ACC tournament primer: Wake Forest as No. 6 seed
Wake Forest’s baseball team heads into a bit of a juxtaposition with this week’s ACC tournament.
To advance to the semifinals, the Deacons need to beat N.C. State for the fourth time in a six-day span, and then they’ll have to beat a Miami team they never played this season.
That will have to be the path for Wake Forest, which earned the No. 6 seed after sweeping N.C. State this past weekend and finishing with a 15-14-1 record in ACC play.
The sweep in Raleigh – the program’s first-ever road sweep of N.C. State – has probably sealed Wake’s place as an at-large team in the NCAA tournament. The Deacons entered last week on the bubble and won three straight road games against a team thought to be in the field.
Wake Forest has the 11th-best RPI in the country (fourth-best in the ACC, trailing Virginia Tech, Miami and Louisville). It’s worth pondering, if you’re not worried about getting ahead of yourself, if the Deacons could surge into a top-16 seed for the NCAA tournament with some success in Charlotte and host a regional.
Wake Forest hasn't reached the NCAA tournament since 2017, when the Deacons were one win away from reaching the College World Series.
But before we get to all that …
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Here are the nuts and bolts of what to know ahead of this week’s tournament:
When: Tuesday-Friday, pool play; Saturday semifinals; Sunday championship.
Where: Truist Field, Charlotte
(not to be confused with where Wake Forest plays football now – boy, the folks at Truist really got creative with stadium names, huh?)
Wake’s pool: No. 3 Miami, No. 6 Wake Forest, No. 10 N.C. State.
Wake Forest against the pool this season: 3-0 against N.C. State; did not play Miami.
Other pools: Pool A is No. 1 Virginia Tech, No. 8 North Carolina, No. 12 Clemson; Pool B is No. 2 Louisville, No. 7 Georgia Tech, No. 11 Pitt; Pool D is No. 4 Notre Dame, No. 5 Virginia, No. 9 Florida State.
Of note: The winner of Wake’s pool will play the winner of Pool B in the second semifinal on Saturday, slated for a 5 p.m. start.
The championship game is scheduled for noon Sunday.
Wake Forest pitching: This is the all-important question at this time of year for college baseball teams … and it’s one that didn’t have an answer as of Sunday evening, in relation to who will start for Wake Forest in the tournament.
The first question to be answered is whether ace Rhett Lowder will start Tuesday. Coach Tom Walter told Deacons Illustrated that it will depend on how Lowder, who is 10-3 with a 2.45 ERA and .229 batting average against, feels Monday.
If Lowder feels good, he’ll start Tuesday’s game on four days’ rest against the same team he threw an 89-pitch complete game last week. That would mean Teddy McGraw, who threw a gem in Wake’s shutout win on Saturday, would start Friday against Miami.
If Lowder can’t start Tuesday’s game, the Deacons will start Seth Keener – 5-1 with a 5.51 ERA in 18 appearances (10 starts) this season – with plenty of bullpen support behind him against the Wolfpack, and Lowder will start Friday’s game.