Barry Jacobs
Popular columnist Barry Jacobs has covered the ACC since the 1970s, sharing his observations in books, magazines, newspapers and on WralSPORTSfan.com since March of 2007.
By Barry Jacobs
Apr 26, 2009
The long-expected decision by Duke’s Gerald Henderson to probably turn pro came just short of an April 26 deadline to declare his intentions regarding the NBA draft. Now he and dozens of other collegians have until June 15, 10 days prior to the draft, to test the waters, as the saying goes, and see if they sink or swim in the currents of basketball commerce.
This process can prove sobering rather than affirming, as UNC’s Wayne Ellington and Danny Green discovered last year and Virginia’s Sean Singletary and Clemson’s James Mays found the year before. As celebrated investor Warren Buffett once noted, “only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.”
These metaphorical spring swims aren’t much fun for college programs either. Next year the player tryout period will be much shorter, thanks to an NCAA initiative that originated with the ACC, whose coaches disdain the present arrangement. “We deal with such uncertainty as to who our teams are going to be from year to year,” lamented Dino Gaudio, Wake Forest’s coach.
Sure enough, since the 2009 season ended the majority of ACC squads came a step closer to prematurely losing one of their premier players, departures that could shape the league race in 2009-10 and beyond. From Duke to Georgia Tech, Maryland to Miami to Wake Forest, key contributors are exploring their pro options while remaining within arm’s
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By Barry Jacobs
Apr 15, 2009
Lee Fowler, the administrators he consulted at N.C. State, and the enabling business-as-usual types in the media got it wrong, wrong, wrong. There was only one conscionable way to show appropriate respect for the contributions made by Kay Yow, who put 34 years of her soul and very big heart into building and sustaining the Wolfpack women’s basketball program and those who participated in it.
N.C. State went in a different direction.
The obvious choice was to elevate Stephanie Glance, Yow’s longtime assistant, as her coaching successor. Glance worked alongside the much-lauded Yow through the Hall of Famer’s final battles on and off the court. Then she led a group of traumatized youngsters in the aftermath of their coach’s Jan. 24 death due to breast cancer.
There can be little doubt Glance earned an opportunity to carry on Yow’s work, or that the deceased coach, her players and family wanted her to get the job. "I just felt like, if she wanted to hire somebody as a head coach, that should have been done," Ronnie Yow, Kay’s brother, told Ken Medlin of WRAL.
Instead, Kellie Harper was hired away from Western Carolina to replace Yow. She comes to Raleigh with a handsome coaching resume and an even more impressive pedigree as a product of Pat Summitt’s Tennessee program. But, through no fault of her own, Harper’s arrival marks less a new beginning than a bitter ending, the betrayal
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By Barry Jacobs
Apr 8, 2009
Researchers in New York have isolated a chemical that can erase memories in rats. This may be developed into a drug that would allow humans to dispel specific memories. One can easily imagine a future in which Maryland’s Gary Williams administers a drug to Greivis Vasquez that would shortcircuit the guard's recall of his next opponent, thereby avoiding provocative comments like claiming "ownership" of Cameron Indoor Stadium prior to visiting Duke, or dissing Conference USA before facing Memphis in the NCAAs.
Here and now Williams surely remembers, and will remind others, that his Terps were the only team to defeat both participants in the 2009 national championship game, North Carolina and Michigan State. For the rest of us, that is merely a curious quirk, a sidelight to a season that ended with a grand flourish for the ACC’s fourth NCAA champion in nine years.
Oh, sure, not everyone is happy to see North Carolina win another national title. You don’t have to be a Duke or N.C. State fan, or disgusted by corporate bailouts and CEO’s golden parachutes, to be tired of watching the rich get richer.
Miami’s Frank Haith, who grew up in this state, surely wasn’t alone in his reaction when media members ripped ACC coaches collectively (excepting those with NCAA titles to their credit) following a poor performance in the ’09 NCAAs. “Make sure you tell those writers in North Carolina,”
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By Barry Jacobs
Apr 5, 2009
In easily defeating Villanova, a team that dribbled too much and shot too poorly, Roy Williams’ latest spring ensemble continued its attention-grabbing strut on the runway to basketball immortality.
