Will Wade: "I Haven't Been Able to Unlock the Best In a Lot of These Guys"

NC State head coach Will Wade met with Wolfpack Sports Network for his final radio show of the season, where he reflected on the season, previewed the Stanford game, and much more!

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It is that time of the week; it's great to be here. We are live, and we are outside. It's a block party here next to The Pit Authentic Barbecue. And before we start the show—this is our last show—I want to give a huge thanks and a big hat tip to the great folks with Empire Eats, because this is really neat. We've shut the street down; we're on Commerce Place and Davie Street.

We've got picnic tables and chairs and speakers and Chucky Brown, and we've got everything we need for a great show here outside at The Pit Authentic Barbecue. Coach, it's pretty cool. Craig Hammel and his folks do a great job. Maria Gowdy, big thank you. And we'll thank everybody again in the last segment, but this is awesome; it's really fun.

Yeah, really cool. It's the first time I've done this.

I haven't done a block party show before. Maybe more to come.

Only Greg could pull this off.

And he sure did; he did a heck of a job. It's really neat, really sharp. We're going to take, generally speaking—so we go five segments in the show—we're pretty formulaic about it. We can deviate, and occasionally we do; we can take hard left turns, right? But generally, we do a recap of what's been going on.

So Coach, we can buckle up and talk Notre Dame and Duke and do our due diligence here. The Notre Dame game was a stinger. An overtime loss, 96-90. We'll talk Fighting Irish, and then we'll talk Blue Devils. Up seven with 2:47 left, I think it was; up nine with about four and a half minutes left. An 11-2 run in regulation; in fact, Notre Dame never led in regulation.

Nope, it was just tied.

It was just tied, and then it went to overtime, and the shooting went cold late. I know that was at least one of the issues late as well. It was hard to stop Haralson, and he got a head of steam going. It was hard to stop him from going to the iron. What were your takeaways from the Notre Dame game?

Disappointing when you lead the entire game. This is twice now. We've had a seven-point lead with two and a half minutes at Notre Dame and a lead against Miami at home. We hadn't been able to close it out, and so it's really disappointing. That's the difference between a mediocre year and a good year, or a good year and a great year—being able to close out those types of games, and we haven't been able to do that.

Notre Dame was really disappointing. When you control the game as we did for the majority of the game. We had chances to blow it open, and we could never get it to double digits, but we got it to nine, like, three times. When you have those opportunities, and you can't do it, it's really unfortunate; it's really tough.

We've got to find a way to close those out, and it's happened to us twice now in the last couple of weeks. The Miami game at home was just as bad, but give Notre Dame credit; they changed the zone. We missed some good looks against the zone. We just couldn't finish, and so that's the difference in why our record is what it is and not what it probably should be. But we've got to keep battling and see if we can get it fixed.

You were pulling me back down to earth after the SMU game. I was excited to win in Dallas, and Tre Holloman had a great block late, but you were not happy with your six-minute game. That was the first time we really talked about the six-minute game in those terms.

Quote-unquote—I'm doing air quotes here for the folks listening—you "got away with it," right? And it was a really good win, and you shot it really well in the second half. Did you see the six-minute game, late-game issues?

Oh yeah, we had major six-minute game issues at Notre Dame. Any time you give them a lead to run to end the game... we just walked them to the free-throw line. We walked Haralson to the free-throw line. We didn't even make them take some tough shots. Number five didn't make anything—five made the threes, but he didn't make anything off the bounce, hardly. He missed all of those. They were all short on his floaters.

They got easy shots. We didn't make them work, and then we came down and took some quick threes, so it was just really poor execution on our part, and that falls on me. I'm in charge of the deal, and I can't get us to execute how we need to. It's disappointing. We've typically been very good at that. We've got four seniors on the court at most times who have played a lot of college basketball, and we haven't been able to close these games out.

