Okay, we all know what happened… there was a close loss against Clemson to close out the season (oh boo hoo), dismantling of Miami in the quarterfinals of the ACC tournament (yippee… I feel hope!), then UNC’s robotic white boy hits a winning bucket with .8 seconds to go and does the bushwacker down the court in celebration (at this point I am kind of sick of this tug-of-war over the last at-large spots and frankly, I don’t care… if you don’t want us in the tournament after that, fine, fuck you. That’s basically Coach Greenberg’s stance.)

Something important is lost in the race for the at-large tournament slot when schools I have never heard of or schools that have last second miracles scoop up a ton of automatic bids. I don’t like that I find myself cheering AGAINST Georgia’s big upset in the SEC. I love upsets, even though I couldn’t care less about University of Georgia outside of the strip club they have in downtown Athens, I am happy that there was a reward for a team that makes a big splash the last week of the regular season. But that prize is the conference trophy and the fucking net from the court that wasn’t hit by a tornado. Awarding the auto-bid basically is like saying to a Pro Football team that if they go 0-9 but somehow win in the last two weeks of the season and the best teams happen to lose (or perhaps play like shit because their eyes are on the post season) then lets give that shit team the benefit of the doubt and allow them in to the playoffs. Oh and let’s throw Niagara in there too. Niagara? These people http://www.purpleeagles.com/ ? What a shit show.

I really have let the whole “tournament thing” go. I mean just how deep did we expect to go in to the tournament? Isn’t squabbling over a 12th seed not much better than whining over the Outback bowl bid? Sure, we want to be there in the limelight and a trip to the NCAA tournament is vindication of a good season (a great season in comparison to our expectations), but we got a hell of a lot more press as a bubble team than we would have as an expected lock that drops to Vanderbilt in round one.

I’m proud that we put on a good show this season. We aren’t a basketball school… but were becoming a force in the hardest basketball conference in the nation. We were projected to be the 11^th worst team in the ACC… but we ended 4^th. Seth Greenberg is ACC coach of the year and Delaney/Allen look to be something special for years to come. In all, it was a great year for Virginia Tech Basketball.

By the way, take a look at the first round of the NCAA tournament. What an abortion. Sure there are a few great games in there (USC v Beasley State, Clemson v Villanova, GMU v Popular Belief) but after you look it over just head over and look at the NIT bracket. Funny, It looks a lot more exciting over there in the runner-up bracket. Maybe its because there are schools I have heard of or at least seen televised once in the past 3 years. Even Florida and Ohio State are hanging out with us, we can’t be that upset even though as a number one seed, that’s all our opponents can hope to achieve when playing us.