Winning on the road in the ACC will always be difficult as Virginia discovered at Clemson last night. It’s tempting to paint this win as a big upset and while it’s certainly a meaningful win for the Tigers, let’s not forget that Clemson was favored heading into the match-up. It’s a good win, but not particularly surprising. So in that same vein, tonight, we have two tough road tests on the schedule.

The Headliners

• #7 North Carolina at Miami at 8:00 PM on ESPN

Miami, with the big win against Duke and solid in-conference performance, has played its way onto the bubble. Unfortunately, the Hurricanes are still very much a marginal team when it comes to the Big Dance. Miami needs to either win tonight against North Carolina or beat Florida State in the rematch of last weekend’s game, and probably needs to do both to warrant serious tournament consideration. Beating North Carolina is a tall order, but the results of the teams’ last meeting offers some encouragement for the Hurricanes. The 17-point win in the ACC conference opener happened before the integration of Shane Larkin into the Miami starting line up and before North Carolina’s loss of Dexter Strickland. Miami now starts an ultra-quick three guard line-up that includes Larkin, who managed six steals in 24 minutes last meeting, while North Carolina now lacks a speedy perimeter defender. Duke exposed North Carolina’s susceptibility to a well-timed three-point barrage and Miami is better positioned to exploit that than ever. Also worth mentioning is the stellar job that the Hurricanes did in limiting the effectiveness of Harrison Barnes who went 2-of-12 in the previous face-off. Miami has these advantages and the homecourt and have a real chance at upsetting the Tar Heels. Yet, when push comes to shove, North Carolina still has the clear edge. What the Tar Heels lack in perimeter speed they make up for with size and length. While the duo of Reggie Johnson and Kenny Kadji has been tough to defend, Tyler Zeller and John Henson match up well. Henson can be effective against Kadji’s inside-out game and Zeller has the offensive savvy to get Johnson into foul trouble early.

The Opening Act

• Georgia Tech at Wake Forest at 7:30 PM on ESPN3.com

If Boston College didn’t exist, these two teams would each only have a single conference win. Still, one of these teams will leave this game the winner and despite Wake Forest’s home court advantage, I think Georgia Tech has the edge in this game because of their superior rebounding. Wake Forest can offset most of their disadvantages through a big night from Travis McKie and C.J. Harris, but even then, it’s not clear if the Demon Deacons can get enough significant contributions from the rest of the team to walk away with the win. In any case, this game should be closely contested even if aesthetically unpleasant.

This was a bad weekend for the Maryland Terrapins.  On Thursday, starting point guard Pe’Shon Howard tore his anterior cruciate ligament, and on Friday the team announced that he was out for the season. Howard is no stranger to injury; he missed most of Maryland’s non-conference slate with a broken foot. Then, on Saturday, the Blue Devils tore apart Maryland in a second half that featured the prominent benching and subsequent sulking of star player and ACC leading scorer, Terrell Stoglin. After the game, Stoglin made his displeasure known on Twitter.  At 4-6 in conference, Maryland stands on the precipice of a collapse. Is Maryland done for the year?

It's Been A Long Season For Mark Turgeon

The Terrapins were never going to win the conference championship, and, coming into this season, making the NCAA Tournament seemed like a longshot. None of this has changed. The expectations for this team at this point are simple: avoid collapse and prepare for the future. Howard is a gifted player, but his contributions to the team have been limited this year. He has a team-low 80.4 offensive efficiency rating and a team-high 34.9% turnover ratio. While his defense and playmaking (including a team-high 22.4% assist rating) helps to offset his shortcomings, there is a case to be made that the team is fine without him. His replacement, freshman Nick Faust, isn’t much better in terms of offensive efficiency and turnover percentage, and has yet to find his footing under Mark Turgeon. Howard’s absence means more minutes for Faust, and while that may be hard to watch now, the live game experience well help the promising young guard develop faster. Turgeon hopefully realizes that right now (with six conference losses), this season isn’t as important as next season.

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The first post-rivalry week matchup in the ACC starts up with an intriguing bout between two teams that may be headed in different directions. Clemson took an easy victory against Wake Forest on Saturday and Virginia lost big to a North Carolina team that was trying hard to put the Duke loss behind them. Now Virginia goes to Clemson for a game that becomes more interesting the more I look at it.

