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The Big Stage: Deacons have high expectations for tournament after stellar regular season
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Dino Gaudio says his WFU team is a confident group that played well down the stretch of the regular season.
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2009 NCAA TOURNAMENT
Published: March 19, 2009
Being invited to the NCAA Tournament didn't make Wake Forest's season.
But it did give the Deacons a chance to do just that.
The season ultimately will be judged by what the fourth-seeded Deacons do Friday night -- against No. 13 Cleveland State in the first round of the Midwest Regional in Miami -- and in any subsequent games they might play.
The success of the regular season eliminated any fall-back position, even for a program making its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2004-05.
The Deacons burned those bridges by bolting out of the gates with 16 straight victories, ascending briefly to the nation's No. 1 ranking and finishing the regular season 24-5 overall and 11-5 in the ACC.
Having whetted the appetites of their fans and supporters by beating North Carolina and Duke, by winning at Maryland, Boston College, Clemson and BYU and by going 6-1 against teams in the Top 50 of the ratings percentage index, the Deacons have left themselves two paths.
They either advance deep into the tournament or they join a long list of Wake Forest teams that have come up short on the biggest stage of all.
"I just think throughout the year we've done a terrific job this season," Coach Dino Gaudio said. "We were 6-1 against Top 50 teams. We were 3-1 against Top 10 teams. I don't know if anybody in the country was 6-1 against Top 50 teams. They've done a terrific job.
"We won six of our last seven (regular-season) games, though we did lose our opener in the conference tournament. I think it's a confident group. I think they're really excited to play."
The 75-64 loss to Maryland in last Friday's ACC Tournament quarterfinals was perplexing, not because of who beat the Deacons but because they looked nothing like the team that had played so well the previous three weeks.
They shot 30 percent from the floor, missed 22 of 25 3-point attempts and were no closer than eight points over the final 17 minutes.
James Johnson attributed the performance to stage fright. Jeff Teague's explanation included words such as scared and timid.
"I just think the shots we had against Maryland, we had some really good looks," Gaudio said several days later. "I don't know, but for whatever reason, we were a little bit tight.
"I mean we missed 52 shots. That's hard to do."
Gaudio expressed confidence that the momentum that the Deacons carried into the tournament was enough to override one bad performance, no matter how abysmal it was. He gave the Deacons the next two days off and said that it was a rejuvenated team that reassembled for the NCAA selection show Sunday night.
A victory over Cleveland State on Friday would lift the Deacons into Sunday's second round against either No. 5 Utah or No. 12 Arizona.
The regional also includes Louisville, the Big East champion, and Kansas, the defending national champion.
Gaudio said that the team asked to practice Sunday night after the show, but he vetoed the idea. But when he left campus about midnight after watching tapes of Cleveland State, he said he could see the lights on in the practice gym in the Miller Center.
"These kids fight," Gaudio said. "They're a bunch of fighters.
"We won six of seven, and our one loss is at (Duke) where we claw our way all the way back and we shoot 61 percent from the field over there, and we played really well on offense. We just had a really hard time guarding them over there for some reason.
"So I think we're playing really well, winning six of seven in this league."
A source of comfort could be that this team plays defense better than at least the last two Wake Forest teams that made the NCAA Tournament (in 2004 and 2005 under Skip Prosser).
Wake Forest led the ACC in field-goal percentage defense most of the season, its second since overhauling its system and installing a pack-line defense designed by Dick Bennett of Wisconsin.
On the other hand, no player on the roster has ever played in the NCAA Tournament. The performance last week in Atlanta raises the question -- if a team is tight in a first-round game of the ACC Tournament, even while knowing its spot in the NCAA Tournament was secure, how will it react under the pressure of winning or bagging up the basketballs for the season?
"I think the most important thing to help us immensely is having gone through the Atlantic Coast Conference, the 16 games," Gaudio said. "In that sense, we have pretty good experience.
"I just think if we do what we're supposed to do, which is guard and rebound -- we've done a terrific job of that all year -- and we play hard, then that's all we can do. I'm not smart enough to figure out whether we have more experience than Cleveland State or Cleveland State has more experience than we do. I was watching film on Cleveland State and saw they weren't in the NCAA Tournament since (1986). So none of their kids will have experience as well.
"So we've just got to go out and play, that's all."
■ Dan Collins can be reached at 727-7323 or at dcollins@wsjournal.com.
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