Expectationsby Jim Alderson, 3/23/05 It’s all a matter of perception and expectations. The Virginia Tech basketball season that ended its season last Saturday with a Beale Street blues-inspiring performance against Memphis is regarded as a success. Tech finished 16-14, a marginal improvement over last year’s 15-14 Big East swan song. This Tech team has been tabbed monumental overachievers.
Expectations were low. A bunch considered to have little ACC-quality talent, a lack of an inside presence and no depth was picked by ACC media to finish near the bottom of the ACC standings and was widely ridiculed as being one of the worst teams ever to play in the ACC. Things didn’t exactly work out that way. Tech scratched and clawed their way to an 8-8 regular season finish in their inaugural ACC season, good for fourth in the conference. The Hokies developed into a good defensive team, were an opportune crew on offense, often demonstrated a ferocious competitive streak and displayed a remarkable ability to win close games, especially at home. The high point of the season came when Tech became one of only four teams to beat Duke this season, so far at least, knocking off the ACC’s best overall program on a special night in Cassell. The Tech team slipped late in the season, playing their way out of an NCAA bid as other teams adjusted to what Tech was doing and began to match Tech’s intensity. Still, the unexpected ACC competitiveness was a pleasant surprise for a Tech program that had been moribund for a decade. Seth Greenberg was rightfully named the ACC’s Coach of the Year. By recent Tech basketball standards, the year was considered a success. Wake Forest came into this year with sky-high expectations. With most of the key elements back from last year’s solid team, the Deacons were a trendy pick to garner both conference and national honors. In his fourth year at Wake, Skip Prosser was judged to have built a powerhouse. Unlike Greenberg at Tech, Prosser had inherited a solid program from former Deacons coach Dave Odom. Unlike Greenberg, who is still struggling to find his recruiting traction, Prosser immediately developed a sound recruiting strategy that focused largely on in-state North Carolina kids overlooked by state and conference heavyweights Duke and North Carolina with their more national recruiting scope. The media proclaimed this to be the Year of the Deacon. Wake had a pretty darn good year, too, by most anybody’s standards. The Deacs finished 27-6, along the way laying a double-digit defeat on Carolina and briefly holding the top spot in the national polls. Things soured a bit for Wake at the end of the season, however. They made a quick exit from the ACC tournament, beaten by an NC State team that seems to be peaking at exactly the right time. Then an excellent Wake season crashed and burned in the second round of the NCAA Tournament as Wake suffered a near-total defensive meltdown during the second half of their game against a good but hardly great West Virginia team. The Wake team carrying so many high expectations failed to reach the heights predicted of them. North Carolina newspapers have been filled with stories and columns plaintively asking ‘What Went Wrong?’ with a 27-6 season. The Deacon variety of message board loons have been jostling each other all over cyber space to post the next screaming denunciation of Prosser, comments ranging from ‘He’s a loser’ to emphatic opinions that the fourth-year coach will ‘never get it done at Wake’ to open speculation as to the identity of the next coach after Prosser is fired for only winning 27 games and committing the unpardonable sin of losing in the NCAA’s second round. By expectations standards, Tech’s 16-14 season was an unqualified success while Wake’s 27-6 a dismal failure. Go figure. Georgia Tech also faced enormous expectations this year. The Yellow Jackets caught fire last season at exactly the right time, ripping their way through the NCAA field, making it all the way to the championship game. With most everybody back, including a dynamic three-headed guard rotation, reasonable expectations around North Street were that GT was primed to capture the entire NCAA kit and caboodle this time around. That is not how things turned out. The Jackets were plagued throughout the year by injury problems, an inability to ever completely re-capture the magic that led to the exciting '04 tournament run, and a tendency by coach Paul Hewitt to spend less time dealing with his team and more braying that the entire ACC organizational structure from the officials on up were out to get him. Georgia Tech finished 20-12, a season that included a pasting of our Tech in the ACC Tournament and a tough loss to Duke in the finals but ended two games later with a bad loss to Louisville in the NCAA’s. 20-12 is hardly a bad year, but to hear media types and the Yellow Jacket variety of message board loon tell it, the bottom practically fell out of the GT program. The Georgia Tech year definitely did not meet expectations.
The Terps were shunted off to the NIT which, while a terrific reward for a team with the low pre-season expectations of Virginia Tech, was a bitter disappointment for Maryland. If Gary Williams had nothing better to do than spend his time reading message boards, he would find posts claiming that the coach of the '02 national champions and '04 ACC champions was ‘over the hill’ and the game had ‘passed him by.’ Expectations will get you every time. At Duke expectations are always high, because Coach K, more than any media type or fan, demands it. This was hardly a vintage Duke team. It had been beset by a player, Luol Deng, leaving early for the NBA and another, Shaun Livingston, not even bothering to spend a year in Cameron before turning pro. A couple of transfers the last two years from players unwilling to sit on the Duke bench and wait their turn thinned things down even more. Coach K was then during the season faced with a multitude of illness and injury problems that often left him with only 5-6 blue chip recruits with which to do battle. While expectations are never low at Duke they had been moderated somewhat with the pundits projecting the Blue Devils a middle of the pack ACC team. The results were the same as usual for Duke, however, as Coach K got another ACC championship out of his team, the sixth in the last seven years. At this writing, Duke is 27-5 and still alive in the NCAA tournament. When longtime friends Coach K and Seth get together over the summer they can congratulate each other for having turned in the conference’s best two coaching performances. They also did the best jobs of managing expectations, Seth at a place where there were none and Coach K where they are always through the Cameron roof.
Seth Greenberg often speaks of building something substantial in basketball
at Tech as a process. Indeed it is. Seth has done a terrific job in laying the
groundwork. Crowds packed Cassell this year for the first time in ages to watch
a gritty basketball team that exceeded the sum of its parts. They were a fun
bunch to watch and gave notice that maybe basketball would again matter at the
football-centric Virginia Tech. One of the building blocks and indications that
he has started something here will be quickly in evidence next year: Seth will
have to deal with increased expectations.
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