We're going to be in some close games here; we'll be in a close game Saturday. We'll be in a close game in the ACC tournament, and so we've got to find a way to be able to turn the tide a little bit and be more solid. Particularly, defensively, we've just been horrific. This is as bad a stretch as I've ever seen defensively, and we're going to keep trying some different stuff. Hopefully, we can dig in and get a few stops, but giving up 96 points is really, really disappointing.

I haven't done nearly a good enough job with the guys defensively, and getting them to fly around and play hard. We give up loose balls, we give up offensive rebounds; we just don't do a lot of stuff in the wash of the game that allows you to win. The other team wins a lot of the wash of the game type plays, and makes it very difficult.

You're playing uphill most of the game, and so it makes it hard to win that way. It's been that way most of the season for us, and we were able to kind of get on a run there for a little bit, but that stuff evens back out, too.

Hopefully, we can go back on a run here and see if we can get a flip starting Saturday. Saturday's a huge game for us. Stanford's playing tremendously; they've won three in a row. They beat the brakes off SMU at home, they just won at Notre Dame, where we lost, and they controlled the game and were able to close it out.

Notre Dame trapped them late, number 25 hit a huge three, and so they were able to come out unlike us. They controlled the game; they were up 8 to 12 points most of the second half. They've got a tremendous point guard, they've got tremendous shooters, and a great coach. We've got to find a way, with our backs against the wall a little bit, to find a way to get a win on Saturday.

Ebuka Okorie is their leading scorer—leading scorer in the league, actually, for Stanford. He's their point guard, their ball handler. Is the issue, like you mentioned, number five? Certa had 32 points. He had 32, so it's actually his second 30-plus point game in the last, like, three weeks. He's been hot.

I want to send a letter to all these guys that we gave their career day to, see if we can get 10% of their NIL since we helped drive their value up, and see if we can get a donation from some of those guys.

I would rather just not have it happen anymore.

I would, too. Certa was really good, but Haralson's the one—he hadn't been playing, and I knew, you go back and watch, he got hurt in their game at SMU. He's the type of guy we really, really struggle to guard. He's a big, physical guard, can get downhill, and plays through contact.

Once I found out two days before he was playing, I had a little insight there. I worried that without him, they would have a hard time putting you in rotation, so Certa can't get a bunch of threes. That's why they were struggling without him. With him, they can put you in rotation, and then you've got to make decisions to play him one-on-one, where he's going to draw a foul or lay the ball in, or if you double him, then you're giving up a three to Certa or Shrewsberry.

So he puts you in a real predicament that they can't be in with just number two running the point. Against Duke, the game before us, they had number 13, Sir Mohammed, running the point; he turned it over quite a bit. Certa made the shots and made the plays, but really, Haralson's the one who made everything work. He had 10 free throws—was 9 of 10 from the free-throw line—so he's the one who really hurt us.

25 points for Haralson. He's actually the biggest recruit in the history of Notre Dame basketball—five-star—and he played like it. All right, let's turn the page now to the Blue Devils. You were very complimentary of Duke after that one. It was tight for the first seven, eight minutes or so, and then...

It was a four-point game with six and a half minutes to go in the half, and then they just... we had some really poor offense. It all started when we missed a layup, they took it off the backboard, came down, and lay it in. It was a four-point swing. You can't make those mistakes. You’ve got to hang as long as you can and then hope you can barrage them with some shots. We make those mistakes against a lot of teams, but they can't capitalize on them as Duke can.

There are not enough good things I can say about them. Everything they do is first class. Our eyes are wide open to where we need to go. Their three-man is taller than our center.

They're big.

We've got some work to do. They just look different, they move differently, and they are different. They're a great team and very, very well-coached. Over 40 minutes, they're just kind of like a boa constrictor; they just squeeze the life out of you. They did that to us.

We hung in there for 15 minutes or so, but you don't get any prizes for that. The length and their athleticism posed major issues for us, and we struggled against them. We've struggled against that all year. It's kind of the same formula Virginia has, with even better players and better athletes than Virginia has. That's been problematic for us this season. They're a great team, great program, and we're nowhere in their weight class right now. That's just where we are.

