The influx has played havoc with regular season scheduling, due to having to accommodate so many teams. So, apparently, is his team. You just wouldn’t have known it Friday. To make somebody say we have the easy schedule?
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With a 64-48 lead and just 11:08 remaining, it seemed like Coach K and the Blue Devils would cruise into a semifinal matchup with North Carolina on Friday night.
He paused, shook his head and said, “That’s a bunch of” garbage. The Tar Heels led the Fighting Irish by 15 points earlier this season, only to lose, and UNC led by 11 a year ago in the ACC tournament championship game, only to lose.
He smiled and added.
Top-seeded North Carolina (26-6) has floated around the top 10 in the national rankings all season and ultimately outlasted the rest of the league’s powers for its 30th regular-season title.
The Panthers take on the Tar Heels in another noon ACC Tournament game today. The ongoing NCAA investigation into the 18-year academic scandal, as chronicled by a UNC-sanctioned investigation, still hangs over Chapel Hill.
After that one Paige, who has spent a large portion of the season mired in an uncharacteristic shooting slump, appeared to yell, “I’m back”, on his way back down the court. It wasn’t just their offensive play that helped lead them back, it was defense and stellar rebounding- 22 of those rebounds came via Zach Auguste.
Another win means another day in Washington, for the Virginia men’s basketball team and their fans.
The UNC run started after Notre Dame’s Bonzie Colson scored on back-to-back buckets, the last with 6:06 left to pull the Irish to within 23-22. He finished with a team-high 16 points. “And I really don’t want to think about it”.
Pitt (21-11) tied it at 45 with 15:52 left, but then the Tar Heels got rolling.
“He hasn’t been able to throw it in the ocean”, Williams said.
He also keyed the defense.
Paige played at that level all night against Notre Dame, particularly in the first half, when he drained three 3-pointers and scored 11 points.
Pitt’s players talked about the loss in the almost identical terms. Johnson, at 6-feet-10 and 230 pounds, is the smallest of the four. But again, I think Carolina gets a lot of credit. Offensively, the Tar Heels could do no wrong.
Berry had 13 first-half points, hitting all six of his shots from the field. The margin Thursday was 30-25, but Pitt was the second-best rebounding team in the ACC.
“They’d beaten us the last three times we played them”, Marcus Paige said. There’s little doubt who pointed that statistic out to the players.
Notre Dame coach Mike Brey.
“I was really proud of him”, Pinson said.
Of course Smith never would have responded to the scheduling question the way Williams did.
It’s exactly the kind of play they’ve needed from him all season but haven’t always gotten, which is why they have been good all season, and potentially scary, but not always fulfilling that potential.
If Missouri or Texas A and M chose to jump off a bridge, that was no reason for us to do the same, which I wish others such as the Atlantic Coast Conference would have said to nip this thing in the bud. But they’re working hard and getting better.
Although life today does present its challenges with ever-changing technology, etc., people arguably live much better and longer lives than yesteryear; for example, in 1900 when the life expectancy at birth for an American male was only 46.3 years. The media knows that.
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One thing about Ol’ Roy: There’s never any doubt about what’s on his mind. More importantly, so do his players.
