Off the court with Chas McFarland

I covered No.1 Wake Forest's game at Clemson Saturday and was impressed by the whole Deacon team. The Deacs have a Noah's Ark of a basketball team -- two of just about everything -- and they have a real intimidator in the middle in 7-footer Chas McFarland. He alters a whole lot of shots he doesn't block and helps make the Deacs a really good defensive team (something they rarely were under the late Skip Prosser).

McFarland went off the court twice in that game with notable results. Here's ESPN's footage (posted on YouTube) of a Clemson fan tackling McFarland after he saved a ball out of bounds and fell into Clemson's student section. (One Clemson student got escorted out of the section for this foolhardy little act).

Another time McFarland piled into press row, right between where The Observer's Ron Green Jr. and myself were sitting. I had brought a 12-ounce can of diet Coke and had it sitting at the table. McFarland knocked that over, right into us (mostly onto Ron, however -- life is unfair like that sometimes). It could have been worse -- McFarland would likely have destroyed our laptops if we had had them sitting courtside there, as we would have had it been a night game.

In any case, we had a good, messy reminder the rest of the game of how hard Wake plays -- and how big McFarland is.