Greensboro gets an out-of-state title game, but it will produce a deserving ACC champion
The old sardonic joke about whether they’ll bother to keep playing the ACC tournament once Duke and North Carolina go home — usually a gripe from some other team that feels aggrieved about the officiating, not always without justification — hasn’t often actually come to fruition, especially not in Greensboro.
It feels especially precise in this particular tournament, with Florida State and Georgia Tech scheduled to battle Saturday for the title after each playing a single game in Greensboro. With first Duke and then Virginia dropping out of the tournament because of positive COVID tests, it’s bitterly clear that finishing the tournament is far from guaranteed.
Still, despite their abbreviated schedules here, there’s no question Saturday will produce a deserving champion. Florida State showed that in Saturday’s 69-66 win over North Carolina, a smothering defensive performance that left the Tar Heels no room to breathe when the game hung in the balance.
If Georgia Tech, with only a win over Miami to its credit in Greensboro so far, can handle the Seminoles’ size and strength and depth, then there’s nothing left to prove.
“There’s no doubt that they bring a lot of talent to the table,” Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton said. “They play a different brand of zone defense, and they are as good a solid man-to-man defensive team as we’ll face all year. We got our hat handed to us at their place, and we’ve got a tremendous amount of respect for them.”
It’s an appropriately unusual title game pairing to cap off this unusual season, only the second ever without a team from North Carolina after 1990’s Georgia Tech-Virginia final, the first ever in which neither team participated in the inaugural 1954 tournament. (Virginia was not among the original Sedgefield Seven, but signed up quickly enough.)
‘New blood’
Florida State fans exited the Coliseum chanting “New blood,” and with the ACC blue bloods gone there’s no argument there. Nine years after Hamilton won his first ACC title at Florida State, a year after his second was handed to him without playing a game, he’ll only have to win two games to get his third.
It may seem tempting to put an asterisk next to this title as well, but there’s no reason. There were a handful of ACC championships in the past decided with a pair of wins, when it was a much smaller league. It’s a bigger league now, but there’s never been a season like this. It’s fine.
Either way, a title would put Hamilton and Florida State into a higher altitude. Only the four North Carolina schools have won more than three, and they’ve had many more opportunities. Georgia Tech has a chance to join Wake Forest with its fourth.
North Carolina had another opportunity this week, to be sure. The Tar Heels were down 13 to the Seminoles in the first half — Roy Williams, at one point, watched an entire two-possession sequence with his hands on his head, a man perhaps not resigned to his fate, but feeling very much the prisoner of it — but as they did last week in Chapel Hill, fought back to take the lead midway through the second.
The Tar Heels took the lead with four minutes to go and didn’t score again until there were three seconds on the clock. Florida State’s defense was just too good. There was no space.
“We never got a good shot the whole time,” Williams lamented.
It probably wasn’t ideal the Tar Heels were playing their third game in three nights while Florida State was playing its first, but that’s partially the value in being seeded second instead of sixth and partially the luck of the positive-test draw. For the second straight year, the regular-season results played an outsized role in the tournament. For the second straight year, so did COVID.
To play or not to play
Roy Williams was asked, in the wake of Duke’s exit Thursday and Virginia’s exit Friday morning, whether he thought it wise to even play this game, given the short window of time to prepare for the NCAA tournament and its requirement of seven straight days of negative tests. He said he did discuss it with his staff, but at this point, why not plunge ahead?
“I’ve had a high level of concern all year long,” Williams said. “I said it last night or at some point, we should congratulate the young people how they’ve handled this. It’s been an unbelievable challenge. It’s been an unbelievable worry on every coaching staff and every medical staff.
“Every team in the country has asked these young people to act completely different than they would normally act in college. I just think our kids all around the country have done a great, great job. And I think Tony (Bennett) and Mike (Krzyzewski) would probably say the same thing about their teams. It’s very difficult times. Very difficult times is what it’s been all year.”
If the ACC can get through Saturday night, it will have played 12 of the 14 tournament games. That’s actually up a hair from its regular-season percentage.
“You never know what’s going to happen throughout these tough times,” Florida State’s Scottie Barnes said. “You’ve just got to be grateful for every game that you get to play.”
Time is running out, for some more quickly than others. North Carolina has a week to quarantine and prepare for the NCAA tournament. Georgia Tech and Florida State have a championship to decide.
This story was originally published March 13, 2021 at 12:21 AM with the headline "Greensboro gets an out-of-state title game, but it will produce a deserving ACC champion."
