In the end it was a dominant win by Maryland. Jeff Bzdelik pulled his starters at the under-four media timeout (to be fair, Nikita Mescheriakov and Tony Chennault had already fouled out by that point).

• Starting with Wake Forest, this game didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. The Demon Deacons played Maryland tough the first 15 minutes and fell apart. After leading 26-21, Maryland went on a 35-9 run including the beginning of the second half. The biggest issue all afternoon for Jeff Bzdelik’s squad was production from players not named Mescheriakov, CJ Harris and Travis McKie. Those three scored 52 of Wake Forest’s 60 points (it would’ve been more had Bzdelik left them in to the bitter end). Chennault and Carson Desrosiers combined to go 1-13 from the field. That won’t cut it coming from starters. Period.
• On Maryland’s end, it’s really tough to judge how impressive the Terrapins were against Wake Forest. There’s no argument that they didn’t dominate the game, but Wake Forest also lost all of its will to win after giving up its five-point lead in dramatic fashion down the stretch in the first half. The best news from Mark Turgeon’s standpoint is that he got to rest his thin line-up for much of the second half, which will keep the teams’ collective legs fresh for a game tomorrow against North Carolina.
• In contrast to Wake Forest’s starters, Maryland’s combined to go 25-43 from the field (58%) thanks to one of Nick Faust‘s best games of the year (19 points on ten shots) and a very strong game from James Padgett (5-6 from the field). This Maryland team could make North Carolina work tomorrow if Faust and Padgett can combine for more points than Terrell Stoglin.

1. North Carolina (27-4, 14-2) – It’s funny how the difference between a successful season can come down to one game. Had North Carolina lost to Duke at Cameron, people would’ve pointed to the Tar Heels’ lofty preseason expectations and how they came up short. Instead, Roy Williams’ squad finally showed the world just why it was ranked so high early in the season. Kendall Marshall hit shots, the defense clicked and the game felt over by the first media timeout. Now the Tar Heels have the inside track for a one-seed, owning the head-to-head victory with Michigan State that will definitely come in handy. There are still legitimate questions about North Carolina’s intensity, but if that intensity is in the ballpark of Saturday night opponents should be scared. Don’t pencil the Tar Heels into the Final Four before seeing the ACC Tournament. This team’s worst enemy until the final weekend will be itself. One person in particular to keep you eye on is Marshall. He was snubbed from first-team All-ACC (he missed by two votes), so I expect him to come out aggressively Friday. He’s also shows recent offensive improvement, coming up with two of his best performances of the year in rivalry games against NC State and Duke. When he’s taking and hitting open looks, the Tar Heels are impossible to guard.
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1. Winston-Salem Journal: Friday it was confirmed that senior Ty Walker was kicked off Wake Forest’s team for “an unspecified violation of athletics-department rules.” Looking at Walker’s career as a whole, the dismissal isn’t surprising in the least. But it did feel like he turned a page on the court after coming back from a suspension last semester. His mom even flew across the country for his senior night. That’s how I lost the forest through the trees. I’m not going to rip Walker for lack of effort; nor am I going to rip Jeff Bzdelik for the punishment. In the end, it seems like a sad but fitting end to the former five-star recruit’s career.
2. Blogger So Dear: Speaking of Wake Forest, this is an honest take on the school’s basketball program, assessing blame where it’s due. I would be a little harsher on Bzdelik for the last couple of years, but I also think he deserves next year to show what he can do with no offcourt distractions and a couple of recruiting classes he brought in himself.
3. Atlanta Journal Constitution: The ACC Tournament is back in Atlanta for the sixth time this year. But as Tim Tucker points out, it’s probably going to be more difficult for Atlanta to attract the conference tournament after Pittsburgh and Syracuse deepen the ACC’s footprint in the north. Personally, I’m very happy the conference decided on Philips Arena, which seats just under 20,000 people, instead of the Georgia Dome (where the tournament was supposed to be originally), which has a full capacity of over 70,000 (though that was significantly reduced the two times the ACC Tournament took place there). The bottom line is that this year is Atlanta’s chance to sell the conference on the Philips Arena experience in order to compete with Madison Square Garden or the Verizon Center down the road.
4. Fox Sports Florida: The ACC desperately needs Miami and/or NC State to step up this weekend. The conference is looking squarely at four NCAA bids if the Hurricanes and Wolfpack meet early exits. If not for a season sweep of Miami, Mark Gottfried’s squad would be in some serious trouble (and Miami would probably be in a much stronger position for an at-large bid). But the fact is that both teams have very weak resumes and need a good win to push the ACC to five bids.
5. Burlington Times-News: I’m officially tired of these articles bemoaning the lost days of a great ACC. The facts are simple: The ACC is down right now, and most of the dip is due to a coincidence that left eight of the 12 member schools looking for new coaches over the last couple of years. That’s it. Combine that with back-to-back titles from Tobacco Road and you have a recipe for the Duke – North Carolina rivalry overshadowing an under-performing league. It’s true that the hype for the rivalry always made other ACC fans cringe, but give the new coaches some time. As they build successful programs, ESPN will give more air time to other schools.