We're going to get there. We're going to get there sooner rather than later, but we ain't there yet. That's the task at hand is to try to get into that class, and that's what makes the Notre Dame loss so disappointing. You can't lose that one knowing you've got Duke on Monday. That's what's been so frustrating about this year—we haven't made the layups. We've lost to two teams that may not qualify for the ACC tournament: Georgia Tech at home and Notre Dame on the road. If we have those two wins, we're fine. I'm not thrilled, but we're fine.

But we've lost to two teams that may not even make the ACC tournament. That's been the most frustrating part. Everywhere we've been, we haven't always won the big game—we've been in some big games, and we have won some big games—but we very rarely have lost the ones we were supposed to win. That's how we've built up really good records everywhere we've been. We've hit the layups. We've made the layups everywhere. Sometimes they haven't been pretty, but we've always found a way to win them, and we just haven't done that.

We've missed three or four layups here this year. If we took four losses off and put four more wins on, it wouldn't be as bad. We'd have the same issues, but it wouldn't be as bad. That was what was so disappointing about Notre Dame. Our guys can get as excited as they want to play against Duke, but there are just some limitations that we've got. We needed that excitement at Notre Dame.

That's the biggest game. The biggest game is the one that you get the opportunity to win. I'm not saying we can't beat Duke—if we made a bunch of threes at home, we could beat Duke—but if you play the odds, you'd like us against Notre Dame a lot better than you'd like us against Duke, right? Those are the ones that are just gut punches to us.

We were able to do it once earlier this year; we lost to Georgia Tech, turned around, went to Clemson, and won when they were ranked, but that is hard to do. It's a tough way to live if you don't hit the easy ones, and we haven't done that. It's been very, very humbling this year.

What did you think of the 2-3 zone, the defensive switches? You said you might extrapolate a little bit from that. Do you take anything from that?

It wasn't bad. We didn't want to match up in man out of it when it went to the middle, which we can do against almost every other team, but you can't do that against them because Boozer is just... we're trying to stay out of foul trouble. Boozer doesn't draw a foul every time. Part of it is he's big and physical; the other part of it is if you look at him wrong, they call a foul.

So you have to be pragmatic about what you've got. We thought it gave us the best chance to kind of hang in there. We only worked on it for a couple of days, so it's not like we had some great version of the zone in, but I thought it was solid. They made some threes, and there are some things we didn't do perfectly in it, but the bigger issue was the rebounding. Our first-shot defense out of it wasn't that bad; the rebounding gave us some problems.

Not chasing down loose balls... they got a free-throw offensive rebound, and they hit a three off of that after it went out of bounds. You can't lose in those margins when you're playing a team as good as Duke. We lost in the margins, and we lost everywhere against them, but those things really add up. You don't have to play perfectly, but all that stuff that you can control, you've got to be really, really good with it.

Yep. Notre Dame, Miami, Kansas, Texas. There have been some games this year that I know you want back. That would feel better.

Miami, Notre Dame, Kansas, Georgia Tech, Texas. That would be the five. Seton Hall. Those would all be ones, but you can't get them back. We also stole one at SMU, and we've also won a couple like that, so you only think about the ones you lose. We did win a couple, but we've been on the wrong end of that more than we've been on the right end of it, which has been pretty disappointing.

You also have a lot of great wins this year. We're going to go through those here in just a moment. You do. That is a fact.

It is the season finale of the show. There have been nine and a quarter of them now; this is our 10th show of the year. This one is outside.

I was checking back to make sure my car didn't get towed.

Did you get towed? I saw a bunch of heads snap back.

When you lose like we are, you never know.

I think they're coming for you. I saw a bunch of heads snap back, and I thought I was looking to make sure my car was still there. I think we'd find it; we wouldn't do that to you, Coach.

I want to preview Stanford a little bit. You touched on it. Last game of the year, a 2:15 tip. We tipped it 12:12 against Notre Dame. Some of the CW tips have been wacky timing-wise. 2:15 tip against the Cardinal. They are 19-11. They allow the fewest three-point attempts in the ACC this year. I'm going to ask you how and why, but they must run you off the line. Full disclosure, that's something that this coaching staff did out west in the old Pac-12-- 

When you called their games at Washington State.

