That’s good.

I caught the score just before the half. It was surprising to be that far ahead, but also thought, “we can totally blow this lead.”

Later, I caught the score with a few minutes left. We had totally blown the lead. Fortunately the lead was quickly recovered and retained. The final score was 79-69.

The next day I checked the ACC standings. We’re 3rd. That just doesn’t seem right.

Like last year, I have done my best to roundup all the competing post-spring/pre-season rankings.

	Boston College	Clemson	Georgia Tech	Florida State	Maryland	Miami	Virginia Tech	Wake Forest
AJC (40)	-	28	-	20	26	32	10	12
Athlon (25)	-	-	14	-	-	24	9	-
FoxSports /CFN (119)	19	32	22	17	31	29	13	51
Lindy’s (25)	24	-	-	21	-	-	8	20
Rivals	24	25	-	20	-	-	7	-
SI.com (25)	-	-	-	-	-	-	7	-
Sportsline (25)	-	-	-	24	-	-	12	-

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The Tigers decided to turn the heat up in Jacksonville last night as they once again dismantled the Florida State Seminoles in a 5-1 win. This is the 3rd loss for the Seminoles to the Tigers this season (FSU was the home team every time), too bad it came in a showdown for a chance at the ACC title game. It looked as if the Tigers had a handle on the game from the get go and never looked back. Their determination payed off as they now have a chance to play in the title game against the same team that knocked them out of the CWS last year; UNC. That all depends on how the Miami vs Wake Forest game plays out on Saturday. By the way, if you’re a Tiger fan, you will be rooting for the ‘Canes.

In other news, the football team just picked up a huge commitment in the verbal of the number 1 running back in South Carolina, Andre Ellington for the class of 2008. The short of it is he runs a 4.4 40 and had 1600 rushing yards and 15 TD’s his Junior year. He says that his verbal commitment is firm and that he wanted to get the decision out of the way before he underwent his senior season. This takes care of one of the two RB holes for next years class, let’s hope that the Tigers can pick up another stellar one to continue the RB lineage that James, CJ and Reggie have established in The Valley.

Yesterday afternoon’s game became last night’s game. The first pitch was more than an hour behind the scheduled 4PM start time. So I was quite surprised when I turned on the TV around 9PM and found the game still on and in the 12th inning. I’m glad I kept watching.

The 12th ended without much excitement, all tied at 3.

Miami was able to get things going in the top of the 13th. “Tomas led off with a double to left-center” that was more like a bloop single with a fielding error, “and went to third on a passed ball.” Yonder Alonso then knocked Tomas in on a sac-fly to center. Tomas, in case you didn’t know is fast. Very, very fast.

Then Clemson got fired up in the bottom of the inning. Doug Hogan hit a single that the shortstop just kinda gave up on. With Hogan on first, the hit-and-run was on but DJ Mitchell could only muster a pop-foul to the first baseman. 1 out. Addison Johnson drew a walk as the light rain and fatigue were starting to bother the Miami pitcher. With runners on 1st and 2nd, JD Burgess hit a high bouncer over the first baseman’s head and into right field, bringing Hogan home and moving Mitchell to 3rd. Brad Chalk was given the intentional walk to load the bases and open up the force out at home. Miami decided to bring in a new pitcher to face the left-handed Alex Lee. “I wonder if he’ll bunt it,” I told my girlfriend. Sure enough. Lee caught Miami off guard as he squared on the 0-1 pitch and hit a solid bunt past the pitcher on the left side where no one, and I mean no one, had a chance to field it. “And,” to borrow from Marty Brennaman, “this one belongs to the Tigers!”

