Thursday Three-Pointer: Week VII

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- Wednesday night's game between Boston College and Louisville featured two teams more evenly aligned with each other in the ACC. Both teams had offenses and defenses averaging just under 70 points - scored or allowed - and both entered their head-to-head battle with decent shooting percentages. They shot nearly identically from the floor, from outside and from the free throw line, and their rebounding averages and margins aligned with one another's proclivities at the rim. Both dealt with turnovers, but both defenses could produce steals and blocks to protect the scoreboard when necessary.

The Eagles and Cardinals offered one of the most balanced matchups in the ACC, a real treat for basketball enthusiasts who wanted to see teams still establishing their identities in the mid-January conference portion of the year. They didn't see each other all that often, let alone at the KFC Yum! Center in Downtown Louisville, but the fifth road game of the 2021-22 schedule surely gave BC and head coach Earl Grant a litmus test opportunity for their straightforward basketball acumen.

And then the building blinked.

Okay, maybe it didn't blink, but it definitely leaked. A strong rain front blew through Louisville during the day, and as the teams finished their warmups, the ceiling of the KFC Yum! Center - a glittery, gargantuan building with room for more than 20,000 screaming Kentuckians...a crown jewel sitting on the Ohio River next to the Clark Memorial Bridge - sprung a leak directly over the baseline nearest the visitors bench.

An hour delay ensued before some HVAC ingenuity allowed BC and Louisville to tip off, but the hopes of the strong, well-played basketball game quickly diminished into a sloppy start. Neither team grabbed an advantage, but after it devolved into a gritty, defensive affair - something that should have been foreseen given the teams' profiles and the newly-introduced circumstances. Louisville defended its home court with a 67-54 win.

"It was weird," Grant said of the delay. "Tipoff was at 7 p.m., and an hour, 30 minutes before the game, guys went out and did their routine. We came back into the locker room, and 15 minutes before the game - right when I would talk to them for the last time before they go out - we were told the game was delayed. So we sat in the locker room for an hour before guys could go and shoot a little bit, and we didn't know the situation, if the game would be canceled or played. But we played the game, and I'm glad that we did. I just wish we could have played a little bit better, but it was different."

The general weird feeling capped a surreal week in which BC rallied past Clemson to regain mojo within the ACC standings. A loss in that game, which felt all but guaranteed when the Tigers opened up a 23-point lead in the first half, would have dropped the Eagles to the bottom of the ACC standings. Instead, the Eagles are instead scuffling with that lower-to-middle tier in the ACC, which will be explained a bit more in a little while. They're tied with Virginia Tech for 10th spot, but the two teams still retain plenty of opportunity to jump up into the group of teams good enough to secure a first round bye for the ACC Tournament in March.

That's all part of a different conversation, and it's always better to look back before we look ahead. So let's start there, with contextualizing the Clemson and Louisville games before we look ahead to what could happen in the coming days as BC continues to chug through its January schedule.

1) More from Clemson.
By itself, with no rooting interests, that Clemson game was classified as pure fun for college basketball fans. An underdog team went into a better team's home court, played about as bad as possible in the first six to seven minutes, and fell behind by 23 points. It rallied quickly and worked to make the halftime deficit manageable before continuing to push and press throughout the second half. Still never quite overcoming it, that underdog Eagles took their first lead of the entire ballgame with less than 30 seconds to play, thanks to the dagger 3-pointer from an oft-injured hometown kid who earned his Division I opportunities after a chance meeting of a then-assistant coach at Clemson at the school's basketball summer camp. At the end of the game, the wonderful sound of silence filled the home team's arena in disbelief.

Adding context turns it into a historic day for Boston College supporters in particular. It tied as the largest comeback in an ACC conference game in the league's history, joining the 23-point equivalent deficit Virginia overcame to beat Jeff Capel, Cherokee Parks and Duke in double overtime in 1995 and the 23-point rally by Duke at Louisville in 2019. It was the largest comeback in an ACC game for BC since the Eagles upended Maryland in 2009. It is currently the largest comeback in regulation this season and matched James Madison's 23-point rally for an overtime win that also happened on Saturday.

