Second-round survey

The condition of this year’s NCAA tournament is perhaps best described by the standing of my bracket (8 of 16 second round, 32 of 48 overall) in two separate pools. In one, I’m second of six players, behind one guy running away with the lead. In the other, I’m eighth out of 13. Same bracket, similar level and distribution of basketball knowledge (though a different set of biases), wildly different competitive standing.

The upset that surprised me least in the second round is the one that surprised the rest of nation the most: Davidson defeating Georgetown at the RBC Center in Raleigh, emerging from the subregional opposite UNC’s 1-seed. Carolina lost to Georgetown last year in the regional finals, and even that aside, there’s very little love lost for the Hoyas among ACC fans in the Old North State. I told everyone I talked to that if Davidson could keep it close in the second half as latecoming Tar Heel fans finally filed in from their Easter Sunday dinners, the building would close in on Georgetown; that’s precisely what happened. The Post is right to be upset over the home-court advantage to Davidson, but all the writers freely admitted that the Hoyas lost the game on their own merit.

Tech was drawn into a couple tournament stories as well, even as the Hokies awaited their NIT second-round date with UAB (taking place as I write). Most prominent was the fact that the Davidson sharpshooter Stephen Curry, son of Hokie legend Dell Curry, somehow eluded VT’s recruiting grasp — a story simplistically played as a serious failure by Seth Greenberg.

The reality is, of course, more complex. TechSideline.com’s Will Stewart got so tired of rehashing the story that he froze a summary at the top of the basketball message board, quoting both former Hokie assistant Brad Greenberg (now head coach at Radford) and a well-researched Post story dating from last year’s NCAA tournament. It turns out that VT’s available scholarships went first to Nigel Munson (now bound for George Washington) and eventual non-qualifier, now Kansas recruit, Tyrone Appleton; Curry was offered the chance to walk on and earn a scholarship the following year, but instead committed (understandably) to the full four-year offer from Davidson.

As a high school player in North Carolina, Curry was viewed as a marginal ACC prospect at best, due to concerns about his physique; VCU was his only other immediate scholarship offer aside from Davidson, and none of the in-state ACC schools expressed any interest. Has he turned out better than expected? Definitely, and good for him. But did the VT coaching staff have that information during the 2005-06 recruiting season, when they prioritized Munson and Appleton? No more than they knew that Munson would be lured away to GW in ‘07 and Appleton wouldn’t make the grade. The hindsight artists just drive me nuts.

The other angle, more insidious, comes from (Raleigh) News and Observer veteran columnist Caulton Tudor, in an aside to his analysis of Duke’s fading NCAA fortunes:

How quickly Krzyzewski solves his problem will determine how much national impact the ACC can recover. Expansion has damaged the league’s basketball programs far more than anyone could have imagined, but not to the extent that the basic formula for greatness has changed.

Tudor’s insistence on blaming the ACC’s ills on expansion (not to mention his hyperbole, when the general expectation out of Chapel Hill and Durham in the summer of 2003 was Armageddon) is difficult to swallow when Virginia Tech has finished top-five of the conference standings three of our four years in the conference, BC has done so twice out of its three years, and Miami has done so once in its four years. Out of twenty top-five slots available in those four years, the 25% of the conference represented by expansion has taken 30% of the slots. So we’re hardly not pulling our own weight.

No, the problem to me looks like the ACC failing to adapt to a shift in style of play in college basketball — one most obviously represented in its nemesis the Big East. Boston College in particular, but also to some extent VT and Miami, faced serious difficulty in adapting from Big East physicality and intensity to the ACC’s tight whistles and skill game in their first couple of years in the conference. Back to 2008: Scottie Reynolds of Villanova — a 2006 product of Herndon (Virginia) HS — couldn’t play the way he did against Clemson in an ACC game; he’d struggle to reach 20 minutes on the court before fouling out with all the front-arm clearouts he used on unwitting Tiger defenders.

But everyone else plays like that, and NCAA play is called to that standard. Only ACC teams with clearly superior talent have made deep runs into the tournament in the past several years; that’s because the rest of the ACC’s abilities are equalized by physicality they can’t handle or effectively match. That’s not expansion’s fault. That’s on ACC coaches in part, and on the conference office’s guidance to ACC referees in part. The ACC’s future in NCAA play will rely on its ability to make this adaptation.