This is the third straight season the Tar Heels’ stylish group of juniors and seniors won at least one more NCAA game than in the previous year. Now they stand poised to banish the disappointment of their undisciplined burnout against Georgetown in the 2007 regional finals and the embarrassment of their too-casual pratfall against Kansas in the 2008 Final Four. Now they can lay claim to the sweetness that comes only after tasting bitter defeat, in the process elevating their program, their league, and themselves to the heights of fashionable success.
“If we play well this weekend, get a chance to win two games, people are going to remember this team,” senior Bobby Frasor said on the eve of UNC’s departure for Detroit’s Ford Field and the Final Four. “It’s going to be the ’09 national championship team. It’s not just going to be the ’09 Final Four team or the ’09 ACC (regular-season) championship team. The players on this team will then be etched in Carolina history forever because they won a national championship.”
NCAA titles were won four times previously at Chapel Hill, but never within a decade of one another. The current upperclassmen have seen, and coveted, the special
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By Barry Jacobs
Apr 1, 2009
Coach Williams cuts down the net after the NCAA Elite Eight game at the FedExForum in Memphis, TN, Sunday March 29, 2009. Heels beat Sooners 72 to 60 to move on to the Final Four in Detroit.
Photo by Todd Melet
Thanks to Roy Williams and his Tar Heels, while the ACC suffered another collective meltdown in NCAA competition, it did not lose its Final Four mojo.
UNC is the only ACC team to reach the Final Four in the past five seasons, single-handedly extending the conference’s record as the most persistent participant in the NCAA semifinals. The ACC has now placed 20 teams in the Final Four since 1990. Sixteen of those squads came from North Carolina and next-door neighbor Duke, more than any entire conference. Except the ACC, of course.
Duke and UNC captured five national championships since 1990. The Blue Devils won in 1991, 1992, and 2001, and the Tar Heels in 1993 and 2005. That total matches the high for any league other than the ACC. Maryland won in 2002, giving the ACC six champions in the past 18 seasons.
The SEC has five modern titles -- two by Florida, two by Kentucky, and one by Arkansas -- but no team in the Final Four for the second consecutive year.
LEAGUELY SPEAKING
Final Four Appearances, Titles By League Since 1990
League Total 2000-09 1990-99 Titles
ACC
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By Barry Jacobs
Mar 28, 2009
Well, it was more than the coaches.
Several theories were quickly advanced to explain the fourth consecutive disappointing NCAA performance by ACC men’s teams. The most common argument, at least in these parts, held that the league suffers a lack of exceptional coaches beyond Mike Krzyzewski and the Williams boys, Gary and Roy.
"That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard," protested Frank Haith, Miami's head coach. "Look at the league’s record against other power conferences – we dominated.”
Haith meant during the regular season. Back in those happy days, folks in and beyond the ACC insisted, bolstered by considerable evidence, that it was on a par with the much-vaunted Big East. But the equality claim and, ironically, the coaching knock, lost steam after Krzyzewski’s Duke squad unraveled in the second half of its Sweet 16 meeting with Villanova the other night.
Duke’s ouster, coming on the heels of a 1-5 mark by five other ACC squads besides UNC, cast a further shadow on the conference’s lustrous and longstanding reputation for postseason strength.
Entering the regional finals, North Carolina was the sole ACC team in the mix. The Big East, the league the ACC had unapologetically decimated in an attempt to boost its own football fortunes, placed Connecticut, Louisville, Pittsburgh and Villanova in the Elite Eight.
Miami did beat Providence,
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By Barry Jacobs
Mar 22, 2009
Please spare us the whining about the unfairness of it all, about the ACC’s supposed tilt toward Duke and North Carolina in everything from officials’ calls to scheduling. And don’t dare repeat the tired complaint that the conference as a whole does not get the respect it deserves come NCAA tournament time.
If one thing was demonstrated the past few days in the first two rounds of the NCAAs, it’s that the ACC remains very much a two-team men’s basketball league, with everyone else nibbling at the periphery of power.
True, top-seed North Carolina and No. 2 Duke had a bit more trouble than expected downing Louisiana State and Texas, respectively, in the friendly confines of raucous Greensboro Coliseum. But the result was predictable -- the 13th consecutive year one or both of the ACC’s premier programs advanced at least to the Sweet 16.
Of 27 ACC teams that got that far since 1997, 17 came from either Duke or UNC or both. During those 13 seasons, the Tar Heels and Blue Devils combined to win 12 ACC tournaments and finished 11 times with at least a piece of first place in the league.