With Washington State, that's right.

Get it out, Matt.

Kyle Smith and I—their head coach—worked together for quite a while at Wazzu, and their staff stayed mostly together and is now at Stanford. He's got Stanford now at 19-11. You mentioned the league's leading scorer, Ebuka Okorie. That's a feature of what they run; they often run a lot of their offense through their lead ball handler and their lead guy in the scheme. How do they do what they do defensively? How do they allow the fewest three-point attempts in the ACC?

They're very physical on the drive. They're able to play your drives one-on-one. They do a good job with physicality on the drives, showing their hands, and fouling you with their chest—which is legal. They really do a nice job of making sure they're playing the drive one-on-one. You don't get put in rotation, and that allows them to stay home on the shooters. They are pretty big on the wings.

They're not huge on the guards, but Ebuka Okorie is listed 6'2", and then Benny Gealer actually leads the ACC in three-point percentage. He hit 30 the other night--

He hit seven threes against SMU.

6'1", 185—he can really flick it. They're actually injured; they have Chisom Okpara at 6'8", and he's out. He's a La Lumiere kid.

We talked about him. It's La Lumiere in the rural areas of Indiana. You remember that. You had to take a turn after a cow pasture to get there. Now I know how to say Lumiere and Jayme Knotuniemi. There we go. I got it. It was a high-risk moment, but Jalen Thompson's pretty big: 6'7", 210. And then they have a kid, Jeremy Dent-Smith--

Who can really shoot it.

Big threes.

The Division II transfer can really shoot it. They've got a good team and a good roster. He plays them the right way; their parts and pieces fit. They've been picking up momentum and have won three in a row. People don't realize they've played really well. They've won as many Quad 1 games as we have. Do you know that? Their issue is in the non-conference, while they were getting their footing; they lost three Quad 3 games.

They lost to UNLV at home, and they lost to Seattle—both are good teams—but they lost to those guys. That's why they're not picking up more steam. But of the high-end games, they've won as many as we have. They haven't had as many opportunities; I think they're 4-6 and we're 4-9 in them. They haven't had the opportunities necessarily that we have had to win those. What are we, 5-8?

5-8. We might need to talk about that Tallahassee game again. That's a Quad 1. We might need to talk about Tallahassee yet again.

That's a Quad 1.

Here on the coaches show, we might just need to go back to Florida State.

It is a Quad 1 win now.

The train's coming by, by the way—that's a feature of being outside. You should hear that in our headsets right now; it's just like we're right up on it.

You got a Quad 1 win from Florida State, so you're 5-8 in Quad 1 and-- 

6-2 in Quad 2.

That is really good. It's like one of 15 teams in the country with 11 Quad 1 or 2 wins. You're one of about 14 teams in America that can boast that.

We've also got 10 Quad 1 or 2 losses.

You've played a hard schedule.

We've played a hard schedule. You want to get to 23 Quad 1 or 2 opponents—and we'll have right at 23 based on the conference tournament. You want to have five or fewer Quad 4s. I think we're at five of those. One of them, we only scheduled four; one of them, our league gave us, which we lost. That's certainly problematic, but we only scheduled four, which is right where you want to be.

The leading scorer in the ACC right now is Ebuka Okorie, averaging 22 points a game. He's Stanford's point guard—or off guard, call him what you want. How good is he?

He's their point guard and their best player. They keep the ball in his hands. They're not dumb; they put the ball in their best player's hands and keep it there for a long time. He's electric and very fast with the ball. He gets in the paint and is shooting it well from three. He's able to read the defense very well and is just very smooth. I like him. He's very stoic. Like Quadir Copeland, he is just stoic. You never know whether he made a great play or a bad play.

