March Madness: North Carolina Ousts Top-Seeded Baylor in OT

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.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/sports/ncaabasketball/march-madness-scores.html