As for the rest of the ACC, Maryland’s first-round defeat of California was the only 2009 victory by any of the five entrants from beyond the US 15-501 corridor. Boston College, Clemson, Florida State, and Wake Forest all lost to lower seeds in their NCAA openers, making short work of the ACC and its much-boasted prowess.
That
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By Barry Jacobs
Mar 19, 2009
Bobby Frasor takes the ball to the hoop during the UNC vs. Radford round one game of the NCAA tournament in Greensboro, Thursday, March 19, 2009.
Photo by Todd Melet
Early on, when there was the slightest doubt regarding the outcome of its opening-round game against North Carolina, fans of 16-seed Radford University chanted the school’s initials at the urging of their cheerleaders. “RU! RU!” they shouted.
Meant as a declaration, the cheer sounded more like a question.
But what question? If, for instance, the interrogatory was, Are you capable of playing on a par with the top-seeded Tar Heels, the answer was an emphatic NO! NO!
The bigger, faster, deeper Tar Heels held a 19-point lead at halftime, then leveled the Highlanders in the second period en route to a 101-58 win. That was the largest margin of victory for a No. 1-seeded North Carolina squad against a No. 16 in 10 tries, exceeding last year’s 39-point dismemberment of Mount St. Mary’s.
Along the way, senior Tyler Hansbrough topped Duke’s J.J. Redick as the ACC’s career scoring leader on a pair of free throws at the 15:43 mark of the first half.
“I’m just glad he broke the record on a free throw,” said classmate, housemate, and off-court running mate Bobby Frasor. “That’s pretty fitting.”
If the are-you question was directed at the Tar Heels -- asking whether they were capable of winning handily without point guard Ty Lawson -- the answer was an emphatic YES! YES!
UNC, 29-4, cranked up the tempo to the suffocating pace more often
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By Barry Jacobs
Mar 15, 2009
Duke rose to the challenge.
The Blue Devils rose to a challenge posed to the ACC’s old guard by Florida State, a program that had never previously reached the championship game in the ACC Tournament. Duke’s 79-69 victory on Sunday afternoon at the Georgia Dome, the second time in two tries the Devils won the title in the prodigious building in downtown Atlanta, made it 12 times in 13 years that either Duke or North Carolina, the ACC's perennial powers, emerged atop the conference.
Duke rose to the challenge of trying to contain FSU senior Toney Douglas, whom Mike Krzyzewski called “as good a player as there is in the United States” and his favorite outside his own Blue Devil squad.
The Devils rose to the challenge when Florida State, favored to win by many in the media after ousting top-ranked North Carolina in the semifinals, closed to within 42-36 with 12:17 remaining in the title contest.
Duke seized control in the first half, hitting five 3-pointers in six possessions. “A basketball game is a game of streaks,” said Douglas, who scored 28 points despite the Devils’ assiduous attention. “They streaked.”
Meanwhile Duke’s defense forced FSU’s young big men out of their comfort zone, closed off access to the lane, and forced 21.7 percent shooting in the decisive first half. “Duke does a good job of bodying you up and pushing you off the block,”
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By Barry Jacobs
Mar 14, 2009
Danny Green was a center of attention in the North Carolina locker room, and not for the best of reasons. He had just missed the final, forced jumper in a scramble to stave off a rare Tar Heel defeat, culminating a personal shooting performance as painfully ineffective as could be imagined. “I couldn’t find the basket these past couple of days,” Green said flatly. “It was really rough for me. But the season’s not over.”
Talk about your lost weekends: For UNC’s two games in the ACC Tournament, the 6-6 wing made only 3 of 25 shots, one of 12 from 3-point range, the sort of feckless shooting that felled Wake Forest in the quarterfinals against Maryland. Yet, in the aftermath of UNC’s 73-70 loss to Florida State in the semifinals, ending a bid for a third straight conference championship for the Heels, Green patiently and thoughtfully answered every question thrown his way.
At times during the tense, closely-fought semifinal, as Green missed point-blank layups and wide-open jumpers, it seemed only a matter of time until the ordinarily clutch, 49 percent shooter would taste success. But that time never came. Eventually, of course, failure began to generate its own gravitational force.
“I just wasn’t looking for my shot as much as I usually do, I wasn’t as aggressive as I usually am,” Green admitted. “I was really trying to get everybody else involved, but if I was open
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