The path wasn't as straight and uncomplicated as it appeared back in October, when North Carolina was a unanimous preseason No. 1 and there was talk of the gifted Tar Heels going unbeaten.

But here they are, the team to beat -- at least in the South -- going into the NCAA tournament and their Thursday opener vs. Big South champion Radford in Greensboro, N.C.

The Heels watched Sunday evening's bracket unveiling from home after losing to Florida State in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament semifinals a day earlier. They've played through a season-ending foot injury to senior swingman and defensive ace Marcus Ginyard, the loss of freshman forward Tyler Zeller for much of the season to a broken wrist and a stunning 0-2 start in the ACC in January.

They fell to FSU with point guard and ACC Player of the Year Ty Lawson on the bench, nursing a jammed right toe.

Yes, teammate Bobby Frasor said, they'd like to have been playing in Sunday's ACC final. "But we played our season to be playing on the last Monday," he said.

That would be in the NCAA final in Detroit's Ford Field in three weeks.

The South looks navigable for the Tar Heels (28-4), assuming Lawson is OK. No. 2 seed Oklahoma lost back-to-back games when star sophomore Blake Griffin was lost to a concussion in late February, then twice more after he returned. The Sooners will be tested as early in the second round, where the prospective opponent is Clemson.

Should both they and Carolina reach the regional final in Memphis, a matchup of this year's likely national player of the year and last year's  Griffin and UNC's Tyler Hansbrough -- would be appetizing.

Third-seeded Syracuse got on a late roll, but what did 195 minutes of basketball in four days in the Big East tourney take out of the Orange? They caught a break, and another day of rest, with an assignment to Miami and a Friday opener vs. Stephen F. Austin.

The team to watch might be No. 4-seeded Gonzaga, which played a who's who -- beating Oklahoma State, Maryland and Tennessee twice, then losing to Arizona and Connecticut by only five points on the road -- before rolling through the lighter-weight West Coast Conference.

The Zags also fell to Memphis by 18 in early February. Another question mark?

Further down the South bracket, the NCAA selection committee sprinkled in some intrigue.

* Ninth-seeded Butler, a potential second-round opponent for North Carolina, is coming off two appearances and three wins in the tournament in the previous two years. The patient Bulldogs can be a handful.

* No. 12 seeds have won almost a third of their first-round games -- 31 of 96 -- since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. And here we have Western Kentucky, which carried that seed into the Sweet 16 last March.

* Two of the tournament's four first-time entrants landed here, Stephen F. Austin as the 14th seed and Morgan State as the 15th.

* Morgan coach Todd Bozeman is completing a redemptive personal journey. He took California to three NCAA appearances in the mid-'90s, becoming the youngest coach (at 29) to lead a team to the Sweet 16 in 1993, but was forced to resign and slammed with NCAA sanctions in the wake of a recruiting scandal. He got back into the college game, at Morgan, in 2006.