He's over there talking to the coaches about what he likes and what he wants more of. He's got a very good demeanor. He doesn't play like a freshman; he looks like a junior or senior. If you didn't know he was a freshman, you'd have no clue. He's very good with the ball in transition; he gets them going.

What a find—a freshman from New Hampshire. He's going to have opportunities to play professionally, probably sooner rather than later. He is a tremendous player in a great system to showcase what he does. Scored 40 against Georgia Tech.

He can go big. He's a really good player. 

It's kind of just a rules question, but it's an interesting one that probably foreshadows a change coming in college basketball. With the men playing two halves, do you have a preference that it changes to four quarters, and if so, why?

Every other basketball league in the world plays four quarters except for us, so I think four quarters makes a lot of sense. They argue about the TV timeouts and the length of the game, but the games are already too long. There are ways to get around that. They're particularly concerned about the end of games and how long that will take. With the four quarters, I want to be able to advance the ball on a timeout at the end of the game.

The concern is that it will make the game longer because of the extra stoppage.

That can be worked through; there are a lot of smart people who can figure that out. Everything else plays four quarters. Everybody else plays four quarters. I don't know why we don't.

Earlier this season, you made the statement—this might be a hot table—that you've got a lot of casual personalities on the team. I remember you saying that at some point.

I said that? I wouldn't be surprised. I'm just kidding—I know I said that.

Do you stand by that? What have you done as a coach since then to light a fire under some of those guys? What's it like coaching guys who are nice guys?

We've got a good group. At the end of the day, the buck stops with me. We have all these titles, but I'm the coach, and I'm the GM. I choose them. I haven't gotten the most out of these guys. Remember those old combination locks on the lockers in high school? Every team and every kid has a combo. You have to keep clicking it until you hear it.

Three revolutions to the right, two to the left.

You have to keep going until you hear it. For whatever reason, I haven't been able to unlock that in some of these guys. That's been very tough for me this year. Until the final basket is scored against us and we lose, we're going to keep trying until the bitter end.

I'm stubborn in that way; I'm not going to give in. But I haven't been able to unlock the best in a lot of these guys or in this team. That’s been challenging.

That's on me; it's not on them. I chose them. They're here, whether they stayed with us or we brought them in. They are our guys. It's my fault for not being able to get everybody to play to their individual capabilities and get us as a group to play to our team capabilities, whatever the personalities may be.

There are still ways to win, whether you've got hardline guys or guys who are a little more casual or loose. It's hard to win when guys are really uptight, too.

There are ways to win with both, and we just haven't been able to do it. That's a failure on my part to not get the personalities to play up to their potential. It's not on our players; it's on me. We're going to keep trying, and hopefully, we'll play better on Saturday.

You've had your moments this year.

Not enough. This is what we came here to do, so we have to get better quickly. We're going to finish this out as strong as we can, then we have to retool and be ready to roll next year. I'm not looking forward to next year right now; I want to finish this year as strong as we can. We still have a lot in front of us. Anything can happen when you get to tournament play, whether it be in the ACC tournament or the NCAA tournament.

We have to buckle down and do everything we can to beat Stanford to make sure we're in the NCAA tournament. Then we'll play it out from there. We're going to keep fighting and battling. I still believe there's good stuff left in this team and some really good wins left in our group because we do have good people. They do care, and they want to win. I've just got to be able to harness that to where we play better and put ourselves in a position to win more games.

Lewis asks a question—it was a pleasure to meet him tonight. Great to have Lewis in attendance. Lewis asks: Coach, can you update us on some of the scout team and development players? Colt, Zymicah, and Jayme. How are those guys coming along?

They are doing really well. Colt Langdon has been hurt, so he's just been sidelined a little bit, but he's been looking great. He's been able to get out and do a little bit more; he was riding the bike today. He probably wishes he were still sidelined instead of riding that bike, but he's getting in great shape.

Zymicah Wilkins, I've been really impressed with. He's lost 30 pounds and looks great. He's been getting in extra work and is on the scout team every day. I've tried to explain to him that he kills everybody on the scout team—he's very good—but it's a little different. There's no pressure on the scout team and no real repercussions if things don't go well; you just get to go at it again. But he is someone who's really taken advantage of the redshirt year.

