We'll round up all of the summer and preseason thoughts on the upcoming basketball season here.

Reminder to start this thread comes from today's announcement of the non-conference schedule -- well, most of it.

Doesn't really fall into the purview of anything specific other than summer content.

The ACC inviting Joe Lunardi to its spring meetings to tell the league's basketball coaches what can be done to get more teams into the NCAA tournament struck me as ... odd. Don't think I'm alone in that assessment, given how outspoken Lunardi has been about the downfall of the league.

So, I came up with some suggestions of other experts in their respective fields.

Let me know who I missed!

Going to try to handle this in the same way as the football thread ...

Starting with: Damari Monsanto's exit after a rollercoaster of 3 years.

Here's the quick story on Wake Forest heading to ECU.

Programming for the week: The earliest I'll head to Greenville will be Saturday. I'm leaking oil after this past week and Greenville is a 5-6-hour roundtrip. Maybe I'll get there for a Saturday night game against ECU, maybe not. I'm going into the week thinking I'll be remote-covering both WF and Duke throughout the weekend, just so that I can have as firm a grasp on one as I do the other.

Pitching for this week: Here's the juice for today's post -- Chase Burns is pitching on Saturday. That's the only definitive thing about Wake's pitching situation right now. It'll either be David Falco Jr. or Josh Hartle on Friday, and whichever one of them it isn't would get the ball on Sunday. But go ahead and lock in Saturday as Chase Burns Day.

The schedule for the ACC tournament has just been released. Wake Forest's games are:

Wednesday - vs. Pitt - 3 p.m.
Friday - vs. UNC - 7 p.m.

Wake Forest has to win both to advance -- people think the format is more complicated than it is, since the top 4 seeds can go 1-1 and advance, non-top-4 seeds have to go 2-0.

I'd almost guarantee that Wake Forest will have David Falco Jr. start the Pitt game, with bullpen to follow. And then in primetime, it'll be Chase Burns against the top seed in the league -- and the only one that put a loss on his record this season. That'll be must-see TV. If WF wins both games, it has Josh Hartle lined up on normal rest for a semifinal game.

Both games will be shown on ACC Network and the time element is subject to change, obviously, as there's one game before the Wed. game and two games before the Thur. game. And, ya know, weather.

It's 12:24 p.m. Tuesday and I have no idea how today's game against Liberty hasn't been cancelled yet ... but as of now, it's still going to be played.

As a programming note, I won't be going out there tonight if there is a game.

But I do have a story today: On Antonio Morales and the defensive improvements he made to get into the lineup.

As an additional programming note, the only game this weekend I'll be able to get to is the series finale at N.C. State. It's my wife's birthday on Thursday, and then I'm going to hit the UNC-Duke game on Friday night as I divvy up responsibilities.

Per his father, Fla. TE Tae'Shaun Gelsey will be in town in mid-June for his official visit, beginning June 14. Florida is the only trip on the books scheduled beforehand

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Going to thread together summer football content here. So, it'll be preview stuff throughout the summer -- some lists, predictions, My Takes, etc.

One programming note to get out of the way now: I'm not going to ACC media days in Charlotte this year. I have a family vacation scheduled and honestly, the event has become such a TV-focused one that I don't feel like I'm missing out on too much. Maybe I'll watch the press conference stuff when WF takes the podium -- but I'm not going to bend over backward to cover it.

One note off the spring game: I missed that Wake Forest announced captains that morning. They are: Taylor Morin, DeVonte Gordon, Luke Petitbon, Jasheen Davis, Kevin Pointer and Nick Andersen. All of them make sense to me. The only real takeaway I have is that it'll be the first year since 2019 that a QB isn't a captain. No surprise there and it's obvious why; just interesting to take stock of.

Recap of last night's 24-7 win over N.C. A&T.

Programming note: I'll be at the Friday night and Sunday games against Clemson with full stories to follow. I'm not going to make the Saturday game because I'm going to the Josh Level Classic, a HS basketball all-star game, in Greensboro. I know I'll have a story off of it about Juke Harris; probably will find some other angles while I'm there.

As a reminder: Weekend rotation is now Chase Burns-David Falco Jr.-Josh Hartle. Michael Massey will be unavailable this weekend.

So, here's the meat of the weekend: Recap of Sunday's doubleheader sweep of Western Carolina.

Something of a programming note/update moving forward: I'd like to get a My Take done tomorrow on where this team stands. Have some ideas percolating and frankly, I'm bored with waiting on basketball news that may or may not happen and an interview with Omaha Biliew that may or may not happen.

And then probably the most important thing I learned this weekend: Michael Massey is seeing a back specialist tomorrow (Monday). There is fear that he has a season-ending injury. Obviously he hasn't been "right" all season, as he was entering as a starter and has thrown over 70 pitches twice in 10 starts. I'm reminded of a quote from Tom Walter after his second or third start of the season that they were just going to be week-to-week with him, that sometimes he was going to be good, other times they'd be lucky to get 3-4 innings from him.