It didn't touch the infamous 53-19 deficit overcome by Drexel in a two-point win over Delaware from 2018, but it did set a record for the largest comeback in Boston College program history, bettering the 67-65 win from the 2004-2005 season. That game was against Kent State and occurred during the Eagles' last year in the Big East, but after trailing 41-23 in the first half, Craig Smith hit a buzzer-beater for the win, 67-65.

2) Surrey's Not Sorry, Clemson
The headlines coming out of the Clemson win extolled the very different days for both Brevin Galloway and Makai Ashton-Langford. For Galloway, the game represented a breakout performance in a BC uniform and the first time he displayed the game-changing deep shooting abilities like he was for Earl Grant at College of Charleston. He had dealt with some recurring knee injuries over the course of the first half of the season, but his vision and pure stroke was on full display in the win over the Tigers when he knocked down 5-for-10 from the outside.

Ashton-Langford, meanwhile, led the Eagles with 35 minutes on the floor and was more of the overall presence expected, and he rallied from a tough start to finish with a game-high 19 points - 17 coming in the second half - to go along with a career-high seven rebounds, four assists, and a steal.

The unsung hero through all of this, though, was forward James Karnik, who scored 17 points and had six rebounds while battling PJ Hall in the paint for the bulk of the game. The 6-9 Canadian maple was 8-for-11 shooting and had an assist, but, like the guards who played outside, he only had one foul in a game where BC stayed largely out of the officials' ire.

"He was really down and out after the Pitt game," Grant said. "Both of my centers fouled out, and it was one of those rollercoaster games where we lost by one possession. He fouled out of that game, and we talked about staying the course. I think he did a good job of bouncing back and getting in practice, doing some skill development."

Karnik's performance against Clemson didn't spill over to the Louisville game, but what he did against the Tigers was an indication of a mentality Grant tried to install in the seniors playing their last collegiate games. Because the majority will either play professionally overseas or turn pro in something other than basketball (you know…use their degrees for careers), Grant reminded them that they only had about 50 days remaining to play college basketball. He tinged it with a sense of urgency to ignite them, hoping their ability to savor the moments would in turn help the team get over the hump it cleared in South Carolina.

"I told those seniors that they only had those 50 days left before the charter flights and the free meals are over," Grant said. "In 50 days, the season's over. So enjoy this and embrace it. And James has been in the gym, where he's always been in the gym, but I saw a different look in his eyes over the 10 days after Pitt. He was committed to working on his game, and Clemson was the fruits of his labor where he was in a good place and felt good going into the game. He was focused on stopping PJ Hall more than he was on scoring. A lot of stuff just came organically."

3) And now, we go back to the ACC.
There's still plenty of time to digest what happened down at Louisville, but let's cycle back to the ACC for a second. The loss dropped BC to 2-4 in the league and 7-9 overall, but it helped further widen the chasm between the top two-thirds and the bottom six teams currently battling for a potential first round bye in March's ACC Tournament.

Miami currently leads the league after winning six of its first seven games, and Florida State, which won its last game against Coach K, is a game behind the Hurricanes with a 5-2 league record. Neither team is ranked nationally, but the only team inside the polls, No. 6 Duke, is tied for third as one of three teams with a 4-2 conference record after losing to the Seminoles. That group, which includes Notre Dame and North Carolina, is technically tied with three other teams, which now includes Louisville after Wednesday, but the Cardinals, Wake Forest and Virginia all have two more games played with a win and a loss more than the other group of three.

The league trickles down from there. That game-and-a-half difference from eighth to first is mirrored between the group of 5-3 teams to Syracuse, and the Orange, in ninth, hold a half-game lead with one more game in the win column over Virginia Tech and BC. The Hokies and Eagles have one less loss than Clemson and Pitt and two less losses than NC State, which is a full game back in 14th, before Georgia Tech's 1-6 record is five games behind.

