YouTube Gold: A Great Buzzer Beater By Matthew Cleveland

Florida State has struggled this season, at first probably because Leonard Hamilton has a young team and second because injuries have decimated his roster. He’s missing Naheem McCleod, Malik Osborne, Anthony Polite and Caleb Mills. RayQuan Evans is back from his, but he hasn’t been particularly effective. And going into the Virginia game, they’d lost eight of nine.

And while this year’s Virginia team is clearly not as good as it usually is under Tony Bennett, they know how to manage late-game situations, as we saw at Duke.

So normally, when you have a situation where Florida State has to hit a last-second shot from way past the three point line, with just one second left on the clock, well...you bet on Virginia.

Right?

We certainly would have.

Well not this time: Matthew Cleveland, a 6-7 freshman out of Atlanta, caught the ball and turned in one motion, and not only got the shot off, with one second, but a pretty, fluid shot. How often do you see guys panic in that situation? You know, the odds of hitting that shot aren’t good but how many guys rush it?

Well this one fell through the net like a dream and Cleveland, no fool, ran away before his teammates could bury him in this year’s best dogpile.

Congratulations for one of the ACC’s best plays of the year.