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Wednesday, March 7, 2007
ACC tourney is wide open
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Tampa — Duke is a seventh seed and playing on Thursday, which immediately tells you that this has not been a typical ACC season and won’t be a typical ACC tournament — and not just because I think we’re closer to Havana than Tobacco Road.
“Teams beaten in games this season where you’d go, ‘Well, I didn’t think they’d win that game,’” Maryland coach Gary Williams said Wednesday. “As long as it stays that way, this will be wide open. I don’t think anybody could have picked the outcome of games in February this year.”
Like it was predictable in January? Clemson was 17-0 in mid-month, then finished 4-9. Duke went from feared to mocked. (Now don’t laugh. Yet.)
This is what college basketball has become. The talent has been spread around. Every team is young, and with youth comes little consistency, or often defense.
The ACC isn’t unusual. It’s just a little ahead of the curve. There are schools in the middle on the tournament bubble. There’s a Georgia Tech team that started 2-6 in the ACC, finished 6-2 and hopes the former was an aberration. There’s a bottom-feeder from Miami that recently dumped Virginia and can let its mind wander.
Most of all, there’s North Carolina State, which tonight might as well be America’s Team. The Wolfpack plays Duke, which closed the season with two losses and a forearm shiver. The Blue Devils have won seven of the last eight ACC titles and 16 overall, more than any other school. But they haven’t been this low of a seed since 1995 (ninth) and tonight they’re reduced to playing a preliminary round game for the first time in seven years. They also will be minus suspended guard Gerald Henderson.
Now, most will look at this and still see: Duke vs. North Carolina State. But given the way this season has unfolded, what do you think is going through Sidney Lowe’s mind?
In 1983, Lowe was the starting point guard for N.C. State under the late coach, Jim Valvano. The Wolfpack was a fourth seed in the ACC tournament at the Omni but opened with a victory over Wake Forest and then stunned North Carolina and Virginia in succession. Lowe was the tournament MVP. (All that did was set the stage for the Wolfpack winning the national championship.)
None of N.C. State’s players were even born yet when Valvano was running on the court in Albuquerque, looking for somebody to hug. But they don’t have to look far to draw on that history. Lowe is their first-year coach.
“This is very similar in that we had to win the tournament in order to get into the NCAA tournament,” Lowe said Wednesday. “While we’re not talking about those things yet, we are talking about doing something special.”
N.C. State has been a microcosm of the ACC’s absurdity. It went only 5-11 in the conference and lost to Miami by 15, but beat North Carolina once, and Virginia Tech and Wake Forest twice each. Tech coach Paul Hewitt laughed when somebody asked about the ACC tournament being wide open because, “I hear that every year.” He has been banging the drum for the conference to get nine teams in the NCAAs because of the balance.
“Unless you have a team with three or four NBA players in the starting lineup, it’s always like that,” Hewitt said.
Every ACC team has shown its flaws. Every team, as Gary Williams said, “has won games this year when it knows it has played well. So everybody is coming here thinking it has a shot.”
Even Wake Forest, which had lost six straight before dumping Tech by 10 and later Virginia to close the season.
Even Florida State, which somehow beat Maryland and Duke but lost to Clemson in consecutive games.
Even Miami, which has beaten Georgia Tech, Maryland and Virginia. OK. Probably not Miami.
North Carolina won the ACC’s regular season at 11-5. But if it had lost its final game to Duke, it would be in a much worse position than just 10-6.
FSU coach Leonard Hamilton explains: “If the No. 1 team in our league had lost the last day, they would be in fifth [in seeding].”
North Carolina fifth? Duke seventh? N.C. State 10th?
Can we keep moving this tournament south?
Permalink | Comments (12) | Categories: Final Four, Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC
Honorable Felton, UGA due some breaks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Four years ago the SEC convened to play basketball and Georgia stayed home in shame. The self-removal from the 2003 postseason remains the lowest point in the school’s athletics history, but the arrival of another SEC tournament illustrates how far from rock bottom this program has climbed.
Georgia hasn’t gotten lucky in the post-Jim Harrick years, not even once, and still it begins play tonight with, as Dennis Felton notes, the fifth-best record (17-12, 8-8 SEC) “in the toughest division of any conference.” This proud and driven coach has surely been tempted a thousand times to cut the same corners as his sullied predecessor, and not once has he yielded. Felton has done exactly as he said he’d do: He has built a program that warrants not just support but admiration.
In April 2004 Felton traveled to Indianapolis for the NCAA hearings on the mess he’d inherited. The contentious day got off to a festive start when Harrick likened president Michael Adams, his erstwhile friend and advocate, to a bag of fertilizer. Finally, when all the questioning and bickering was done and an adjournment at hand, Felton asked to address the panel. “I can’t remember exactly what I said,” he says now, but the message was pointed: This will never happen again so long as I’m coaching here.
Felton: “I wanted to make it very clear that [the NCAA] could count on the fact that we had pure intentions, that we were intent on doing the right thing, that they could count on us being an exemplary program.”
So he said then, and so has he done. Consensus holds that the Bulldogs need to win twice in this tournament to have a chance at an NCAA berth. Being human, Felton reflects on the Western Kentucky game, a three-point loss achieved without leading scorer Takais Brown, who was eligible by NCAA and Georgia standards but not by Felton’s more exacting criteria, and on the 12-point defeat suffered last week in Rupp Arena without Levi Stukes, who averages 12.1 points but who was suspended for sassing the strength coach. Might those have been the needed victories right there?
“Of course I [think about it],” Felton says. “You’re always doing the math and evaluating things.”
Not subject to re-evaluation is this man’s personal code. Maybe he’s a 20th-Century guy trapped in the 21st Century’s absence of accountability, but Felton, without apology, holds himself and his men to a higher measure. “I really don’t think I’m that different from other coaches,” he says, but Felton bears the same resemblance to the brazen Harrick as chalk does to cheese.
With so much at stake and his fourth Georgia team so near the Big Dance, a lesser man might have looked the other way when Stukes mouthed off. Felton never looks the other way. “It’s real important to the growth of the program,” he says, “even if it means sacrificing games.” Who thinks like that anymore?
This honorable man does, and if ever someone was overdue for a dollop of fortune, it’s Felton. His best recruit, Louis Williams of South Gwinnett, never enrolled. His most talented player, guard Mike Mercer, wrecked his knee on Feb. 10. His most valuable player, point guard Sundiata Gaines, sprained his ankle as Georgia was about to embark on a show-the-world fortnight with games against Georgia Tech, Clemson, Wisconsin and Florida at the end of December and beginning of January. (The Bulldogs wound up 0-for-4.)
“I don’t sit around and fret, ‘Can’t we get a break?’ ” Felton says. “I face up to the reality that we haven’t gotten a break.”
And still Georgia is nuzzling close to the NCAA tournament, close without once taking the inviting path of least resistance, close without compromising any of its coach’s deeply felt principles. This still isn’t the greatest team in the world, but it absolutely stands for something. As the saying goes, if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything. Georgia once fell for Jim Harrick’s line, but the falling is over. This is a program with a purpose.
Permalink | Comments (28) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
