Fans who paid for Gonzaga-North Carolina tickets also got to see five seconds of the circus during the first half of Monday’s game. After Gonzaga’s Nigel Williams-Goss airmailed a jumper and UNC’s Joel Berry II appeared to tip the rebound out of bounds, Isaiah Hicks came flying across the baseline to save it.

The problem was Hicks’ save attempt didn’t have enough mustard to get the ball back in bounds. Enter Kennedy Meeks, who jumped across the baseline to give it a second shot and delivered the ball to nearby Theo Pinson.

How did that ball never go out of bounds?! Unbelievable.

It’s tough to tell for sure if the save was clean. At first, college basketball Twitter exploded with ref hatred. But on closer look, the call does not look egregious.

That doesn’t mean the call was necessarily correct, though. Was the ball out of Hicks’ hand before his foot touched out of bounds?

North Carolina save

Possibly, or maybe even probably. But that’s a much closer call than it looked live.

And you’ve gotta credit the Tar Heels’ hustle for not giving up on that play.

[Clippit]

About Jesse Kramer

Jesse is a writer and editor for The Comeback. He has also worked for SI.com and runs The Catch and Shoot, a college basketball website based in Chicago. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow Jesse on Twitter @Jesse_Kramer.

2 thoughts on “How the heck did North Carolina keep this ball in bounds?

  1. You are looking at the wrong out of bounds play. Try the jump ball call at the end, when Meeks’ hand touched out of bounds while he was on the floor . They missed it, it was clear, a huge mistake.

    1. Yeah, the refs missed a lot. The other one I couldn’t believe was late in the game when one ref correctly called a ball out of bounds on Gonzaga, and then another ref overruled it and said a Carolina player had touched it and gave the Zags the ball. Replay showed it was not touched, yet one ref overruled it, like it was an obvious miscue. Overall, bad officiating.

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