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• The baseball team had gained some momentum before the Hurricanes came to town. That momentum is now gone, as the ‘Canes took the first and the third games of the series. Sunday’s Game 3 score was 7-6.
• The 8th ranked women’s tennis team went to Chapel Hill and kicked some baby blue ass this weekend. The #13 Tar Heels lost 6-1.
• Men’s tennis, on the other hand, lost on Friday to #2 Virginia 5-2. And they also lost to Virginia Tech 4-3. The lesson to be learned is that people from Clemson just don’t belong in Virginia.
• The bad news continues on into the world of men’s golf. The team finished 10th at the Administaff ASU Invitational. Coastal was first, UNC was 2nd. USCe finished 4th. The team did finish 8 shots better than 15th place USC-Aiken.

And for the golf team alumni at the Shell Houston Open:

• Lucas Glover missed the cut.
• J. Byrd earned $66,660 by finishing tied for 19th at -8.
• Matt Hendrix had three solid and one “oh my god what happened” rounds en route to winning $34,100 and finishing at -5.
• Charles Warren fared less well, but still made the cut. He finished tied for 66th at 2 over. His check was for $11,300.
• Finally, DJ Trahan finished all alone in the 8th spot. He was 10-under for the weekend and 11-under for the tournament. That performance was worth $170,500.

It may be worth noting that the 5 golfers above combined to win $282,500. I’m fairly certain they won more in a weekend that all the Gnomes make combined in a year. Which all goes to show that the time spent in the classroom would have been better spent harassing the cart girl.

Clemson’s future out-of-conference opponents are always up in the air, but at least we know which ACC teams we’ll play through 2015 (assuming the conference stays together).

2007 Clemson Football Scheduled Opponents (in no particular order)::
@Maryland
Wake
@ NC State
FSU
BC
@ Ga. Tech
@ Duke
Va. Tech
(OOC: Furman, UL-Monroe, some MAC team, SC)

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Clemson’s caused us all enough misery over the last two weeks, so let’s look for joy in other people’s misery.

My misery: For weeks I’ve continued to say that Wake Forest was just a ragtag bunch of pretenders. Well those little bastards have done nothing but prove me wrong, wrong, wrong, and I feel like a giant retard for it. And in general my ability to correctly pick the winners of ACC games is roughly about 40% at this point. I made a prediction table after week 8. Based on that, this week’s picks are: Clemson over NCSU, BC over Duke, FSU over Wake, Maryland over Miami, and Georgia Tech over UNC.

Boston College: They were just about to ease into the Atlantic Division Drivers Seat until they got beat by that indefatigable Wake Forest team. Ask yourself this though, are a pair of losses to Virginia Tech and Maryland really worse than a single loss to Wake Forest. That’s a toss up right there.

The ACC Florida Teams: FSU and Miami are having a rough go of it this year. Each team is just 5-4. And thus far they both have losing records in conference.

Miami: Speaking of the U, they’ve got horrible, horrible fan support. A pretty good Virginia Tech team came to town last week and only 41,504 fans showed up at the Orange Bowl.

With all the regular season travels completed for the Tigers, everyone is glad that the team can stay home and play only in Death Valley. But just how important is playing at home? I decided to look into the numbers to see.

To keep things relevant, I looked at only the statistics since Tommy Bowden became coach

starting in the ‘99 season. Since that time his teams have gone 36-12 at home, 19-20 on the road, and 1-0 at neutral sites during the regular season. That leaves the bowls as neutral site games, in which Bowden is 3-3. Road trips are clearly a 50-50 proposition.

For simplicity, I’ll leave out neutral site games.

In percentage form, the home winning percentage is 75, with the road being 48.7. So the chances of winning by playing at home are improved by about 54%.

However, with two important league games looming, I went ahead and took only league games into consideration. Here, Bowden is 20-10 at home, and 16-16 on the road. Compare that 66.7% home winning percentage to the 50% road winning percentage, and the team is only about 33% more likely to win any given league game at home.

There is some bad news to be added to this year’s 4-0 start at home. So far under Tommy Bowden, we’ve never had an undefeated home season. And through 7 full seasons, there have been only three 1 loss seasons. However if we consider only home conference games, there is a lone season where the team did not drop a conference game at home. That year was 2003.

So how does Clemson compare to other ACC teams under their current head coaches? Read on…
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