not that there’s any less of that when these teams play.

It looks like the ACC is going to get seven teams into the NCAA tournament, plus or minus one, and while that number is mostly set during nonconference play, who those six or seven or eight teams are can change in ACC play between now and March. At this point, N.C. State and North Carolina are among the safe six, and Saturday isn’t going to change that one way or another.

Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at tinyurl.com/lukeslatest to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.

Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports