Rick Pedone
SportsEditor

Contributing mightily to the carnage that is our NCAA basketball tournament pool sheets are the Florida State Seminoles, an ACC basketball bit player that is doing a disservice to Seminoles fans by distracting them from information about Jimbo Fisher’s latest five-star football recruits.

Not to mention spring practice.

But, here are the Seminoles, blipping brightly on the tournament’s radar, and preparing to duel another bracket buster, Virginia Commonwealth, Friday at 9:55 p.m. in a Sweet 16 showdown in San Antonio that has millions of basketball fans asking, “Who? How?”

That the Florida Gators also are bivouacked in the Sweet 16 against BYU at 7:10 p.m. tonight doesn’t come as quite a shock. Coach Billy Donovan has done this several times before, even going so far as to win a couple of national championships.

We in Central Florida are familiar with the Gators in that they start 6-10 senior forward Chandler Parsons, a former Lake Howell High standout who somehow avoided an appearance at Kissimmee’s Great Florida Shootout prep basketball tournament.

Gators sophomore guard Kenny Boynton did come to the Shootout with Plantation American Heritage High in 2008, when the Patriots reached the championship game.

The Gators we were prepared for, especially since they are nicely parked in this year’s JV region, the Southeast.

This FSU thing, though, is quite the mystery. Who had Coach Leonard Hamilton’s collection of junior college transfers (there are eight on the roster) in the Sweet 16?

Quick, name two FSU starters.

The Seminoles knocked off No. 1 Duke in Tallahassee, and North Carolina barely escaped. But, the Seminoles always play like a Final Four team against Duke and N.C. It’s against the other nine ACC schools, and most everyone else, where the Seminoles often resemble a Top 100 unit.

Credit Hamilton for sticking with his program for the past nine seasons. These guys play some D. You can get away with basketball mediocrity at FSU for extended stretches (see just about everyone who has ever coached there), but Hamilton is showing signs of being the guy who might give Coach K, Roy Williams and Billy the Kid fits long term.

FSU hardly has a rich basketball tradition, but the Seminoles do flare up every now and then and scrape against the ceiling.

Only four decades ago, 1972, a young Coach Hugh Durham led FSU, then an independent, to the NCAA championship game, derailing Kentucky and North Carolina along the way in what then was a 25-team event. The Noles lost to one of John Wooden’s legendary UCLA teams, 81-76, in Los Angeles.

Durham took Georgia to the 1983 Final Four, where the Dawgs fell to eventual national champ North Carolina State.

Durham is the only coach to lead two Division I programs to their first Final Four appearances. Neither has been back.

Durham was a pretty good racquetball player, too He showed up at the Lake Wales outdoor courts one day in 1983, fresh off his Final Four appearance, with a friend of mine who played football at FSU.

Durham, then in his mid-40s, tall and spindly, wasn’t nimble, but he hit rockets. We made a deal. He gave me material for a puff piece, and I got out of the way each time he wound up.

It’s conceivable, but not probable, that the Seminoles could return to the Final Four. That would require flicking off underdog maximus VCU Friday and then upsetting No. 1-seed Kansas, the likely winner over Richmond.

Ready for FSU-Florida in the Final Four semifinals? The Gators must escape BYU superguard Jimmer Fredette today, and then the Butler-Wisconsin survivor Saturday.

That would be only four Final Fours for Billy the Kid.

Well, OK. Anyway, football practice goes on for a few more weeks.