The Agony of Greensboro

The Agony of Greensboro

A trio of underdogs are making a push in the ACC tournament.  Clemson and North Carolina, however, are headed home amid a slew of question marks.


By JIM SUMNER
Basketball Times Online

Greensboro, N.C. — For many college basketball fans, March is about Cinderellas, the lesser lights who rise up and smack their betters, channeling their inner Jim Valvanos, advancing and surviving. 
    The Atlantic Coast Conference has a trio of candidates after the opening day of its conference tournament.  Twelfth-seeded Miami stunned fifth-seeded Wake Forest, 11th-seeded North Carolina State did the same to sixth-seeded Clemson, and No. 9 Virginia edged No. 8 Boston College. 
    The latter is more of an upset than the seedings suggest.  Virginia entered the game on a nine-game losing streak and is without its best player, sophomore forward Sylven Landesberg.  It seems that Landesberg dropped the student part of student-athlete and stopped going to class.
    All face second-round matchups today against teams that had first-round byes.  Virginia squares off against Duke at noon and may well be gone before this shows up on line.  But maybe not.  That’s March.
    But I’m fascinated by two of the first-round losers.  When you think of Clemson and sports, football is the first thing that comes to mind.  Maybe the only thing, unless you follow college baseball. 
    But the Tigers have had their hoops moments.  Horace Grant became the school’s only ACC Player of the Year in 1987.  Dale Davis and Elden Campbell led Clemson to first place in the ACC regular season in 1990. Larry Nance helped Clemson to an Elite Eight appearance in 1980, while Tree Rollins spent four profitable years in Death Valley. Senior forward Trevor Booker made first team All-ACC this season over a truckload of players who will be drafted higher in the NBA draft.
    That brings us to the ACC Tournament.  Clemson is an original member of the league.  Last night’s loss to NC State assures Clemson of its 57th consecutive season without an ACC Tournament title.  That’s all of them, by the way.  O for 57 is some kind of slump.
    Clemson did make the title game in 1962 and 2008, losing to Wake Forest and UNC respectively in the title games.  Their overall ACC Tournament record drops to 16-57.  Ouch doesn’t even begin to describe the futility.
    Clemson fans are accustomed to making that empty-handed drive back to their bucolic foothills community.  Expectations are different for the proud North Carolina Tar Heels. They played credibly last night against Georgia Tech, displaying an intensity and focus all too often lacking this season.
    But they lost, dropping their overall record to 16-16.  So, it’s not like we couldn’t see it coming.  Then again, there was always that thought in the back of the mind that North Carolina was one good game from turning around the season.
    So much for listening to the back of the mind.
    In retrospect, it’s clear that everyone took too much from UNC’s 2006 season.  The Tar Heels won the 2005 NCAA title and then said goodbye to their top seven scorers, four of whom left for the NBA with eligibility remaining.   Buoyed by Tyler Hansbrough, who had a freshman year for the ages, Carolina was more than competitive in 2006, finishing second in the ACC and ruining J.J. Redick’s senior night in Cameron Indoor Stadium.
    So, clearly Roy Williams had mastered the fine art of replacing an entire roster overnight.  Well, maybe not.   There were injuries to be sure and some chemistry issues, although it’s not clear if the chemistry issues led to the losses or the other way around.  But essentially a team with a Hall-of-Fame coach and more prep All-Americans than any team in the country somehow couldn’t put on the floor a team that could handle the ball or shoot with any real competence.  Carolina’s three perimeter starters shot a collective 5 for 29 against Tech, 1-13 on 3-pointers.  And no one was surprised.
    That led to the most surreal moments of any recent ACC Tournament.  In a post-game press conference that was more therapy than information exchange, Williams was asked about the NIT.  “If someone’s going to invite me to play, I’m going to play. Period.  Are we worthy enough to be invited? That I don’t know.  Those people that make the decisions get to make that decision.  Maybe they won’t even invite us.”
    So, that’s what it has come to for the defending NCAA champions. Their coach can’t even be bothered to lobby for an NIT bid.  Probably time to let this season end not with a bang but a whimper.

Jim Sumner, a Raleigh-based writer, is BTO's Tobacco Road correspondent.  An author of three books and numerous articles on the ACC, he has provided expert commentary to HBO’s Battle for Tobacco Road and ESPN’s Between the Lines.  He can be reached at jimsumner@earthlink.net.

Photo Credit: 
www.tarheelblue.com 
www.clemsontigers.com