All of this shows how one team can jump into the next tier with a run of sorts. BC has games against Virginia Tech and Wake Forest in the next, immediate four days, and wins in both of those games would vault the Eagles from a first round game wearing home whites into position for an automatic second round game. Moving even one or two spots into that hole occupied by Syracuse would do that, but jumping two or three spots as the season progresses shifts someone away from a team like Miami in a possible quarterfinal game.

There's a ton of basketball left to play, but the unprecedented parity in the ACC is revealing the battle over the next month. According to Joe Lunardi's Bracketology series on ESPN, Florida State is further away from the tournament than Virginia Tech despite the widening chasm in the conference table, and Wake Forest is one of the last teams in the bracket without a play-in game for a No. 11 seed. Since Miami's in first, the Hurricanes are considered an automatic qualifier, but they only hold a No. 10 seed, and outside of Duke and UNC, there are no other spots considered locked for teams like Notre Dame, which is 11-6, or Louisville, which is 11-7 but lost its last three games to FSU, NC State and Pitt.

Where does this leave BC? Wide open. The Eagles are coming together, and they've battled nearly every opponent into the final few minutes of the second half. There are some issues to turn around, but even at 7-9 overall, they aren't a bad team, and the league itself is almost waiting for Cinderella to pluck itself out of that lower group. Getting through the bracket is a little bit more impossible by playing in the first round, so each game is critical to move the Eagles closer to a bye. There hasn't been a first round team to advance to the semifinals since 2018, and though the 2020 tournament was canceled, no first round team won a second round game anyway.

The last team to do it: Boston College, which beat fifth-seeded NC State, 91-87, before losing by eight to Clemson.

Layup Line: Bracketology Is In Session
I start tuning into Bracketology as January starts moving forward, but the end of the month really kicks it into overdrive as teams solidify their postseason resumes. I have long held that the basketball postseason is the blueprint for near-perfection, and the continued emphasis on the at-large bids really ratchets the heat up a few degrees as the days and games start to get more and more critical.

Creighton is a perfect example. The Big East is a tremendous basketball conference, but the Blue Jays are dancing on the bubble despite a 20-point win over Villanova, a team that was both a lock and a national championship contender when the teams played their first game. Not much was expected from Creighton when the season started, but the tight losses to Iowa State and Xavier helped push that candidacy forward after an early-season win over Brigham Young.

That team does hold a blowout, 34-point loss in the return match to Villanova, but Bracketology says Creighton is one of the last teams in the tournament with a bye past the play-in games. Texas A&M, an SEC team without a win over a nationally-ranked team, is one of the last teams out. The argument then becomes about the difficulty level of the SEC, which would gain seven seats in the bracket, against the Big East, which also currently has seven bids. The answer isn't secure yet, but games in Omaha against Providence are going to be impacted by games between the Aggies and Arkansas or LSU.

That's the beauty of the tournament and the run-up over the next month. Nothing's guaranteed yet, and those national games are going to have an impact on games elsewhere where there isn't any automatic or obvious connection. Games between Oregon and the Pac-12 are going to impact Mississippi State and Belmont, and Memphis and FSU are going to jockey against Alabama-Birmingham or the Atlantic 10.

And, again, this leads us back to BC, a team that admittedly currently doesn't have a strong enough resume to lead a role in this conversation. The Eagles won't be a factor in the conversation as an at-large team, but there is ample opportunity to make some noise and build momentum for the years to come. After this stretch against Virginia Tech and Wake, a return match against North Carolina looms. Games against Virginia, Syracuse, Duke, Florida State and Miami are on the schedule, and a good chunk of them are at home in Conte Forum.

The Eagles are proving the be one of the toughest teams in the ACC to play against. They look to be ready to play the part of spoiler and maybe, just maybe, improve their name and stature within the ACC as they move along.

BC and Virginia Tech tip off on Saturday at 12 p.m. from Conte Forum in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. The game can be seen on the ACC's Regional Sports Network coverage, locally in Boston on NESN, with radio broadcast available locally on WEEI 850 AM.

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