The scenario is simple for Georgia Tech: Beat Wake Forest and have Stanford lose at No. 14 Louisville.
Those results Saturday would give Tech the No. 7 seed next week at the ACC tournament in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s a pretty remarkable possibility given that less than two months ago the Yellow Jackets (16-14, 10-9 ACC) were among the teams treading water to stay above the cut line as one of the 15 teams to make the league’s postseason event.
“Just really proud of the group. We’ve been through a lot,” Tech second-year coach Damon Stoudamire said Tuesday after his team easily beat Miami. “The people who have been around the program, you can come to practice and do different things, but if you haven’t been there each and every day, you don’t really know. During the dark times and during the times when things were not going well, it would have been easy to waver. And nobody wavered.”
Tech was 8-11 and 2-6 in the ACC on Jan. 18 after a loss at Florida State. The Jackets have gone 8-3 since to slowly climb up the league table.
At the very least, Stoudamire’s team has clinched a bye into the second round of the ACC tournament next week. It will either play at noon Wednesday at the Spectrum Center or at 7 p.m. Wednesday, pending Saturday’s results around the league.
“We just gotta keep improving, we gotta keep going forward. I’m excited,” Stoudamire added. “We were able to clinch a bye and get that Tuesday off, which is huge in a lot of respects, especially for a team like ours when we have so many injuries. We need that extra day.”
Tech’s 89-74 victory over Miami on Tuesday gave the Jackets their third consecutive win and seventh victory in nine contests. They’ve continued to play good basketball despite only using seven or eight players, two of which are freshmen Jaeden Mustaf and Darrion Sutton.
Starters Nait George, Lance Terry, Duncan Powell, Baye Ndongo and Ibrahim Souare have come together as a formidable fivesome capable of beating any team in the conference. Tech’s run of success, which truly began Feb. 1, has included victories over Louisville, Clemson and Stanford, three of the top seven teams in the league. The Jackets can run that mark to four of the top seven with a win at Wake Forest at 2:15 p.m. Saturday.
If there is a bitter pill to swallow for Tech, however, it is that the team’s good form has come a bit too late. Road losses to Syracuse, Boston College, Florida State, Notre Dame and Virginia, and a loss at home to North Florida in November, severely damaged any chance Tech could have had at being an NCAA Tournament at-large team in 2025.
The Jackets also lost games to Georgia and Cincinnati at home and a neutral-site contest to Northwestern — all three of those squads have NCAA NET rankings inside the top 55. Tech, with a NET ranking of 106, was 3-5 against opponents considered Quad 1 this season and a win at Wake Forest would be a fourth.
If Stoudamire’s team had won a few more games along the way against some of those aforementioned teams, it would be in a better position here in early March.
“These last two games (wins over ACC bottom-dwellers Miami and North Carolina State), for me, have been great because these are games that we’ve struggled in. I think that we handled our business and we matured from that standpoint and our approach was the right way,” Stoudamire said. “I think that’s why you’re seeing growth and maturity with this group. It’s been an evolving process each and every day.
“This is the point where we’re at right now — it gets to the point where, even though we can’t get ‘em back, a couple of the guys have said to me, ‘Coach, if we would have did this earlier.’ I said, ‘We can’t get it back now though.’ That’s what happens when you start having success. When you have success, you won’t take those moments for granted.”
Tech faces a Wake Forest team (20-10, 12-7 ACC) that has been off since losing 93-60 at No. 2 Duke on Monday. The Demon Deacons have lost four of their past six and likely have played themselves out of a spot in the NCAA Tournament field.
The Jackets and Deacons tip off 15 minutes later than Stanford and No. 14 Louisville on Saturday, thus Tech’s tournament seeding made be set before the final horn sounds at LJVM Coliseum in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Tech’s first opponent in Charlotte won’t be known until later Saturday because of the logjam of teams jockeying for positions 9-15 on the final day of the regular season.
Regardless of where Tech ends up by the end of Saturday, or who it faces Wednesday in Charlotte, Stoudamire stressed his side just needs to continue to worry about itself.
“I think we just have to stay the course. I’m one that, I try to set the expectation for our team and not let people on the outside set the expectation. I think that as expectation emerges, in the locker room, so to speak, it has to emerge from them. Nobody can put expectation on them, at least not for me,” Stoudamire said. “I feel like we can do special things. I feel like I’m rubbing off on these guys and their mindset and the way they’re thinking. But I need to see a little more before I start to put something in the universe that I don’t know if we ready for yet. I like where we at.
“I think right now, for me, their play is letting everybody else do the talking. I think we just need to continue to do that.”
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