Jayme Kontuniemi may have improved as much as anybody. He's a hard worker and probably the leading scorer on our scout team. He takes it very seriously and has done a really good job. All those guys have worked really hard, and they help prepare us for games. Those guys are as big a part of our program as anybody. We're very appreciative of them, and they're going to be ready when their numbers are called in the future.

Coach, are you ready to give more minutes to players who may not contribute as much offensively but provide a stronger defense? What do you think about that? Well, who's Gary talking about? I don't know; he wasn't specific. Gary didn't name names.

There's a push-pull on anything. Certainly, some guys are better defensively than offensively, and guys who are better offensively than defensively. We've got a mixture of both, but you can't have too much of one on the court at one time, or you’re either never going to get a stop, or you’re never going to get a score.

You can get all the stops in the world, but if you can't score after you get the stop, it doesn't matter. You can score all the points in the world, but if you can't get a stop after you score—which is what we’re struggling with—then that doesn't matter very much either.

You have to have a mixture of those guys. That's what we've been trying to work on. I haven't done as good a job of putting the right lineups out there as I need to. That’s really hurt our team and stunted some of our growth and progress. We talked about Duke; when they went on their run, we had a lineup out there where we just had to sub Quadir Copeland out quicker.

We leave Q in there so long to start the game, and then we have to sub him out quicker so we can put him back in quicker. When he goes out, it gets a little bit off for us. We need to sub him out quicker while the other guys are fresh and could do a little bit more. It opens a lot of things up. There is some rotational stuff I haven't done nearly a good enough job with in terms of getting the best personnel out there.

Will wants to know, with it being Senior Day on Saturday: What does Jordan Snell means to this program? We talked a lot about Snell off the top; we haven't talked about him as much lately. He was kind of an early glue piece.

He's a great kid. He's been awesome and has done a lot of great things for us—outside of the technical against North Carolina. Some would argue that was his best moment! But Snell is rock-solid. He brings a positive attitude every day and is always really excited to be here. He loves NC State and loves playing for NC State. He brings a lot of passion to our program and our guys. He's been an invaluable part of our team this season.

Gary wants to know if you feel like Scottie Ebube has done enough to potentially see more minutes in the next game. Gary is a big Scottie fan.

Yes.

There you go.

That's a succinct answer.

Absolutely. There was another question here I wanted to get to—not that one. These people are trying to get us in trouble! There are some spicy ones in here. We're going to take a break and come back next segment.

What happens when you lose is that people are like, "All right, let's see if we can get them in trouble." We haven't really discarded many questions that have come our way; for the most part, we really do get them on there. There are a couple in here that we're going to skip for tonight, though.

We'll talk about them off-air since you're here in person. We'll talk about them after.

Coach, we talked earlier on the show about some of the difficult games we played this year. Meanwhile, that was not on my itinerary, by the way. That was a difficult time. The Kansas, Miami, Texas, "coulda, woulda, shoulda's" that we discussed. What I do have on here is a long list. Liberty is running away with CUSA; the Pack beat them by 40, right? Liberty right now is 24-5 and 16-2 in CUSA.

That was a 40-point win. VCU has ascended in the A-10. They're now second in the A-10 at 23-7. You said they might compete for the A-10 after the Pack beat them. They are 14-3 in the A-10. UAB, as it turns out, is doing okay. They're fourth in the American.

Do you want to know something crazy about UAB? Did you do much research on them?

At the time I did, but not since.

Do you know what their home conference record is? They've won one home conference game. They're like 1-7 at home this year, and they're like 8-0 on the road to the conference.

That's bizarre.

They're 19-11. It's very strange. They've won one conference home game and every conference road game. I don't know what that is. They won at Charlotte last night. I was talking to their assistant last night, and he was telling me.

