ACC Roundup - Pastner Accused Of Sexual Assault

In Thursday’s ACC play, Georgia Tech fell to Louisville, 77-54 and Clemson ripped Pitt 72-48.

It’s funny, Clemson won by just two more points than did Louisville, but it seems worse.

Neither Tech or Pitt is impressive of course but Tech is certainly better. So maybe it’s just the 70s-40s thing.

Either way you look at it it was ugly on both accounts.

People haven’t paid enough attention, but Gabe DeVoe is on fire. He’s 22-34 from deep over the last four games and shot 7-11 in this one, finishing with 25 points. That’s gone a long way to replacing Donte Grantham, out of the year with an ACL injury.

He personally outgunned Pitt from the bonusphere 7-5.

With the win, Clemson, remarkably, is is 20-4, still in second place and virtually assured of a high NCAA seed.

Brad Brownell, who came within a whisker of losing his job to Will Wade last spring, is off the hot seat and going nowhere unless he chooses to. Come to think of it, after coming so close to getting canned last year and doing so well this year, he might decide to strike while the iron is hot.

Tech got hammered at Louisville of course, but that’s not a huge surprise.

More impressively, the Cardinals did it without Deng Adel, out with an ankle injury.

Louisville forced 20 turnovers and held Tech to 36.4%.

Josh Okogie had a solid game with 25 points and 10 boards to pace the Jackets.

The game was probably somewhat overshadowed by allegations of sexual abuse in a lawsuit filed against head coach Josh Pastner.

If you remember, earlier this year a former friend, Ron Bell, accused Pastner of NCAA violations. Now he and his wife are accusing Pastner of sexually assaulting her on multiple occasions and specifically that Pastner attacked her in Houston in a room at the Hilton Americas Hotel while Bell was taking a shower.

Pastner denies all of it - ”It’s unfortunate, but I’ll deal with it. All my wife and I try to do is be compassionate to people and that’s life, so you live and learn. But unequivocally, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero truth to any of those disgusting, bogus allegations. It’s disgusting.”

Pastner’s attorneys are well aware of Bell’s character issues, starting with his drug problems and now, we learn, of issues with his wife and her family that will surely be prominently displayed in court.

We learned a great deal from the Duke lacrosse case: that yes, police and officials in the legal system can and do lie through their teeth and that while anyone can have an opinion about a particular case, it’s best to wait for the facts.

More recently we’ve seen horrible men exposed as creeps who are willing to abuse women in the most disgusting ways.

All we can say in this case is the same basic thing: we hope the truth will fully come out, and whatever the truth is that the guilty will be appropriately punished. And clearly, in this case, one side is not telling the truth. There is no grey here.

• First African-American basketball players at each ACC school
• Clemson basketball: Gabe DeVoe leads Tigers over Pitt
• College basketball roundup: Clemson crushes Pittsburgh
• DeVoe leads No. 16 Clemson to 72-48 win over Pitt
• Louisville basketball routs Georgia Tech, snaps losing streak
• A Robert Morris transfer is leading Clemson’s unexpected basketball resurgence
• Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner responds to sexual assault accusations in counter lawsuit