Hard reality
North Carolina State is learning the lesson that Virginia learned last year.
And it's a tough one to have to swallow down - realizing, that is, that you're a second-tier basketball school, even if you're in the second tier in the best basketball conference in the country.
State went after biggies like Rick Barnes and John Calipari when its head-coaching job came open earlier this month. Virginia took a similar approach in apparently seeking out Barnes and Kentucky head man Tubby Smith last year before landing DePaul coach Dave Leitao to take over the reins of its hoops program.
The upside to the move is that Leitao seems to have worked out to date - he took a team picked to finish 12th in the 12-team Atlantic Coast Conference to the NCAA tournament bubble before finishing 15-15 in his first season in Charlottesville.
The reality, though, that a program that was at the center of the basketball universe for four years in the early 1980s wasn't worthy of the attention of coaches like Smith and Barnes tasted like castor oil for more than a few in Wahoo Nation.
Denizens of the Pack Nation, for whom the memories of the national titles that its school won in the 1970s and 1980s are starting to fade fast, would be well advised to begin puckering up.
- Chris Graham