Another Win Forcing ACC To Believe In BC

It was never explicitly stated, but the difference between Boston College's trip to the WNIT and advancing to the NCAA Tournament boiled down to a single game against Florida State in the ACC's conference tournament. The Eagles were a 19-win team and were technically the better seed, but their identical conference record meant the winner held the inside track to the national tournament simply by advancing to a better round in the conference bracket. The expectation heading into the game was that the league would receive eight bids, but with Georgia tEch

The expectation was that the league would receive eight bids, but with Miami holding the three-way tiebreaker by virtue of its two wins over the Seminoles, the only way both BC and FSU advanced required the Hurricanes to absorb a blowout loss against one of the league's bottom six teams. When that didn't happen, a subsequent win over second-seeded Louisville all but assured the loser of the Second Round matchup was the odd team out. There was no way of knowing Miami would beat Louisville at the time, but that's essentially why the Eagles wound up as the odd team out of the national dance after a season that included a win over nationally-ranked Notre Dame and close call near-misses against North Carolina and NC State.

With those conditions, it could have been assumed that Sunday's meetup between Florida State and Boston College would have hung the revenge mantle over Conte Forum's front door. It was the first game of the 2023 calendar year and the first matchup between the teams since the drama of last year's trip to the Greensboro Coliseum, but whatever residual nastiness was relegated to a slideshow or highlight reel. Few, if any, of the best players on the floor were involved in that game, and with FSU head coach Sue Remrau in retirement, her replacement - former WNBA star Brooke Wyckoff - offered a very different type of battle behind the bench.

It wasn't a proverbial revenge game, but that didn't stop the drama from building towards the dramatic overtime conclusion of a 77-71 win for the Eagles. For the second straight game, BC upset a better, bigger opponent, and for the second straight game, the Eagles proved how belief didn't need to exist elsewhere in the ACC when it was plenty thick in the Conte Forum locker room.

"I don't know how many people around the country said that BC was going to win that game," said BC head coach Joanna Bernabei-McNamee, "but the people in our locker room and the 1,000 fans that we had said that BC was going to win that game. The atmosphere in Conte was super electric, and I thought the way [we] played together, even when FSU made a run on us, we stuck together. Basketball is a game of runs, and we're not going to play anyone that's easy in the conference, so when every team makes that run, it's about us believing in ourselves enough to combat it with one of our own. I couldn't be more proud of this group and how they fight and how they stick together."

BC prides itself on playing as more of a cohesive unit than any other opponent, but after beating No. 10 NC State on the road, doubts still existed about how the Eagles expected to stop Florida State's offense. The Seminoles trucked Clemson for 93 points and a 31-point victory three days before traveling to Chestnut Hill, and they scored 99 points in their most immediate road game in a 41-point win over Georgia Tech. Their seventh and eighth games of the season with at least 90 points, it was hard to imagine how the Seminoles remained unranked after they hung a 61-point win on Presbyterian and a 57-point win on Texas Southern. They'd beaten Wisconsin and Purdue, and they nearly defeated fifth-ranked Connecticut in Hartford after rallying from a 15-point, first quarter deficit.

Freshman Ta'Niya Latson averaged 25.5 points per game and was the fifth-leading scorer in the nation, and even with a defense operating as a single unit, holding her down required the perfect effort from multiple players. Dontavia Waggoner was seen as the primary option, but expecting Andrea Daley and Taina Mair to battle her while Maria Gakdeng held the post against any combination of Makayla Timpson, Erin Howard and Mariana Valenzuela felt unrealistic.

Yet by the end of the game, a perfect offering was exactly what BC produced. Latson was one of the 20 best recruits in last year's graduating high school class, but the Eagles built the blueprint that held her to 10 points on 4-for-17 shooting. She committed a team-high five turnovers and was whistled for four personal fouls while Timpson likewise failed to shoot 50 percent from the floor for her 14 points en route to a double-double with 11 boards.

"Credit to my peoples," Bernabei-McNamee said with a laugh. "They really came to play with [defense] in our mind. We've had really talented freshmen on our squad that have been playing really well but haven't gotten any ACC merits for it, and I think our whole team took that a little personally."

"We come into a game knowing our matchups," said Waggoner, "but in transition and in things like that, we don't have matchups. We just go. When we're in practice, we go through a grind so we know how everyone plays. If we have to be matched up on them, we'll know how to defend. For me, I had to switch on and off Latson because I had four fouls, but I knew my teammates going to have my back."

Waggoner and Mair simply outplayed them at a head-to-head level, with the BC duo battering the FSU defense for a combined 38 points and 20 boards. Waggoner bullied her way to the free throw line for 15 attempts, and while BC only shot 55 percent from the stripe as a team, her 21 points and 14 rebounds with three assists and four steals outplayed Latson at every level of the offensive game.

Mair, meanwhile, morphed from a distributor to a scorer by shooting 4-for-8 from outside, though she still had seven assists while playing all but one of the game's 45 minutes. They were joined in double figures by Daley, who, like Waggoner, bulldozed her way to 12 points and nine rebounds while playing 40 minutes.

"T-Mair is really the floor general that we want, game-in and game-out," said Bernabei-McNamee. "She's an unbelievable player, and I think [the team] just played really hard and together [with her]. You don't want anyone to play one-on-one in a game of basketball because you have to play as a team, and it's a team effort. You get [Waggoner] with some stifling defense and [Daley] up-top had to pick [Latson] up while we switched, and I think they just made conscious efforts, play after play, to succeed [at both ends of the floor]. That's indicative of a team that really has that chip on their shoulder."

The true difference, though, came from Ally VanTimmeren's 12 points off the bench. Gakdeng was plagued by foul trouble throughout much of the second and half and found herself shelved after playing seven minutes in the third quarter and six in the fourth, so the sophomore who initially matriculated to Chestnut Hill for the second semester of the COVID-19 season in 2020-2021 rallied to shoot 4-for-5 in the first half.

"It just comes with more confidence," she said. "I didn't focus on creating shots [so much as] working with my teammate and the first thing I needed to do when I ran the floor and things like that."

FSU simply failed to match that effort at either end of the floor, and after forcing overtime, the Seminoles wilted without a made basket in the extra session until Timpson hit a fast break layup with under two minutes remaining. By the time it happened, BC built an eight-point lead, and without the time or the energy left in its legs to mount a substantive comeback, Florida State dropped its first conference game of the season to a suddenly-surging team that was blown out by Notre Dame prior to its mini, two-game winning streak.

"I really liked the way that [we played]," Bernabei-McNamee said. "It was that 'five-together-as-one' on defense every time the ball moved. We showed that if the ball moved, all five players moved, and they were communicating. Defensively, that's huge, and I also think that they're [using it] to push transition offense. We almost corrected it in the third quarter, but in the first quarter, we had some undisciplined fouls because we can always get two points back but we can't get back a foul. Outside of that, I think the growth has really been in that belief in one another, and we just keep getting our chemistry down."

Now 3-2 in league play, the sixth-place Eagles sit two games away from first place Duke but are one win behind the Blue Devils are dropping the Seminoles into a second-place tie with Louisville. BC returns to the court on Thursday when it plays Syracuse at Conte Forum at 7 p.m. for its Faculty/Staff Appreciation Day. The game can be seen on the ACC Network Extra with availability on the ESPN online platform of sites and mobile apps.

Players Mentioned

Andrea Daley

Maria Gakdeng

Taina Mair

Ally VanTimmeren

Dontavia Waggoner

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