Thursday Three-Pointer: Week XII

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- Jaeden Zackery woke up on Wednesday morning wishing for roadkill. Boston College had only won once on the road this season, but aside from the miraculous comeback at Clemson at the beginning of the month, his Eagles hadn't experienced the sweet taste of disappointing a home crowd.

That's not to say BC hadn't been competitive whenever it left Chestnut Hill, but the near misses at Pittsburgh, Louisville, Virginia, and Notre Dame all left a sour taste against a record that increasingly stretched a winning percentage away from .500. The players, coaches, analysts - everyone, it seemed - felt like this particular team deserved better, and with two road games left in the 2021-22 season, the Eagles finally cashed in their chips with an impressive 69-61 win over N.C. State.

"Our main thing on the road has been to get roadkill," Zackery said. "That's kind of been what we've been trying to do all season, but we struggled with it. So it's good to come out and get some roadkill and get a road win since we'd been looking for it for a while."

Winning on the road in any conference is difficult, but the parity within the ACC made it especially tough for almost all of its 15 member teams. Just five teams entered this weekend with winning records away from their home courts, and just one, Virginia Tech, is placed outside of the ACC's top four teams. Of the remaining 10 squads, eight have three wins or less with losing a minimum of eight road games.

Those games are ultimately the difference in a team's ability to compete for a national tournament spot. Miami is 8-2 on the road and 20-8 overall, while Syracuse, a team with a 15-13 record, has only won three games on the road. Shifting even two or three of those road defeats would inherently pull the Orange into the race for an opening-round bubble bid, while the Hurricanes would fall out of contention if that same number shifted them into double-digit overall losses.

That message was heard loud and clear by BC, which used the N.C. State game to win consecutive games for the first time since beating USF and Notre Dame at the start of December. Shifting the road record to .500 would have the Eagles positioned closer to the inside of the first-round bye slots while simultaneously moving them closer to a possible NIT bid.

Given how close some of those losses were - a single possession against Pittsburgh, a 13-point game that was much tighter than the final against Louisville indicated, overtime at Notre Dame - that shows just how close BC was to earn its way into the postseason conversation in the first year under Earl Grant.

"We've been close," Grant said. "We've been close in a lot of games on the road, and we felt like we just played a little bit better [against N.C. State]. We can win these games. It was a two-possession game against UNC with five minutes to go, and we were up against Notre Dame. So we've been close and played well, but it was close with no cigar. Now we have the cigar. We finished, and I'm just so happy for all the guys and happy for our program."

Here's what else is on the table as the season moves into its final week:

1) Never as good as the wins. Never as bad as the losses.
In the aftermath of BC's win against Florida State, forward James Karnik stepped to the podium and delivered his testimonial about playing for Earl Grant. He likened it to a Bible verse that his head coach always used, and while Karnik couldn't remember the exact wording, he memorized the single message that every player on the team absorbed: don't be weary.

By itself, the lesson of humility and hard work is great for any college athlete willing to put in the hours to overcome their general fatigue at the end of the season. BC certainly recognized that need through its ups and downs, and the overall elevation of faith both in the work and the system paid off when the Eagles decisively defeated the Seminoles on their home court.

But they further understood how weariness isn't always based on actual results. Sports records and history books often look back and digest records and numbers, but within the season, harvests are seen by the steady improvement that eventually yields or leads to the overall success of a program. It's why coaches often preach about building programs instead of teams; they know that any team can go out and win once, but building a program requires harder work to instill a victorious, long-lasting mindset.

"If we blow a team out by 30, he's looking for things we can work on," Karnik said, "and when we lose a bad game, he always looks at the positive. So he takes the negatives out of the good and takes the positives out of the bad. That's how he pushes us forward, and he always cares about our effort. As long as we're giving effort, we're fighting for him. That one quote - don't be weary - is a Bible quote, and by the end of the year, I'll be able to rehearse it."

"He just comes into practice every day and pushes us," Zackery agreed. "He'll tell us right when we get off the plane after a road game that was a loss that we're going to go to work [the next day]. That game is in the past, and we just move on and forward to come in the next day and work like it never happened."

The delivery of that message is probably more important than anything else, and this week offered the truest product of Grant's earliest stated goals. He always understood what BC once meant to the ACC, and he accepted the position because he wanted to rediscover the Eagles' identity as a gritty, tough, rugged basketball team. He didn't want to sell it out to build a one-shot winner and against N.C. State, BC used its new/old mentality to generate more turnovers than the Wolfpack had committed in a single conference game this season.

"I tell the guys all the time that if I go to Vegas, I'm not going to play blackjack," Grant said. "I don't want to trap and gamble. I want to pressure teams and see if they make mistakes, so we talked about guys doing a great job of pressuring. We pressed in the half-court to defend the ball well, and we stabbed the gaps when people drove, which got our hands on a lot of balls. We didn't go into that game trying to force 18 turnovers. We went into the game trying to keep them out of the paint, and because we were in a good position, we just happened to knock some balls loose."

2) Let's see how legends are made.
To Grant's end, finally seeing the fruits of those labors is giving Boston College a very dangerous feel as the season grinds into its final act. Winning consecutive games over FSU and N.C. State all of a sudden put the Eagles in prime position to climb out of the ACC Tournament's first day, and it's hard to imagine a team pinning its hopes on the conference bracket if a game against BC looms in Brooklyn.

