Congratulations to the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets!
Tech’s win over Carolina last night in Atlanta made a big statement for the ACC’s push to get more than six teams into the NCAA Tournament. If the NCAA Tournament would have started before last night, Georgia Tech would not have made the field. But, their win last night serves to at least place the Yellow Jackets squarely on the bubble (with games to be played).
In yesterday’s great conversation on SFN you will find a lot of great commentary and analysis from our community. In short, it is clearly beneficial to NC State’s hopes for an NIT bid for Georgia Tech (and Clemson and Florida State) to perform well and make a push into the NCAA Tournament.
With the ACC Tournament still to play (click here for a mathematical analysis of the NCAA Tournament), who knows what might happen.
A few ACC items of note:
* The sub-story to Ty Lawson’s benching was that he “had a bad practice”. Riiiiiiight. God I hope that this guy jumps to the NBA this year. Last night’s performance helps to further underscore his importance to the Tarheels.
* Fantastic ACC Notes that shouldn’t be ignored.
* 850 TheBuzz this morning.
* N&O’s audio of Talking with Tudor.
* Does this mean that the ACC office has rid itself of the “great facilitator”, Fred Barakat?
* It was great to see Ben McCauley play well against Wake on Wednesday night after struggling for a couple of games. Despite the great year that McCauley has put together, he has generally struggled when being guarded by longer, athletic players like Brandon Wright at Carolina. McCauley may be the primary beneficiary of JJ Hickson’s presence in Raleigh next season as it will allow Big Ben to move to his natural power forward position where he will consistently have more advantageous physical match-ups in the post.
* From Dave Glenn’s notes that we previously linked:
With two consecutive horrible seasons in conference play, Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser is nearing some dangerous territory. Consider this: Since 1975, ACC basketball programs have had streaks of three or more seasons when they lost more than 60 percent of their conference games only 13 times. In 12 of those situations, the coach who started the streak was fired without ending it.
The lone exception was Maryland coach Gary Williams, and his truly was a unique case. His three straight horrible ACC seasons (1991-93) came in the aftermath of the disastrous Bob Wade era (1987-89) in College Park. Williams ultimately righted the ship, going to 11 straight NCAA Tournaments (1994-2004) and winning the national championship in 2002.
With a 3-13 ACC record last year and a 4-10 mark so far this season, Prosser now has two straight seasons that surpass the 60-percent losing mark. Looking ahead, he’ll enter 2007-08 without his most productive player from this year (senior center Kyle Visser), and with a possible starting lineup of five sophomores. A third straight bad season would put Prosser in the midst of some very undesirable company.