EXTRA: Here’s the ACC Tournament bracket. I think Miami and NC State have very good chances to win two games and Wake Forest has its best chance to win a game for the first time since 2007.

With the ACC Tournament quickly approaching with one game separating everyone from Atlanta. Right now that means there’s a real traffic jam of schools going for the fourth seed (Virginia, Miami, NC State and Clemson) and the ninth seed (Boston College, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech and Wake Forest). Below is a chart that hopefully makes sense of everything. A big shout-out to Patrick Stevans, who put together the scenarios.

Warning: it gets pretty complicated.

ACC Tournament Seeding Scenarios

The 2012 ACC Tournament seating chart was released today. School sections rotate every year, which is why North Carolina finds itself in the end zone and Duke sits at nearly center court. One unfortunate side effect is that Georgia Tech, which plays many of its home games at Philips Arena, is stuck in the opposite end zone. I know the Yellow Jackets aren’t going to make up the majority of fans, but still.

The 2012 ACC Tournament Seating Chart

Another thing you might notice is the sections don’t appear to be the same size. Namely, Miami and Boston College have basically no seats. Combined Miami and Virginia Tech barely match Florida State‘s section, which should be the exact same seat-wise. The Eagles get what looks like about the equivalent of one third of the Duke section. That said, I will be shocked if Boston College or Miami comes anywhere close to filling their respective sections.

The ACC Tournament starts in two weeks. I’m already excited.

Whether you are against ACC expansion or a fervent proponent of a wildly dominant Atlantic Coast Mega-Conference, there is one thing that we can agree on: Fourteen is a really awkward number.  Mike Krzyzewski, supposedly one of the driving forces behind expansion, spent a good deal of Duke’s media day explaining the problem with fourteen team conferences. Citing a distaste for pods, he discussed a two-division based strategy for scheduling that, while reasonable, would yield a nineteen-game conference schedule and an uneven number of home and away games. While Krzyzewski kind of brushes it off, this is the kind of schedule imbalance that can end up deciding which team wins the ACC regular season title. In Krzyzewski’s mind, however, the problem with his plan just bolsters the case for a sixteen-team league.

Coach K Isn't Shy to Voice His Opinion

Of course, the problems don’t stop with the regular season conference schedule: Fourteen teams would significantly complicate the ACC Tournament. Craig Littlepage, the athletic director at Virginia, has broken down a number of possibilities for the conference tournament, none that really seem particularly appealing. His concerns seem legitimate in that it’s hard to make a fair bracket with fourteen teams. Unless the conference were to resort to some form of multi-round byes, we’re looking at an extra day of competition or morning games. Considering the fact that Thursday is a pretty sparsely attended part of the conference tournament, adding  Wednesday games might be stretching things out far too much. When the Big East had fourteen teams, the conference solved the problem by simply excluding the last two teams. This approach seems like it would be despised in the ACC, but it’s hard to see many other effective approaches. Obviously, there could be an elegant solution to the fourteen-team problem, but at the moment, no one can seem to put their finger on it.

The expansion of the Atlantic Coast Conference seemed to reach a point of stability in the last few weeks, despite the uproar over Boston College’s role in denying Connecticut’s admittance. It seems, however, that true stability on the basketball side might be impossible with fourteen teams. Fourteen is an awkward, challenging number. With all of the accompanying challenges, complications, and troubles, it’s easy to see that sixteen is a more appealing configuration. Things may not be as stable and set as they seem.

RTC is pleased to announce that we’ll be covering all of the major conference tournaments this year — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10, and SEC — in addition to the strongest two high-middies, the Atlantic 10 and the Mountain West.  Each day for the rest of this week, we’re asking our correspondents to provide us with a Daily Diary of the sights and sounds from the arena at each site.  Equal parts game analysis and opinion, the hope is that this will go beyond the tiresome game recaps you can find elsewhere and give you an insightful look into Championship Week.  Yesterday’s coverage:  ACC, Atlantic 10, Big Ten & SEC.

