Maryland Basketball: Wake Me Up When December Ends

Boston College Eagles (6-1) at
Maryland Terrapins (6-3)
Comcast Center - College Park, MD

Alright! Time for the ACC season to once again start before Christmas. Good times!

For the third consecutive season, the Maryland Terrapins get set to square off against long-time rival Boston College in a December conference game that will be followed by 15 more conference games…they just happen to be a full month down the road. Why Maryland has to keep doing this is beyond me. The next conference game of any kind will be December 23rd when Virginia Tech visits Wake Forest. Even though that is still a couple of weeks early, it’s not as absurd as this annual Maryland-BC get together. So, for the third straight season, I get to complain about the ACC scheduling.

As I’ve stated before in my previous Maryland-BC game posts, the ACC expansion was a ridiculous waste of time. The intention of allowing BC, Virginia Tech and Miami into the conference was to simultaneously get better overall in football and add a football championship game. The shear numbers of the conference allowed the ACC Championship Game to be born. However, since allowing the three schools into the conference, the ACC has gotten progressively worse in football (although BC and Tech have been two of the better programs). Also, the ACC Championship Game, which was supposed to wield millions upon millions of extra dollars in revenue, has been a bust as well. In what should have been an entertaining game last Saturday between two decent teams, Jacksonville’s Alltell Stadium was half-full with thousands of tickets left unclaimed and unsold. At least it wasn’t as bad as last season’s championship, in which the stadium was almost two-thirds empty and neither Wake Forest nor Georgia Tech scored a single touchdown.

Of course, the side effect for the ACC was to become so gargantuan that a round-robin regular season in basketball, once a great staple and tradition that made ACC basketball what it was, would no longer be possible. On top of that, looking down the road, it appears the expansion also watered-down basketball in general. I mean, other than North Carolina, what is there?

The Dookies are ok, but beating mid-tier Big 10 teams by 20 points shouldn’t really excite anyone. There are several mid-major conferences that have passed Big 10 basketball at this point. And the Blow Devils are still only nine months removed from losing to VCU in the first round of the NCAA tournament (more on those Rams in a moment). They didn’t suddenly become a national contender overnight. What about NC State? Weren’t they supposed to be good this season? Was that before or after they lost to New Orleans and East Carolina? Why would anyone say this team was good? It’s not like they were in the Top 25 at the beginning of the season. Wait, they were? Well, they weren’t on mine. Remember, I said in early November they wouldn’t even qualify for the NCAA’s and they would be lucky to make the NIT. Virginia is going to step up, right? Well, after Sean Singletary, I kind of lose interest with the rest of the team. Adrian Joseph is really the second best player on the Wahoos? Alright, I guess if you want to go 8-8 in conference that’s the way to go. What about Virginia Tech? They were on the way up. That was until their entire lineup, save for punk-doofus Deron Washington, wore out their eligibility. Georgia Tech has fallen off the map. Wake Forest has too, not to mention they’re dealing with bigger issues than basketball this season. Florida State and Miami are bad as usual (ignore the decent record the two have put up so far this season…they’re bad, trust me). Clemson is undefeated, and probably will be as they enter January. That should assure them of a NCAA bid. No ACC team that wins 17 games in a row misses the tournament, right? Hello, is this thing on? Clemson? Oliver Purnell? Hello…anyone there?

The ACC used to be a nine team league that would routinely send at least five or six programs a year to the NCAA. And at least two or three of those teams would have legitimate national title claims. Now, the ACC is sending anywhere from four to seven teams a season, and maybe one of those teams has a chance to win the whole thing. The rest of the teams are just there because they put up a decent record against a watered-down conference. Look, someone has to win all these ACC games on the schedule. Some fans like to call it parity. I call it bad basketball. At the turn of the millennium, no one could realistically claim that there was a better basketball conference, from top to bottom, than the ACC. A couple of years ago, conferences like the Big East and SEC could argue that they were as good as the ACC, but ACC fans could still win that argument pretty easily. Now, there’s no real debate. The Atlantic Coast Conference has been passed by. The Pac-10 is better. The Big East is better. The Big XII, a football conference through and through, is better. And it looks as if it’s going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. More was ruined than tradition and scheduling when the ACC expanded. The quality of the game itself has steadily gone downhill the past three seasons.

Which brings me to the Maryland-Boston College game. Like the rest of the teams not named UNC, these are two programs that are on a progressive path downward. For BC, it’s easy to tell you what’s wrong. In the past two years, Craig Smith, Jared Dudley and Sean Marshall have graduated or moved on to the NBA. That’s a lot of talent gone. So when the Eagles go 6-10 in the conference this season, you’ll know why. For Maryland, it’s not as simple.

The loss to VCU is not a terrible one. The Rams still have Eric Maynor, a kid who I will always be a fan of, because he single-handedly sent Ratface and the Nerds packing last season. Plus, the loss came at the BB&T Classic which should just be renamed John Feinstein & Friends Find a Way to Screw Maryland Each and Every Season (I know, a little wordy, but it could catch on). How many times are we going to lose in this tournament before we pull out? At this point, it’s death, taxes and Maryland losing at the Verizon Center. Anyway, the loss to VCU isn’t one that’s going to make or break Maryland’s season. In fact, none of Maryland’s three losses are bad at all. VCU, UCLA and Missouri should all make the NCAA tournament this season. It’s the larger picture that worries me.

Maryland is averaging less than 75 points a game. And even though they’ve played four quality teams, they’ve also played five really bad ones. Their points per game should be much higher. The three-point shooting is hovering right around 30%. No one other than James Gist seems to be getting any rebounds. And, saving the best for last, Maryland as a team has more turnovers than assists. I don’t feel like looking through 320 or so programs to verify this, but I’m willing to bet that there aren’t many teams this far into the season with a 1/1.2 a/t ratio.

The good news for Maryland is that this game is at home, and they should win it. Boston College isn’t exactly lighting up the college world either. They were dominated by mighty Providence, and have escaped with very close wins against powerhouses like Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Florida Atlantic. Other than Tyrese Rice, and maybe Shamari “Seriously, No Relation To Britney” Spears, there isn’t much on this roster to worry about. This is a very young team that has played only one road game so far this year (against terrible Michigan). So hopefully home court advantage is enough. Despite the silliness of playing an ACC game on December 9th, this is a good game at a good time for Maryland. A win here, and they should be able to cruise into next month, which is the next time I’ll probably be talking about them.

Maryland 77
Boston College 71