NEW YORK — By the time Wake Forest stumbled off the court having watched a double-digit lead turn into an absolutely catastrophic and entirely avoidable loss, the Demon Deacons had 5,817 self-inflicted minutes of agonizing waiting ahead of them.
Five thousand, eight hundred and seventeen long minutes before Wake Forest gets the news that’s all too likely, now, after this loss, to be devastating.
The one thing Wake Forest’s NCAA tournament selection profile – with very few good wins and an abysmal strength of nonconference schedule – could not abide was an unacceptable loss. And that’s a generous way to describe Wednesday’s 82-77 overtime loss to Boston College.
This remarkable Wake Forest season, a team cobbled together in a single offseason that looked like it had played together for years, good enough to secure player and coach of the year honors, now hangs by the thinnest of threads.
“I think we’re one of the best 68 teams in the country for sure, but I’m not in the room,” Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes said. “The narrative for our league hasn’t been very good, so I’m not holding my breath. Do I think we should be in? Yes. But I don’t get a vote. We’ll just have to ride it out and see.”
This very different Wake Forest team still followed in the footsteps of its less capable predecessors, taking its 15th ACC tournament loss in 17 tries.
Boston College, which hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament in 13 years and has been a dead-weight anchor on the ACC’s basketball reputation ever since, may just have cost the ACC an NCAA Tournament bid and could have a chance to do it again Thursday against Miami, which has a better profile than Wake Forest but suffers from the same ACC-wide issues and is anything but comfortable.
Southland Conference commissioner Tom Burnett, the chairman of the NCAA selection committee, said Wednesday that the ACC’s reputation or status as a power conference won’t help it when it comes to deciding the final at-large teams.
“The committee really doesn’t look collectively at the conferences,” Burnett said. “We look at each individual team sheet and it clearly spells out where a team stands, whether it’s during the season or during selection week. We’re not spending a lot of time on the collective of any one conference. We’ll dig into the team sheets.”
Everything that could have gone wrong for Wake Forest went wrong. The Deacons fell behind early. They rallied to take a 10-point lead with six minutes to go and then squandered all of it. And they missed their first five shots in overtime to ensure defeat.
Wake Forest had a chance to win the game in regulation but Alondes Williams, the Oklahoma transfer who came out of nowhere to be the ACC player of the year, was called for a charge when Makai Ashton-Langford stood his ground in the lane.
Williams, who was hobbled by cramps both in regulation in overtime, was something less than 100%, but it was a fitting denouement to a rough, physical game that saw Boston College dominate the rim at both ends — and, most impressively, re-rally from double-digits down.
“We’ve been in that position many times,” Ashton-Langford. “We get down, we play catch-up. It shows the heart we have. We ain’t got nothing else to lose. If we lose, we go home. If we win, we advance. That’s what coach preaches in the locker room.”
Wake Forest had everything else to lose.
“It’s on us,” Forbes said. “We were in control of our own destiny. That’s what you play for. We didn’t control our own destiny and now we’re not.”
The Demon Deacons had one job, and that was not to screw this up by taking a terrible loss: Just beat Boston College and then let the chips fall where they may against Miami. Instead, Wake Forest will wait. It will not be a fun four days. It is not likely to end well.
