ACC Basketball: Power rankings and awards predictions

15. Wake Forest Demon Deacons

Wake Forest (6-5) is by far and away the leagues worst team so far and for the foreseeable future. In just this last week, Danny Manning’s Wake Forest team scored their first victory over a Top- 100 (NET Rankings) opponent with a win against Davidson but then countered that with a 4-point loss at home to Gardner-Webb.

In his fifth season at the helm of the Desmond Deacons, Manning has compiled a 60-77 record, which was highlighted in 2016-17 by the team’s only winning season in that span…they went 19-14. Despite recruiting an objectively skilled freshman class, Manning is certainly on the hot seat this year. Freshman Jaylen Hoard is the team’s second-leading scorer and was a top-25 player in last year’s class.

Getting Hoard, leading scorer Brandon Childress and the rest of his young group to come together in league play and scoring some unexpected wins, might just save Manning his job. Whether keeping coach around is a pro or con for fans…you’d have to ask them.

The biggest glimmer of hope for this faltering team is, in fact, its youth. The 2018-19 Demon Deacon’s top 6 scorers are comprised of 1 junior, 2 sophomores, and 3 freshmen. The word of the day in Winston-Salem is potential.

14. Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets

Josh Pastner’s years of riding the coattails of John Calipari have finally yielded an ultimate result. Once a heralded recruiter, Josh Pastner has the Yellow Jackets (7-5) both short on talent and wins. Without the “reload and re-aim” recruiting blueprint Pastner inherited at Memphis, the young coach has produced a slightly above even 41-40 record in his 2+ seasons in Atlanta.

This year’s Georgia Tech squad is short last year’s three leading scorers. The Yellow Jackets lost two seniors to graduation and sophomore Josh Okogie the NBA, making it hard to envision a team that had already went 13-19, could be very much improved this year. Sophomore Jose Alvarado and senior Brandon Alston lead the team in scoring and will try to set the tone going into conference play.

But if the season up until now is any indication, it’s going to be an uphill climb. The Yellow Jackets are 7-5 with only one win over a top-200 team (Arkansas) and last week dropped a game to the aforementioned “ACC killer” Gardner-Webb at home by a troubling 10-point margin.

Pastner and his team will have to find a way to lessen their turnovers and take better shots to get their bottom-tier offense to match their surprisingly formidable defense. But in all likelihood, this may be the last of Coach Pastner that we see in Power 5 basketball for a while.

13. Boston College Eagles

The Eagles (9-3) of Chestnut Hill return the ACC’s leading scorer in Ky Bowman. Eager to match last year’s production, Bowman is again near the top of the league in points per game, scoring 20.9 to go along with 7.8 rebounds and 3.5 assists, through 12 games. (Yes, 7.6 Rebounds for the 6-foot-1 guard…what?)

Although Head Coach Jim Christian has perhaps his best team in five seasons at BC, that’s unfortunately not all that meaningful. Last year’s team had been Christian’s best team in Chestnut Hill and they finished a mediocre 19-16. The Eagles’ pair of top-100 wins against Minnesota and Loyola-Chicago might indicate that this team will at least find themselves outside of the ACC cellar but a 7-point home loss to the Horizon League’s IUPUI in BC’s third outing and a 1-point overtime loss to Hartford in their most recent outing, has drawn back some of the loftiest of expectations for the team.

With an abhorrent ranked strength of schedule to this point, BC’s nine wins to date are a bit skewed statistic. They’ll find much stiffer competition and significantly more losses in a brutal ACC schedule in the months ahead. Expect Boston College to at least generate a few memorable moments against top competition before ultimately finding their way to middle tier NIT seeding.