For people above a certain age, it's hard to imagine UNC giving up a 24 point
lead against anyone, much less Florida State. There it is, though.
The Heels blew it, big time, and Ol' Roy Williams is not a happy camper.
Check out these comments:
- "I just know that we've got to decide if you're going to be a
basketball team or you're not. Everybody in the stands was wearing
blue. We're all fat and happy and smiling but you've got to by God decide
you're going to guard somebody at some point in your life." - "After about the first 15 minutes of the game they totally outplayed
us, outcoached us, outclassed us in everything you can possibly do. It was
fool's gold early for us in the game. We're making all those jump shots and
everybody thinks it's going to be easy. They totally dominated us and
(Leonard Hamilton of Florida State) outcoached me. Everything that could go
bad went bad."
And if you think he had an emotional meltdown, what in the world went through
Steve Robinson's mind? We'd love to have sat next to him for this game.
| Duke | 5-0 | 15-1 |
| Georgia Tech | 3-1 | 15-2 |
| NC State | 3-1 | 10-4 |
| Wake Forest | 2-2 | 11-3 |
| Virginia | 2-3 | 12-4 |
| Florida State | 2-3 | 13-5 |
| Maryland | 1-3 | 10-5 |
| North Carolina | 1-3 | 11-4 |
| Clemson | 1-4 | 8-8 |
| Boston College | 13-4 | |
| Miami | 12-5 | |
| Virginia Tech | 8-7 |
The immediate question is how could it happen, and the easy answer is
depth. Past a magnificent starting five, UNC offers only a slight
bench. Yet Bobby Cremins made a career out of a six-man rotation.
And Duke had a pretty good run when Jason Williams was a freshman playing
basically six players. So that doesn't totally wash. Don't get us
wrong, it could be it, but it doesn't have to be.
Is it Ol' Roy's insistence on a breakneck pace with a thin team? Could be.
Could it be chemistry? Possibly.
Whatever it is, it's left UNC in a hole. 1-3 in the conference is very
un-UNC-ish, and it's good for seventh place, just ahead, amazingly, of Maryland,
and just behind Florida State.
UNC gets a chance to recover somewhat when UVa brings a weak, slow team to
Chapel Hill on Saturday, and then gets State on the 28th. After that comes
Clemson at Clemson, so we'd say the Heels have an excellent chance to crawl back
to 4-3.
Maryland gets Clemson on Sunday, in Littlejohn, at Wake on the 29th, and then
host State on the 1st. They
are in a hole as well, but should be able to at least hit .500.
A big game for Duke will be this Saturday as Tech and State play for second
place. Odds are Tech kills State, and Duke is still a game in front of the
Yellowjackets.
Back to Maryland: we get e-mail on a regular basis from people
complaining about our jihad (you know, militant Islam sucks, but jihad, you must
admit, is a very useful word) against Maryland fans. Our standard response
has been that if anyone at Maryland took it seriously, we'd be happy to drop
it. Unfortunately, it hasn't been and it may take a death or a
catastrophic injury and then a major lawsuit before the power-that-be get it.
So we were cheered to see that Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon took up the
cause on their show, "Pardon The Interruption."
As you may recall, the ever-creative Maryland students have a T-shirt which
reads "F___ Duke," and they enjoy that cheer, and fill in anyone's
name and they like that, too. It was JJ Redick the other night.
Kornheiser called the chants "base and vile" and he and Wilbon
agreed something should be done. We're really glad they took a stand, and
we greatly appreciate it and our best wishes go out to their car windows next
time they cover a game at Comcast. It''ll still probably take a serious
incident to get anything done, but maybe the fact that thousands of Maryland
students were clearly chanting the F word on national TV will make someone sit
up and notice.
It's nice to see that some
sentiment to return to Reynolds is afoot.