That's the only reason I know. That's bizarre. It's a really weird way to ascend. That's a way to game the NET. It's a really good way to game the NET—to dominate on the road. The NET loves road games. The NET does not like home losses. It doesn't like the Georgia Tech loss, but after that, you had six straight wins. That was the hottest part of the year. Let's not forget, also, you gave Ole Miss a hard time in Greensboro way back when. Are the Rebels not having a great season? 

Are you really going to talk about Ole Miss? I kind of forgot about the game, to be honest. Are they going to make the SEC tournament?

I don't know about that. I'm not sure. But I do think it was a nice memory, at least. We shared in that moment post-game. Chucky and I shared it the whole game, for 40 minutes. I enjoyed that. You're really stretching. In all seriousness, I didn't realize Liberty was 24-5. Liberty was undefeated in the league until last week. They've struggled a little bit.

Taken a little water here lately.

They lost a couple of games in a row. They were 16-0 until last week. Do you really think Ole Miss is good? No. What's their conference record? Not great. I'm just saying, listen... they're coming.

See, this is what happens after that comment. You start talking about it, and that's what happens.

They're listening, and they came for me.

That was it. They gave me the hook.

Wow. How about that? But what I'm getting at is, you do have 11 Quad 1 or 2 wins this year, which is really good. There are very few teams that have 11 Quad 1 or 2 wins.

That's true. We played a tough schedule. Some of these guys in our league that have won a bunch of games have won eight, nine, ten, or eleven Quad 4 games. We never want to do that. I just don't think that's the way to prepare yourself.

You have to schedule them first, then you have to win them. Our schedule next year is going to be tough; we're already working on that. I'm not going to say anything because Craig will get upset and I'll get called into the office tomorrow morning, but we have some really good games next year.

As I said, scheduling is only part of it. You have to win them, and we didn't win enough of them this year. You look back on it, and that Kansas game was a killer. We'd be in a much different position with that Kansas win. We played well, but we had some stuff go against us down the stretch big time that you don't often see happen when you're the home team. I think that would be one we'd really like to have.

Some of the conference games are what they are, but when you're an ACC team in your home gym, you would think you get a little better shake than we got. You look back on that one—that was a gut punch. That would have changed a lot for our season and our positioning right now. That's how thin the margins are. A one-point game against them would have changed a lot. Some of it was in our control, some of it was out of our control. I'll give you a trivia question.

I'll do my best.

There's a common thread between our loss to Kansas and our loss to Miami. Just look it up off-air. I'm not going to get into it. You'll probably find it.

I think I can glean it right now from what you just talked about. I actually think a lot of people here are picking up what you're putting down. I didn't say anything. There's a lot of nodding. I see what you're doing right there.

Got it.

I'll take a peek at that.

Probably means we'll have that first round of the ACC tournament.

Speaking of which, a public service announcement: this is the first time to my knowledge that this has happened, but the time of the ACC tournament games has flipped and been inverted.

That was part of the deal we made with ESPN to go from 20 to 18 games because they lost some inventory. They had to agree to do it, and their agreement was contingent upon being able to flip the bracket or do what they needed to do with it.

All in all, I know it's not perfect for the fans, but it's a great deal for us overall. We've gone from four teams to probably eight or nine in the NCAA tournament. All we had to do to get to 18 games was swap a couple of times in the ACC tournament. It's not all bad. We'll take it.

What it means is the one-seed will play at 7 o'clock on Thursday instead of playing at noon. They flipped it down because they want Duke to play in prime time, which makes sense. That gives more eyeballs on it and is better for everybody. The schedule starts on Tuesday with three games starting at 2 o'clock. I don't think we can playon  Tuesday. No, we'll play on Wednesday—either noon, 2:30, 7, or 9:30.

What time do you want to play?

I want to play at 7. I want the best seed possible, so maybe 2:30, because that's when the six-seed plays. But if you ask me selfishly: 7.

Well, you're not going to get your steak dinner the night before, so you'll be all right. We'll figure it out. No steak dinner for you.

That's fine. Nobody knows what we're talking about; that's an inside joke.

I'm going to hold you to it next year.