The Only Game In Town

• Virginia at Clemson at 7:00 PM on ESPNU

Mike Scott Has a Bead on ACC POY

Virginia is nationally ranked, has a winning conference record, and has beaten Clemson once already this season. Clemson hasn’t been ranked all season, has a losing conference record, and lost to Virginia  earlier this season. I would have guessed that Virginia would have a clear edge in this game, but the betting odds have the Cavaliers as a slight underdog coming into this game. Was the Wahoos’ loss to North Carolina so damning that the betting public has simply lost confidence in Virginia? Is there some matchup issue that has newly emerged? What does Vegas know that we don’t? The odds may seem surprising at first, but that’s only because we  are probably underrating the value of home court advantage. Virginia won its first game at home against Clemson, but the score was 65-61. A four-point home win isn’t worth that much. A team that wins at home by single-digits wins the in-conference rematch only about 33.0% of the time. Vegas doesn’t know some big secret about Virginia; it just understands home court advantage. Virginia has played well this season, but they are going to have to stretch to win this game on the road.

Man, ACC play is so boring and predictable.  Rivalries without luster, no intrigue. Blegh.  I can barely remember anything that happened last night.

Austin Rivers... For the Win (Getty)

Of course, I’m kidding as Austin Rivers hit the shot to give Duke a miraculous win against North Carolina in the finest rivalry in college sports. Rivers was truly impressive, but it’s hard to know what lesson to take away from Duke’s victory. If I told Roy Williams that his team would shoot better from the field, indeed, shooting nearly 50%, score 20 points from the free throw line, and turn the ball over less than 10 times, he would probably be happy with that. That’s what Carolina did and it simply wasn’t enough. How did Duke win? Well first, the game plan is the perfect illustration of how one should take down North Carolina. Mike Krzyzewski’s game plan leveraged the greatest weakness in North Carolina’s defense: the perimeter. Duke took an astounding 36 three-point shots, making an impressive 14. As an illustration of how insane this is, Wake Forest in their loss against Virginia last night managed to shoot only 41 field goals. Of all the field goals that Duke took, 58.1% of the shots were three-pointers. On the season, no team is averaging over 50% threes. By making them at a 38.9% clip, it didn’t matter how Duke performed on defense or if they could score on the interior. If Duke can maintain this style of leveraged offensive efficiency, they are going to be really hard to stop. Perfectly game-planned. By contrast, North Carolina shot six three-pointers and made one.

The other thing that Duke did really well against North Carolina was get to the free throw line. North Carolina is the best team in the country at not fouling, but with consistent driving, Duke somehow managed to get to the line 26 times. It was an impressive performance, which is one of the other reasons this game is a bit confusing. As good as Duke was at scoring, sheer ineptitude on the glass and indifferent defense almost totally offset all the impressive things that Duke did. Remember it took a weird accidental defensive tip-in from Tyler Zeller for Duke to eke out a one-point victory. As good as a win is this is, would Duke even be considered the favorite for the rematch at home? It was a memorable and miraculous win, but the exceptional, rare nature of miracles makes it hard to draw any conclusions from a maddeningly inconsistent Duke team.

Of course, considering the nature of North Carolina’s bizarre last two minute collapse, the Tar Heels have just as much if not more soul-searching to do.

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The North Carolina and Duke home and home series is the greatest rivalry in college basketball. There is no doubt about this. By recent custom, this series is the showdown between the two dominant conference powers. Since the 2003 season when a Josh Howard-led Wake Forest team took home the regular season title, Duke or North Carolina has taken home a piece of it every year since, and most years before that. It’s understandable for people to get lazy and talk about how this is the game between the two conference heavyweights, to claim that this is the series that decides the ACC regular season championship. It’s understandable, but it is lazy. More importantly, this year, it’s simply wrong.

Hamilton's Team: Best in the ACC?

Florida State sits on top of the conference standings and the Seminoles hold the key to their own destiny. They clobbered North Carolina, they beat Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium, they beat Mike Scott and the Virginia Cavaliers. To walk away with the number one seed in the tournament, Florida State has to simply win out. Sure the Seminoles still have to face Duke and Virginia again, but the second place team in the ACC, North Carolina, has to play both of these teams twice down the stretch. Statistical wizard and game simulator extraordinaire Ken Pomeroy ran down the chances for either team to win the conference outright and found the Tar Heels had a 41% likelihood, while Florida State had a 39% chance. Since these simulations don’t account for a tie situation, which Florida State wins because of the head-to-head tiebreaker, Florida State really could be “legitimately considered the favorite.” North Carolina is by no means out of the race, but right now they are in second place and Duke’s shot at winning the conference regular season title is pretty slim.

