BLACKSBURG—If he’s said it once this season, Virginia Tech men’s basketball coach Seth Greenberg has said it 50 times, even during the stretch in which his team knocked off Duke and North Carolina:
“We have a small margin of error.”

Sure enough, that was one of Greenberg’s postgame remarks Wednesday night at Cassell Coliseum, where No. 16 Tech lost to N.C. State.  The Hokies had entered as the ACC’s first-place team; the Wolfpack, in last place.

“I’ve been in this a long time,” Greenberg told reporters.  “We’re not out-talenting people.  We can out-chemistry them, we can out-tough them, we can out-compete them, but we’re not playing with McDonald’s All-Americans.”

State shot 53.1 percent from the floor and dominated the backboards, outrebounding Tech 42-29.  The Hokies made only 21 of 60 field-goal attempts (35 percent).

“We did not play with a sense of purpose offensively, we didn’t play with a sense of urgency defensively,” Greenberg said.  “I don’t want to hear, ‘Well, Coach, it’s your fourth game in 10 days, they’re coming off a week off, they had a week to prepare.’  When you get to this point of the season, every single team has inconveniences and injuries and storylines, and the storyline today was real simple: We didn’t play well.”

When State’s first-year coach, Sidney Lowe, goes to his bench, the dropoff in talent is dramatic.  But four of his five starters scored at least 11 points apiece against Tech, and the other one, 6-9 freshman Brandon Costner, contributed nine points and a game-high 11 rebounds.  Junior swingman Gavin Grant, scoreless in the first half, finished with 16 points, 10 rebounds, three assists, three blocked shots and one steal.

“They’re a good team,” Greenberg said.  “They’ve got good players.  They might not have a lot of them, but they got six or seven guys that are all good players.”

—Jeff White