I will go to my grave saying we deserved the 1 seed over Carolina that year. We beat them 2 out of 3, had more top 50 wins, more top 100 wins, ACC Champions (the tournament winner is the champion). The ONLY thing in their favor, IIRC, was they had 7 overall losses to our 8.
And that was with practically half our team missing at least 1 game with injuries!
The only explanation I ever heard for why this was the case was this: the head of the selection committee basically said we were too far down the "s-curve". Because we were so far back at the mid-point of the season (I guess we were a projected 4 or 5 seed), a two seed was about as high as we could climb. So essentially we never even got the opportunity to have our resume evaluated against Carolina for the 1 seed.
Talk about a flawed methodology. It still pisses me off when I think about it.