"My whole approach hasn't been on winning one particular game," Grant said. "I talk about winning behaviors and taking charges, rebounding, and making the right decision when we drive against shot blockers. We focus on our behaviors so that a win is a result, because I know we're trying to build a program. We are in pursuit of trying to have a good team, and we want to be playing our best basketball that we can play once we get to Brooklyn."

The most recent ESPN Bracketology projection had five ACC teams in the national tournament, and the league itself is dealing with the fact that parity limits the number of teams that can get into the dance. Several teams are going to have to win games at the Barclay Center to erase bubble status, and someone somewhere is going to be left out of an NCAA Regional or the First Four because of a debilitating loss.

Exactly which team bursts that bubble is hard to pinpoint, but both Miami and North Carolina are considered two of the last four teams securely inside the First Four. Notre Dame and Wake Forest control No. 9 seeds in the West and East respectively, and Duke dropped to a No. 3 seed in the East Regional after struggling to beat Virginia on the road.

BC is currently the No. 11 seed and would potentially draw a rematch with N.C. State in the first round under the present standings, but the track would lead directly into a collision course with Virginia or Wake Forest if the Cavaliers can break their stalemate with the Demon Deacons. Both Miami and North Carolina are just ahead, and all of those schools, including Virginia Tech, need to win games to get into the tournament.

Shifting BC into 10th or 12th changes that track significantly for one of those teams and leaves the Eagles on a path to the No. 5 or No. 6 seed, meaning potential meetings against Syracuse are also on the horizon. All of this would naturally require a BC win on the first day, but even shifting BC ahead of Louisville or Florida State - both incredibly doable - would lead to a first-round bye and a possible second-round matchup against Notre Dame.

Given what all of those teams need to get into the tournament or earn a favorable draw, playing a suddenly-hot BC team is not what the doctor ordered.

"The only way to play your best basketball is to keep getting better," Grant said. "You don't get to grow if you just show up every day. You come in and work at it. We have a lot more challenges ahead of us, so we just have to stay the course and keep moving forward, get better, and hopefully get some help."

3) The end of the road.
Getting BC into one of those bye spots is suddenly a realistic hope, especially since those road woes - erased as they may be - won't show up until the season finale at Georgia Tech. The next two games are at home, and while one is a rematch against Clemson, the Senior Day, late-night special against Miami could offer a preview of the Hurricanes' aforementioned path to the NCAA Tournament.

Any home arena is the biggest asset for a team, but Conte Forum has converted into a true home-court advantage for the Eagles after they started the season with modest expectations. Nobody knew what to expect, but the emergence of the Sickos at the beginning of the season begat the ongoing "Defend the Nut" mentality.

The payoff is easily seen in attendance, where BC sold out its game against Duke and increased its home number by nearly 25 percent. The Eagles now average more fans at home than both Miami, a national tournament contender, and Georgia Tech, the defending conference champion, and with the win over Florida State, the eruption within the building reached a fever pitch to a crowd that echoed throughout the 8,000-seat arena.

"It feels really good to see the fans come back and support us," Zackery said. "I feel like that's pushed us every day when we come into games. I feel like the more and more we saw them come to every game as the season wore on, we appreciated it, honestly."

Believing in the climb can be a tough ask when a decade-long drought exists from the postseason. The one NIT bid aside, the more modern college basketball players were barely alive when Jared Dudley and Craig Smith led the swaggering Eagles out of the Big East, and the vast majority weren't at BC to watch fans storm the court for the home win over Duke.

But bringing them back shows the belief within the BC fan base. The climb is only just starting, but by investing emotionally in the program, the trajectory can take this team back where it belongs.

Layup Line: On another level.
I couldn't help myself this week after BC played Florida State. The Eagles' stretch of games leading up to Monday started with Mike Krzyzewski's last game at Conte Forum, but the four-game stretch of playing virtually every other day seemed to bring another legendary name to the forefront of the ACC coaching wheel. The game Notre Dame saw Earl Grant match up against Mike Brey, the all-time winningest coach for the Fighting Irish who has over 100 more wins than Digger Phelps, and it preceded a second game against Syracuse's Jim Boeheim.

By beating FSU, Earl Grant had defeated Leonard Hamilton, a future Hall of Fame head coach widely regarded as one of the game's greatest gentlemen, and the return to the road sent the Eagles to N.C. State to play the program once coached by Jim Valvano. This weekend, Grant will coach against Brad Brownell for the second time before the season ends with Jim Larranaga and defending ACC champion Josh Pastner.

It made me curious if coaches look at other coaches to learn things about the game. We're all students of the game at the end of the day, I reasoned, but I was curious if watching game film revealed anything that Grant, a young coach who helped build a winner at College of Charleston, could learn.

"I think some of the older veteran coaches just keep it simple," he said before joking, "What I learned about Coach K is that if you get some really good players, you have a chance to win some games. I learned from Coach Boeheim that you need some shooters, and I learned from Coach Hamilton that you need to get some seven-footers.

"All those guys are great coaches," he added more seriously, "and probably the biggest thing that I've learned is to recruit well and keep it simple."

With three games left in the regular season, BC returns to the court on Saturday when it hosts Clemson at 3 p.m. in a game nationally televised via ACC Network. Prior to the Clemson game, BC's senior class of 2022 will be honored - manager Will Weigman and players Brevin Galloway, James Karnik, and Makai Ashton-Langford. BC closes out its home regular season slate on Wednesday, March 2 against Miami, a game that tips off at 9 p.m.

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