ACC Tournament – by Kellen Carpenter

• Early in the game, during a media timeout, one of the North Carolina cheerleaders lost her balance and fell down on the male cheerleader who was trying to hold her up. She ended up busting either his nose or lip and proceeded to bleed all over himself, the fallen cheerleader and the court. It took some extended minutes for the glove-wearing bio-hazard team to find and clean up all the blood. It was that kind of day for the North Carolina team and fans.
• There was buzz more than an hour before tip-off and it grew steadily from there. The crowd was full of North Carolina partisans, but Duke has had the second most fans here all week. The stands were filled and the crowd cheered frequently and often. While the crowd was excitable and loud, the game lacked the rancor of the two previous Duke games. My favorite part about the crowd, however, were the proud representatives of the teams who had already fallen. Clemson sweatshirts and Virginia Tech hats abounded amongst the faction of spectators who often refused to cheer for either team.
• Nolan Smith may not have had the gaudy offensive performances of Kemba Walker or Jimmer Fredette this week, but his performance on the offensive end has been spectacular and his performance on the defensive end has won the Blue Devils games. Just as Smith disrupted Virginia Tech’s offense by neutralizing Malcolm Delaney, Smith made the Tar Heel offense grind to a halt with his aggressive defense on Kendall Marshall.
• In the past two games, Marshall was slowed down and rendered ineffective as teams have discovered the key to stopping him. Marshall is slow and needs space to make passes or drives. Aggressive, close defense on Marshall prevented him from scoring and making plays. Smith came out on Marshall as soon as he got across the half court line and challenged Marshall to try to get past him or pass with heavy pressure. It worked. Marshall had five turnovers to only five assists. He went 3 of 10 from the field. Marshall’s ability to make plays has been the driving force behind this Tar Heel team. Stopping Marshall is the key to stopping North Carolina, and unfortunately for the Heels, it’s now painfully clear how this can be accomplished.
• The Comeback Kids couldn’t find one more miracle. After the game, Roy Williams said he didn’t understand why UNC had continually fell behind early in their tournament games. I’m not sure either, but I have some guesses. Roy’s insistence on getting early touches for the big men makes UNC’s offense incredibly predictable at the beginning of games. By refusing to shoot threes early in the game, Roy has made it easy to clog the paint and focus in on UNC’s focus.
• Ryan Kelly, despite looking like a very tall version of Neville Longbottom, has actually settled into a nice impersonation of Manu Ginobili as a big man, or maybe Andrei Kirilenko when he came off the bench. In the sixth man role, Kelly played the fourth most minutes for Duke tonight and had a very impressive all-around game. In addition to nine points and three rebounds, he contributed three blocks and three steals on defense and served as a more reliable scoring threat than either of the Plumlees. This new role suits Kelly, and Coach K said he believes that Kelly has played the best basketball of his life in these past three days. In any case, it’s one more nasty surprise Duke has in store for it’s opponents in the NCAA Tournament.
• Watching Duke play it was almost inconceivable to me that a Duke team that so effortlessly ran the table in the conference tournament and only had four losses, none of them bad over the course of the season, might not be a number one seed. They are playing some of the best basketball in the nation this past week, as they have all season.  I understand that many teams have a better collection of “best wins,” but Duke is a seriously dangerous team that has gotten better over the course of the season.
• The last thing that really stood out throughout the course of the tournament was how much Greensboro, as a city, seemed genuinely excited to host. The way that every single business I saw had some sign or deal for ACC fans, the fact that the ACC Hall of Champions stands right next to the Greensboro Coliseum, and just the general excitement about town paints a picture of a place that really, really cares about hosting conference tournaments. It seemed like these were most important days of the year for Greensboro, and that’s a real credit to an otherwise small and sleepy city in North Carolina.

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Game #217.  These two teams have played once or twice before, right?  RTC Live will experience its first such battle.

Isn’t this the matchup that everyone really wanted deep down? Carolina and Duke, bitterest rivals, settling their split series in the conference finals. The Coliseum is going to be packed and it is going to be loud. Duke, despite the thumping they took in Chapel Hill, is still the better team on paper. Despite Jimmer and Kemba’s masterwork performances, Nolan Smith isn’t done making his case as the best player in college basketball. Yet a surging and emergent Harrison Barnes spell trouble for this Duke team. Carolina is playing like they believe they can’t lose and, given the finishes in their other tournament games, who can blame them? Singler may be the deciding factor. Duke doesn’t need a great game from him to win games, as they showed today against Virginia Tech, but it sure helps. Singler has struggled against the defense of Barnes and John Henson, both possessing the speed and length to match up effectively. Carolina has established itself as the better team on defense, but Duke is no slouch on defense and throughout this season, their offense has been consistently better. Duke wants to prove that they deserve a number one seed, and North Carolina wants to go from being a “dark horse” Final Four pick to an acknowledged member of this year’s most elite teams. Of course this is Duke and Carolina: There may be other stakes, but this games is about pride. For the rest of us, it’s one last scintillating spectacle before the Big Dance starts.