North Carolina and Duke transcends simple conference standings. The game is about pride and rivalry more than conference dominance. It does usually mean conference dominance, but ACC fans need to give credit where credit is due: Florida State, to this point in the season, has been the best team in the conference. This game is a great rivalry game but today it is not a battle for conference supremacy. It’s a consolation game for the conference runner-up.

Maryland kicked off a week of excellent ACC matches by eking out a win against struggling Clemson. Terrell Stoglin‘s Superman act remains impressive as he put up 27 points on 11 shots with four steals. Maryland needed every one of those points too, as Clemson took 63 shots while the Terrapins managed only 47.  Winning a game despite such an overwhelming loss in the bottle of possessions is impressive, but I still can’t help but feel that Maryland should be able to beat Clemson without such heroic offensive and defensive efforts.

The Big Game

• Duke at North Carolina at 9:00 PM on ESPN

It's About That Time Again

The Blue Devils come into this game after suffering the wrath of a suprisingly feisty Hurricanes team. Miami isn’t a bad squad, but Duke should have handled the game without any problem. Their offense is as good as ever, but the defense ranks as the ninth-best in the conference. Meanwhile, Duke is inhabiting a special kind of match-up hell. Robbi Pickeral talked about the defensive problem that 6’8″ Harrison Barnes creates at small forward, but a tougher challenge in my mind will be stopping Carolina’s shooting guards. Austin Rivers might claim to be up for a spell against Barnes and Tyler Thornton is at least a partial answer to Kendall Marshall, but who’s going to spend the game trying to stop the athletic Reggie Bullock? If anyone can crack this match-up puzzle, it’s Mike Krzyzewski, who may have to reach deep onto his bench for solutions (free Michael Gbinije?). Regardless, Duke’s ability to make threes will give the Devils a chance against a North Carolina team that still surrenders too many perimeter shots. Make no mistake, Duke comes into this game as the underdog against a confident Tar Heel team that expects to win this game.

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The Terrapins lost to North Carolina on Saturday after a valiant and hard-fought game where it looked like Mark Turgeon had his old mentor Roy Williams on the ropes early on. How did Maryland get the jump on the Tar Heels? By relying on a tactic that Turgeon has been reluctant to embrace all season: perimeter pressure. On the season, Maryland has forced fewer turnovers than almost every team in the country, posting a defensive turnover percentage of 16.9% which puts them at somewhere around the 325th best in the country in this category. Worse, when it comes to steals, Maryland is the second worst team in the entire country, managing a takeaway on only 5.8% of defensive plays.

Mark Turgeon Should Consider Letting His Team Gamble More On Defense

Yet, going into the under-eight minute timeout in the first half, sure-handed Tar Heel Kendall Marshall already had five turnovers. Mark Turgeon unleashed the dogs on the Tar Heels and their perimeter pressure rattled North Carolina. It was an effective tactic that kept UNC’s guards off-balance and helped key an early lead for the Terrapins. Certainly North Carolina rallied to win the game and Kendall Marshall going forward only turned the ball over once more on his way to a 16-assist game. Still, the game was competitive when it probably shouldn’t have been.

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It’s been something of a down year for sensational ACC freshmen after last year’s excellent class. Still there have been some real gems, and though the Rookie of the Year Honor was pretty much wrapped up by the time the first conference game was tipped, most spots on the ACC All-Freshman Team are wide open. A lot of highly-touted recruits have flopped or underperformed, a lot of talented guys haven’t won minutes over their more experienced teammates, and in general, the youngsters have played pretty inconsistently. If voting for the All-Freshmen team was held tomorrow, here’s who I would vote for.

• G Austin Rivers (Duke)

Rivers Was Anointed An All-ACC Freshman a Long Time Ago

Barring a miracle, Rivers has Rookie of the Year wrapped up. Leading a top-flight Duke team, he’s the only freshman whose average has cracked double digits. He leads the balanced and talented Blue Devils with 14.1 PPG. Rivers game isn’t perfect; he struggles to do much beyond scoring and his offensive efficiency leaves something to be desired at 103.2. Still, he’s the leading scorer on the best offense in the ACC and that makes any other deficiency seem somewhat trivial. If highlight reel appearances were a statistical category, Rivers moves would leave all the other rookies in the dust.

