Tudor's Take: Teague's the ACC's best

Right now, right here, Wake Forest’s Jeff Teague gets my vote for ACC basketball player of the year, and that’s even after he didn’t have a particularly great performance in the Deacons’ 70-68 win over Duke on Wednesday night in Winston-Salem.

That said, I still want to see what Teague and his team can do on the road under pressure in big games.

More than any other team in the conference, Wake has benefited from a favorable front-side schedule. Until some other team proves me wrong, the ACC is a three-team league — Wake, Duke and North Carolina.

The schedule broke in such a manner that the Deacons caught Carolina in Joel Coliseum — which may be replacing Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium as the ACC’s version of living hell night — and the Blue Devils in the same rollicking atmosphere.

Wake’s fans, unlike those at Duke, don’t get so much into one-liners and Sports Center highlights, simply make a ton of noise. It was loud in that building against UNC on Jan. 11. But take my word for it, the five minutes before the start of the game against Duke was right there with N.C. State’s Reynolds Coliseum during the David Thompson Era, Carolina’s Carmichael Auditorium in the mid to late ‘ 70s, and Maryland’s Cole Field House when Lefty Driesell was stomping and steaming.

To put it another way, even Dick Vitale was impressed. No one appreciates loud more than Vitale. (Poet that I am.) “Jim-mi-nee!” Vitale said about three minutes before the game’s start.
“Where in the world did Wake Forest ever find this crowd?" The Deacs bled the most out of their fan base, too.

But now, the schedule turns. There almost certainly will be a letdown at Georgia Tech on Saturday, followed by another at Miami on Feb. 4.Wake will not play another game in The Joel until they host Boston College on Feb. 8, followed fairly fast by trips to State, Duke, Virginia and Maryland.

For now, I’m on the Teague bandwagon. But between now and voting day (March 9) I want to see how this act plays on the road. The same goes for Wake coach Dino Gaudio. How could you possibly vote for someone else as league coach of the year at this point?

But in the most technical sense, Wake is 2-1 at home, and the resounding wins over Carolina and Duke easily overshadow what happened against Virginia Tech on Jan. 21, when the Hokies’ Seth Greenberg had a game plan, and the Deacs turned the game’s outcome over to their homecourt edge and momentum.