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RTC is pleased to announce that we’ll be covering all of the major conference tournaments this year — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10, and SEC — in addition to the strongest two high-middies, the Atlantic 10 and the Mountain West.  Each day for the rest of this week, we’re asking our correspondents to provide us with a Daily Diary of the sights and sounds from the arena at each site.  Equal parts game analysis and opinion, the hope is that this will go beyond the tiresome game recaps you can find elsewhere and give you an insightful look into Championship Week.  Yesterday’s coverage:  ACC, Atlantic 10, Big East (pending), Big 12, Big Ten, Mountain West,  Pac-10 & SEC.

ACC Tournament – by Kellen Carpenter

• Despite a collective freak-out Nolan Smith is obviously fine. He torched Virginia Tech en route to a 27-point performance. He played 39 minutes and didn’t limp. After the game he said that he had woken up and felt pretty good, was given a shot for the pain and that was that. Smith also basically admitted that there was no injury that was going to stop him from playing the last, precious few games of his college career. Bold words.
• There were other bold words that came from a raucous Coliseum crowd. An insistent six year-old Duke fan had one message and one message alone for Virginia Tech’s star whenever he went to the free throw line: “Delaney! Give me your money! Give me your money!” A Hokies fan, noting that an inordinate amount of time seemed to be taken up wiping the floor, was adamant in his commands to the Plumlee frontcourt: “Stop peeing on the floor, Plumlee!” This apparently applied to both. The winner of the impromptu ACC semifinals heckling contest, however, was an older Clemson fan. For some reason that I do not know, this fan spent the entire game heckling. He didn’t heckle the Tar Heels and he didn’t heckle the referees as a group, but rather singled out referee Les Jones. For forty solid minutes, he yelled at “Leslie” about every single thing. It was weird and oddly masterful. Kudos to you, demented stranger.
• The Tar Heels sent out a mixed message. Dexter Strickland joked on Twitter this afternoon that they were calling his team “The Comeback Kids,” after UNC turned yet another double digit deficit into an overtime win. Kendall Marshall, who played forty minutes, simplyannounced, “I’m tired.” Harrison Barnes didn’t tweet anything, because he is too cool for Twitter.
• Harrison Barnes, in the best individual performance of the tournament, hung 40 points on the Tigers. That’s impressive enough, but the really impressive part is how he did it. He scored his 40 on a mere 17 shots. He made 6 of 8 three-pointers and 10 of 11 free throws. He had 8 rebounds, four of which were offensive boards. When you play like that, you are, factually, too cool for Twitter. Carolina fans will lift a drink to play that speaks for itself.
• After both games were finished, the buzz around the Coliseum was palpable. It’s been ten years since Duke and North Carolina have met in the ACC finals, and the town, as a whole, seems legitimately excited about it. A rubber match to the split series is something that everyone involved with both teams’ desires. With a number one seed potentially at stake, and a not insignificant amount of pride, both seem poised to deliver a memorable showdown. Given North Carolina’s apparent propensity for dramatic tournament finishes, the chances of a great game happening seem awfully high.
• While the rivals exult, Virginia Tech and Clemson fret. Both improved their NCAA stock, but neither was able to seal their destiny with a signature win. There is a degree of optimism for both teams and Seth Greenberg joked that he wasn’t going to sleep because he was so excited about the Hokies chances. A solemn Malcolm Delaney just shook his head and firmly disagreed: After all that had happened over his four years at Virginia Tech, he going to expect the worst and wasn’t going to believe it until he heard it himself. While I’m hopeful for Virginia Tech’s chances, I’m with tough and wise Delaney on this one. That said, I wish him the best. That kid is too tough and too good to never make it to the Big Dance.

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***** – quit your job and divorce your wife if that’s what it takes to watch this game live
**** – best watched live, but if you must, tivo and watch it tonight as soon as you get home
*** – set your tivo but make sure you watch it later
** – set your tivo but we’ll forgive you if it stays in the queue until 2013
* – don’t waste bandwidth (yours or the tivo’s) of any kind on this game

Brian Otskey is an RTC contributor.

We finally made it. It’s Selection Sunday and one of the best Championship Weeks ever played concludes today. I’d like to thank any reader out there who has read even just one of these daily features this season. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe even learned something you didn’t know about a team(s) from following Set Your Tivo. All rankings from RTC and all times Eastern.

ACC Championship (at Greensboro, NC): #5 Duke vs. #6 North Carolina – 1 pm on ESPN (*****)

Barnes and the Heels Could Snag a 1-Seed Later Today With a Win

The greatest rivalry in college basketball for the third time this year on the last day of the season? Sign me up. In an ACC year full of mediocrity, the two top dogs stepped up and have successfully found their way to the title game today. As you know, these teams split the regular season series with each winning on their home floor. The rubber match will be in Greensboro today, about an hour west of each campus and right in the heart of Tobacco Road.

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