• G Shane Larkin (Miami)

With an expected backcourt of Malcom Grant and Durand Scott leading the talented Hurricanes, it didn’t seem like there was a lot of room for 5’11” freshman like Larkin to get a lot of playing time beyond spells off the bench. Somehow though, Larkin proved so valuable to Jim Larranaga that the Hurricanes went to a three guard lineup starting the energetic guard alongside his more experienced teammates. In his first year, Larkin has already managed to jump to the top of the ACC steals charts, averaging 1.9 SPG alongside Lorenzo Brown and Jontel Evans. In terms of tempo-free statistics, Larkin leads the ACC, getting a steal on 4.8% of opponents posessions (this also happens to be the 14th best mark in the nation). Outside of being an all-round pest on defense, Larkin leads ACC freshmen with 2.5 APG and shoots a very respectable 37.5% from behind the arc. With these skills, Larkin is going to be breaking the hearts of other teams fans for the foreseeable future.

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North Carolina State‘s Scott Wood is many things. He’s a sweet-shooting three-point sniper for an increasingly potent Wolfpack attack. He’s a gifted marriage counselor who truly understands the pain of the human condition. He’s the Atlantic Coast Conference’s current leader in offensive efficiency rating as well as true shooting percentage. It’s also been some time since he missed a free throw. Specifically, it’s been a year and a day since he last missed a free throw in a game. Last weekend he broke J.J. Redick‘s ACC record for most consecutive free throws (Redick made 54 straight), and Wood hasn’t displayed any interest in missing anytime soon. As of last night, Wood stands at 63 consecutive makes, including a few clutch shots as Boston College desperately tried to extend the game by fouling the one guy in college basketball who you just shouldn’t foul. In any case, Wood is now only 22 makes away from tying the all-time Division I record of 85 consecutive makes, set by Butler‘s Darnell Archey.  That seems challenging, if doable.

The Man Who Couldn't Miss (US Presswire)

My favorite detail of Wood’s rise to free-throw shooting genius comes from Robbi Pickeral’s profile of the shooter. No, not the part about how low tops are the key to his success (though that, in all fairness, is pretty funny). The best part comes from a simple declarative sentence, paraphrasing Wood’s appraisal of his chances at breaking the all-time college record:

Wood said he once made 214 foul shots in a row, in a gym with his uncle when he was 12.

I’m not sure quite what it is about this that makes it so funny: The highly specific and precise memory of middle-school free-throw shooting glory witnessed by his extended family or something I ate for lunch, but now, I can easily say that I hope he smashes the national record for the glory of the conference. Luck be with you, Scott Wood. May your ankles move freely and your future wife never cheat on you.

Wednesday night was a night of valiant efforts, but no surprises. Despite the underdogs’ collective success at keeping games close, Goliath withstood David’s slings and the ACC standings are starting to finally look understandable. Without Glen Rice Jr., Georgia Tech was no match for the still-hot Florida State Seminoles who put the Yellow Jackets in the rear view with a dynamic closing stretch. Boston College, formerly a high-octane scoring attack, tried a more traditional underdog approach with a hideous burn offense that slowed the game with North Carolina State to a crawl. Despite some notable efforts to try to give away the game in the second half, Boston College still faltered in its end-game execution and Mark Gottfried and his crew walked away with the win.

Turgeon Got Run, But Maryland Proved It Has Some Fight

The real excitement of the night was in the Maryland at Miami game. While it looked like it was going to be a by-the-numbers blow out, Maryland coach Mark Turgeon took exception to a referee call late in the second half, kept arguing, and finally got ejected. The Terrapins, rallying behind the guy who stood up for them, suddenly started playing some inspired ball. That combined with the absence of any true post players for Miami (Kenny Kadji was injured while both Reggie Johnson and Raphael Akpejiori fouled out) resulted in a remarkable turnaround that turned a double-digit deficit into a double-overtime thriller. It wasn’t the prettiest game, and before all was said and done, Durand Scott, Sean Mosley, and Nick Faust also fouled out of the game. Scott’s 24 points, eight rebounds, and seven assists would prove to be the deciding line of the night. Though Terrell Stoglin scored an impressive 33 points, he did so only after taking an I-still-can’t-believe-it 20 three-point shots. Though Maryland lost, Stoglin’s will, and the key defensive play of Alex Len means that the Terrapins leave Coral Gables feeling that their team is tough enough to hang in the big games and that their coach believes in them.

The Only Game In Town

• Duke at Virginia Tech at 7:00 PM on ESPN