ACC Seeding

With Maryland beating Duke last night, BC locked up a first round bye in the ACC tourney next week. Maryland can tie BC if they beat UNC Saturday and GTech knocks off BC, but the Eagles have the head-to-head edge over the Terps because they beat Maryland in their only meeting.

This is pretty big for BC. The seeding from 1-4 is not that big a deal this year because the conference is so strong top to bottom that there's not much difference between playing Florida State, Duke, Maryland, and GTech in the second round, the likely opponents for the bye teams if seeding holds true. However, playing a tired team on back-to-back days is huuuuge. Just look at last year when BC got the bye and played Maryland, a team that beat BC in the regular season. What happened? The Eagles absolutely buried them, and BC was on their way to the ACC Semifinals.

The one thing that worries me heading into the GTech game is that suddenly, given the above, BC has nothing to play for, especially if the players are reading the press clippings that say they're a lock for the NCAA Tourney. That spells F-L-A-T, which could mean T-R-O-U-B-L-E. There is one scenario in which BC gets boxed out of the tourney, and that's if they get embarrassed by GTech on Saturday, and then again by Maryland or Duke in the 2nd round of the ACCs, and there are an inordinate number of upsets in conference tourneys by teams that otherwise wouldn't make March Madness.