Florida State may have found a good-luck charm.

Randy Spetman, hired last month as the athletics director at FSU, is here attending his first ACC Tournament. He replaced Dave Hart, “one of my mentors in the athletic world,” Spetman said. Hart, the former East Carolina AD who helped force the ACC’s most recent expansion, was ousted after 13 years at Tallahassee

Spetman, a 1976 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and a long-time pilot of B-52's, was most recently AD at Utah State in the Western Athletic Conference. The retired Air Force colonel expressed relief he won’t have to pick a successor for FSU football coach Bobby Bowden, the leader in career victories in major college history. The school already has announced that Jimbo Fisher, the offensive coordinator, will take over when Bowden decides to retire. “That’s like, phew, that I don’t have to do that,” Spetman said. “It takes a little of the pressure off.”

FSU’s 70-60 victory in its first-round game against Wake Forest may take a bit of pressure off, too. The basketball program last sent a team to the NCAA Tournament in 1998. Although coach Leonard Hamilton's contract was recently extended, he had only three NIT appearances in his first five years at FSU.

Florida State rode the scoring and leadership of senior guards Jason Rich (21 points) and Ralph Mims (16) to improve to 19-13, defeating a Wake squad that often displayed its youth. The eighth seed Demon Deacons (17-13) trailed most of the game, saw sterling freshman forward James Johnson shut out in the first half, had more turnovers than assists, and made fewer than half of their free throws

The win over Wake earned Hamilton’s ninth-seeded squad the privilege of facing top-ranked, No.1 North Carolina in Friday’s quarterfinals. The Tar Heels have won each of the teams’ three previous meetings in the ACC Tournament, and defeated Florida State twice during the 2008 regular season.

FSU has not won two games in the same ACC Tournament since joining the league in 1992, but Hamilton called the chance to face UNC “a tremendous opportunity.”

This is the fourth time in five seasons Florida State has won at least 19 games. Come the ACC Tournament, that level of achievement is good enough to produce ample speculation about the program’s NCAA prospects. This year is no exception.

Frequently burned, Hamilton refused to offer an opinion about what a win over North Carolina would mean come Selection Sunday. “If you try to come up with a theory where you understand all the criteria the selection committee is using -- and they’ve changed them three or four times the last two or three years – that will give you a headache,” he said.
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Not everything ran smoothly in the Charlotte Coliseum. The computer program keeping the game statistics during the Wake-FSU game went down at the start of the second half, as did the Internet connection.

The overhead scoreboard, which had been showing player scoring and fouls, reverted to displaying only game video.

But Brian Morrison, associate commissioner for media relations, had a backup plan.

For the past 18 years the ACC has employed a pair of faculty members from Wake Forest, Richard Carmichael and Elmer Hayashi, to keep score manually. Carmichael is Wake’s faculty representative for athletics. The mathematics professors (Hayashi  is retired) did a flawless job, successfully recording even the most esoteric stats such as deadball fouls and team rebounds.