Turtledroppings.com

The Road to the Final Four is littered with ACC corpses!  With Dukes loss to Villanova last night there now remains just one ACC school in post season play.  Tonight UNC takes on Gonzaga to move on to the Elite 8.  I often have a conflict about how to feel when ACC schools get knocked out of the tournament.  A part of me is sad because I truely want to feel as though we are the toughest conference in the country, but at the same time, these are the schools we are recruiting against, so any success they acheive makes it harder for us to pull players away from them. 

But for whatever reason, I don’t have any conflict when it comes to Duke, it’s just pure joy, conference pride be damned.  But we do have to admit this is an unsettling turn of events.  How many times are we going to get 7 teams from the conference into the dance, when 4 of those are gone before the final 32?  But then again, I shouldn’t worry about things I can’t control.

I guess the whole irony of the situation here is that right now there are 10 ACC schools that are not happy with how the 2008-2009 season panned out.  Of all the ACC schools in the dance only 1 could have lost round one and still been pleased with the result.  That team would be Maryland, and we won.  But Clemson, FSU, BC, and especially Wake Forest are all scratching their head wondering what the hell happened.  Add Duke to the list as well.  Sure they made it to the Sweet 16, but I don’t think they are happy being out at this point.  So that leaves Carolina.  Where could their season end with some degree of success?  I would say the Final Four, but that is still two wins away.

So when it all comes down to it, here is Maryland, a team that wasn’t supposed to have a shot, again some predicted us to finish 11th, yet when the smoke of March Madness clears there are only potentially two teams in the ACC who will look back at 2008-09 with fond memories.  And one of those teams still has two more wins to get there.  Who would have seen this back in February?

Extra Droppings:

Memphis loses to MIssouri and shoots 3-15 behind the 3 point line.  Really?  This is the same team that could have shot blind folded half court shots with nothing but net last Saturday (10-19 when all was said and done).  Don’t get me wrong it would have taken a lot for us to beat Memphis, but 3-15 shooting from behind the line certainly would have made it a lot more entertaining!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Maryland Terps Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.