Pending how the appointment goes, the thought is that next weekend against Clemson, it'll be Burns-Falco-Hartle. Here was the full exchange with Walter about Massey today:

"Really happy with Falco, that looks like we’re going to stick with that against Clemson, as well. We’ll start Ben Shenosky on Wednesday."

How negative is the prognosis on Michael Massey?

"We won’t know more until tomorrow, he’s meeting with a specialist tomorrow to find out. There’s certainly a chance it’s a season-ender."

Is it his back?

"It’s his back, yeah. We thought it was his hamstring, but it turns out he’s got a little something going on with his back, so we’ll get him to a specialist."

Programming note of sorts on this week's baseball action:

I'll be headed to Elon for tonight's game; always good to check in with the alma mater, even if I don't recognize much of the campus less than 15 years after graduating.

And then I'll have weekend recap coverage of Wake's series at ND. Planning on getting a short story or two up in between tonight's game and the start of the series in South Bend.

Something of a programming note to get things started ...

Wake's first of 15 spring football practices is tomorrow morning. In the interest of full transparency, I'd lost track of the days and had no idea we had already reached this point until I saw Essex's tweet about covering it.

So, you won't see a practice report here tomorrow. Or for the rest of the week. I'm back on the road for the NCAA tournament (with Duke, if that's not clear). When they figure out cloning or teleportation, I'll be really good at handling this job.

While I'm on the subject ... the spring reports are going to be a bit different this season. I'm aiming toward more feature-type stories, less on the minutiae of which second-year receiver caught three passes during a 2-minute drill. I always say that something like 50% of the stories you write in the spring don't mean anything by the time fall camp starts -- so this is kind of my attempt to prioritize a little better and write more interesting stories.

Thread for this weekend's series against FSU (should've started this before the series opener but ... my bad).

Story off of tonight's game.

Programming note: Was planning on going back Sunday, alas and alack. I have doubleheader spring game duty tomorrow, so I'll have a remote recap of Wake's doubleheader.

I cancelled my season ticket renewal for football today. We have had tickets for over 20 years, but the NIL and Portal finally killed it for me. I will not renew basketball either. I will follow the Deacs, but more likely to go to see my Daughter;s DII alma mater on occasion, when feeling the need for live football or basketball.

Always feels like I'm dialed in to the preseason and early-season baseball coverage ... and it slacks off when basketball season hits tournament time.

So I wanted to thread together some links over the past couple of weeks as I've finished basketball season -- the games, at least, since the portal spins forward -- and dove into baseball (and spring football) season.

Feature on Jack Winnay.

Story on Wake's throttling of Coastal Carolina.

Weekend recap on Wake's sweep at VT.

I won't be in Boston this weekend, so it'll be a weekend recap of Wake's games up there. I'll have it updated every day as quickly as I can -- have a busy weekend, though.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention: The Orioles just got a sweep in Boston.

It looks like each side has moved on and the QB says there's no bad blood or anything

Preview for tomorrow afternoon's game.

Programming: I won't be there and don't have a stringer, so it'll be a remote story on this game.

Preview for tomorrow night's game.

Programming: I'll be tracking the game remotely and have a stringer lined up, Bob Sutton, for coverage from the Joel.

The 2026 class ranking has been expanded from 100 players to a full Rivals250: https://n.rivals.com/prospect_rankings/rivals250/2026

Ten highest debuts: https://n.rivals.com/news/rivals-rankings-week-ten-highest-ranked-debuts-in-the-rivals250

Adam Gorney goes position-by-position: https://n.rivals.com/news/tuesdays-with-gorney-new-2026-rivals250-released

Going to have a running thread for stories and updates this week.

Starting with a preview for tomorrow's game against Notre Dame.

Programming: I'll be there with full coverage.

Here's the recap of Sunday's game. There is also a brief recap of Saturday's game at the bottom.

Meant to post this thread going into the weekend with some thoughts in general and just ran out of time ... sometimes it really sucks feeling like I'm doing half as good a job as I could on two different sites. Oh well, that's a me problem and I'll try to figure it out.

My two cents: This WF has some things to figure out, too. As the story says -- I was thisclose to making it a My Take -- it's not that WF dropped a series. That was bound to happen. I can't remember if I actually wrote it anywhere to reference, but I know I told several people I thought they'd lose one of their first two ACC series.

It's the way this series was lost, the Sunday game, that sticks out like a sore thumb. The walks, careless errors in the field, wild pitches/passed balls ... it was all too familiar of what this team did a lot of in the years that weren't 2023. And Wake's offense isn't anywhere close to the 2022 level of being able to slug its way through games like that.

Now, it's one, one series. Against one of the best 3 or 4 teams in the ACC. It's barely mid-March and that's not when you press the panic button. But it's disheartening for a team to beat itself.

Preview for tomorrow night's game against Clemson.

Programming note: I won't be there, but coverage will come from Bob Sutton, my former editor when I worked in Burlington.

Preview for tomorrow night's game.

Programming: I'll be there with full coverage.

Going to thread together coverage from the first few weeks of the season.

Here's the story from tonight's season opener.

I know I won't be there for Saturday's game because of the basketball game at UVA; going to play it by ear for Sunday's game.