ACC CHAMPIONS

And in more than one sense of the word, mind you.

Congratulations are indeed in order for the baseball team, which big-inning-ed its way to a four-game sweep of the ACC tournament and earned itself the ACC crown. Dan Grovatt is your tourney MVP - he went 8-for-15 (.533) with a home run and 5 RBI.

The tourney was won in the 9th inning against TFSU, but the real turning point was Grovatt's double in the 7th against Duke. Grovatt turned a harmless-looking couple of walks into a run and a dangerous scoring threat, which quickly became Duke's nightmare.

It was definitely the revenge of the low seeds: everyone in the tournament ended up with two losses, except two: us, 4-0 and tourney champs; and Boston College, who snuck in as the eight seed and lost only to Florida State, with wins over Georgia Tech and Miami. BC probably punched a ticket to the national tournament.

The slightly larger picture is this: going into the game, we were tied with TFSU for most ACC championships this season with five. So this was for, like, all the marbles. We now have six to their five: baseball, men's tennis, men's cross country, men's track and field, and men's and women's swimming and diving. (OK, five and a half - we share the track one with TFSU. Also interesting: four of their five are track and field and the fifth is women's cross country. So all they really do is run fast.)

It's the second season in a row that we've snagged six ACC championships and the second season in a row we've led the conference.

Now for the bitching - we do not, repeat not, get to host a regional this year, which is ridiculousness of the worst kind. Clemson (beat 'em), TFSU (beat 'em twice), GT (split the series), and UNC (mercied 'em) all get regionals from the ACC. It's a clear signal that the selection folks valued the regular season over the conference tournaments; besides GT and Clemson, Ole Miss, Florida and ECU also got regionals despite also taking giant dumps in their respective conference tourneys.

Well, we'll be a two-seed somewhere then, and one that certain lower-ranked hosts will be no doubt hoping to avoid. Where will it be? We'll find out tomorrow, but the process of elimination can tell us a few things. We're not going to one of the four ACC sites. Geographically and competitively, I can't see the NCAA shipping us to Fullerton (CSU-Fullerton), Irvine (UC-Irvine), or Tempe (Arizona State), and for competitive reasons I doubt we end up in Baton Rouge (LSU), Austin (Texas), or Oxford (Ole Miss) either. The two lowest-ranked hosts are Louisville and ECU and it's likely we end up in one of those two regionals.

As a final note, none of these games were televised up here, but the championship game is on tape delay tomorrow. Rest assured the TiVo is already set, and sometime this summer, whenever I end up getting around to it, highlights will be YouTubed.