A History of Silence

Jeff Teague looked one way. James Johnson looked another. And head coach Dino Gaudio spent so much time crouching on the sideline you had to wonder if he was coaching a team or wondering if the crop was about to come in.

What they were thinking was anyone's guess, though you didn't have to be able to read minds to have a good idea it involved a lot of frustration and a whole storm front full of and things that can't be printed on a family Web site.

What everyone else was thinking, though, was so crystal clear it might as well have been plastered over the midcourt logo: "Again."As in, Cleveland State did it again, which the headlines would yell in 120-decibel ink after the unlikely Horizon League champs swapped a Viking helmet for Cinderella's tiara.

But so too did Wake Forest. The Demon Deacons did it again.

For the second time in 23 years, Cleveland State plucked a higher seed in the opening round of the tournament. And for a countless time that now seems as much a part of the spring tradition as bats, balls and steroid scandals, a gruff, talented, defend-you-till-you-confess Wake Forest team finished the year in a stunning flameout, looking so fragile that you would've had to check the tags on their jerseys to make sure they weren't made by Swarovski.

And by the time you took a moment to think it might be different this year, it was already over.

No, make no mistake, Wake Forest didn't lose this game when it took the first hard punch from Cleveland State. Rather, Wake Forest went down for the count when they first touched gloves.


Yes, Cleveland State did it again.

But so too did Wake Forest.

"We have an incredibly disappointed locker room right now," Gaudio said. "Hopefully we learned from this experience."

If they did, it may be a first for this pillar program of North Carolina's Four Corners basketball, but a program that's left for home so regularly every March that birds have likely set their migratory patterns by it.

For the Deacons, Friday's night failure is only the latest verse in a long sorrowful tune. Wake Forest last went to the Final Four in 1962, before man set foot on the moon, television went to color or Dick Vitale shed his first hair.

Long ago, the Old Gold and Black became the Old Fade to Black

Since legendary coach Bones McKinney took those Deacons, led by Billy Packer (yes, the same), to the Final Four in the second year of the Kennedy administration, Wake Forest has been blessed with some of the finest players in league history and not once been around to see college basketball's finest weekend.

In just the last two decades, there was Rodney Rogers and a Sweet 16 exit.

When there was Randolph Childress, a man you could force to play with a medicine ball instead of a basketball and he'd still drop 30, and Tim Duncan, the ACC's all-time greatest true center, there was just one run to the Elite Eight.

In Duncan's senior year, the big man's team was stopped in the second round by Stanford even though Duncan scored 40 points and pulled down 42 rebounds in the two games.

Under the the late Skip Prosser, the Deacons had ACC player of the year Josh Howard and later Chris Paul, one of the great points in the history of a point guard league. Paul and Prosser led Wake Forest to the school's first No. 1 ranking. And then couldn't advance out of the second weekend, no more able to stop upstart West Virginia than they could've stopped a landslide.


So maybe it was only fitting that Wake Forest, in the year it again advanced to the top of the national polls in mid-January, crashed so badly that the NTSB will still be picking through the wreckage by the time hoops season starts again next year.

But that didn't make the loss any less horrific to watch.

The Deacons, whose starting lineup boasts three NBA draft picks and whose front line would be tall enough to post up Goliath and brawny enough to be sure he never messed with the Deacs again, were flat-out dominated by a guard-heavy Cleveland State team.

Against Maryland last week, Terps coach Gary Williams drew up the blueprint on how to beat the Deacons. Friday, Cleveland State coach Gary Waters put up the building, taking away penetration in the first half, forcing Wake Forest to shoot from outside and picking off oh-so-many passes that the Deacons tried to whip between two and three defenders, like they were doing their best impression of Brett Favre on a desperation drive.

And it was like watching an elephant get spooked by a mouse, and then watching that mouse whip out a pool cue and start wailing.

"We believed from the start we could play with them," Cleveland State guard Norris Cole said.

But did the Deacons return the favor?

Cleveland State won the opening tip, jumped out to a 9-0 lead and never looked back except to wave in the rearview mirror.

"A couple times, it became easy to score," said Waters, explaining that he had to slow his team down to maintain the tempo where he wanted.

And he was right. A missed Wake Forest alley-oop turned into a layup on the other end for the Vikings. A Wake Forest floater was volleyballed off the backboard, cracked like a screaming double off the wall, while the Vikings twirled into lanes as wide as a grocery aisle in the first half.

And Wake Forest's famed pack-line defense, which was No. 1 in the nation in January in defensive efficiency, was a flag tattered by a hurricane.

"They were just knocking down big shots," Johnson said. "They found a way to get open and hit shots. That was just that."

There were highlights for the Deacons, but they were largely flowers in a compost heap. Johnson played well and the offense eventually came alive. But while Gaudio left the Deacons to make stops on their own as momentum built and built in the sparsely packed American Airlines Arena, Cleveland State always found a way to answer. When they couldn't, Waters adroitly called timeouts and let the momentum flatten before returning to the floor.

In the second half, Wake Forest closed within seven with just under 14 minutes to go, Cleveland State called a timeout, got a defensive stop and later dunked off an inbounds alley-oop. Wake closed within six with 11:08 to go and Cleveland State drilled a 3-pointer and nabbed a steal. Wake closed again to within nine at 60-51 and Cleveland State answered by allowing just two free throws in the next five possessions.

They traded blow for blow, but it was jabs to hooks, swords to machine guns.

And it was predictable.

For Wake Forest this was a season that wasn't so much a roller coaster as a hike to the top of a mountain and a stumble all the way down. It was a plane out of gas with no parachutes, a race car stuck on full throttle heading into Turn 8 at Dover.

In mid-January, they were 16-0 and No. 1 in the nation. They beat North Carolina and Clemson then got clipped by Virginia Tech. They beat Duke in a gutty victory and then watched everything fall apart. Including the Virginia Tech loss and the Duke win, the Deacons lost seven of their last 15.

There were reasons, of course. There was discord on offense that made the Wake Forest game plan seem like the first player over the halfcourt line would chuck the ball while the rest of the team discussed the merits of the Ab Roller. The unstructured system that allowed Teague to score 34 in the upset of North Caorlina fell into a chaotic mess when the point guard's killer instinct appeared to wane. There was Teague himself, who had as many turnovers, seven, as shots and just three fewer than points. And, aside from Johnson, there was a group of guys who appeared to have so little enthusiasm you might've thought they were thinking about which deductions they might be able to take on their tax returns.

And there was only hint of what the true trouble might've been, aside from the 18 total team turnovers, from Coach Gaudio.

"We had a little bit of taste of the NCAA Tournament and a chance to come back again if we have the right mindset," he said.

Later, he would actually run down the highlights of his season, which seemed a little bit like extolling the virtues of a car you just wrecked.

"We're 6-1 against top 50 teams," he said. "Three-and-1 against Top 10 teams. We finished the regular season with 6 or 7 wins ... and started the year 16-0."

It couldn't have been any emptier if it was former FEMA head Michael Brown explaining how being an equestrian judge qualified him to run the nation's crisis management unit. Nothing he stated in that resume could've been further from the point and nothing he did helped do anything but pour more fuel on a hungry fire.

In fact, Gaudio's best argument to continue as Wake Forest's coach was perhaps this game itself, another in a line of postseason disappointments.

Because sadly for one of college basketball's marquee regular-season teams, it's an all too familiar ending.

Wake Forest did it again.