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The highest NCAA Tournament seed Leonard Hamilton has attained at Florida State is a No. 3 seed. In order to notch that seed this season, the Seminoles either have to win at North Carolina this Saturday and win the rest of their regular-season games, or they need to go on a big run in the ACC Tournament, at least making the final if not winning the whole thing. Carving out either path will be hard, but FSU — barring a collapse — should be a No. 4 seed and probably won’t fall lower than a 5. From that position, a Sweet 16 berth is very much in play. Florida State basketball can’t realistically expect to be in a much better place this time of year.
Why has this season become a 4-seed-level season for FSU, as opposed to slipping in the back door as a 10 seed and sweating on Selection Sunday? As the Noles revel in an eight-game ACC winning streak — the longest in the history of the program since the move to the conference in 1991-1992 — one moment seems to stand out above the others. One moment took a fragile situation and transformed it into a night when a team gained a much stronger sense of its identity, its toughness, and its capacity to persevere.
Go back to Tuesday night, February 5, 2019.
The Carrier Dome was rocking. A 36-14 Florida State lead over Syracuse with 5:50 left in the first half had become a 55-52 dogfight with 10:10 remaining. The Seminoles were reeling in the face of the Orange’s 2-3 zone defense. Florida State had scored 19 points in roughly 16 minutes of scoreboard-clock time.
The value of that game was significant purely when viewed through the numbers: Florida State was 4-4 in the ACC at the time. Adding a road win against a good team, moving above .500 in league play, would have dramatically improved FSU’s NCAA Tournament odds. Everyone understood that.
However, the deeper significance of the Syracuse game lay in the fact that Florida State had blown a 15-point lead in a previous trip to the Northeast. The Seminoles had slipped on the banana peel at Boston College in January. If that waste of a 15-point lead had been followed by a failure to protect a 22-point lead in Syracuse, Florida State could have become a far more fragile team, a far less trusting team, and generally a team which wouldn’t have fought back against Louisville on February 9 or walked into Clemson on Tuesday night and smacked the Tigers by 13 points, 77-64.
If Florida State had lost that Syracuse game, this still would have been an NCAA Tournament team… but it would have been in the 8-11 seed range, not a 4 or a 5 with an outside chance at a 3.
Mfiondu Kabengele was the man at the heart of that transformative moment in Syracuse.
Kabengele scored eight points in 1:41 — eight points in the most meaningful 101 seconds of this ACC season — to turn that 55-52 score into a 67-52 FSU lead. What had become a slow-motion disaster turned into a restored Florida State team. The Noles pulled away to win 80-62 in the Carrier Dome.
They haven’t lost since.
A team needs to think about itself and process its identity the right way. A team won’t be perfect, but it needs to be assured that it can handle in-game crises and negative tsunamis of emotion. The ability to successfully create such self-assurance in Syracuse is the reason Florida State is 9-4 in the ACC, with three home games remaining plus a road date at Wake. This is why FSU has a real chance to go 13-5 in the ACC.
This is why Florida State basketball can’t realistically expect to be in a much better place this time of year.
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