Highlights! Braxton Beverly saves the day for NC State

Improbability is a wonderful thing when it works in your favor. NC State did a lot to lose the game to Clemson over the last 10 minutes, and really the game had been lost, but then Clemson started missing free throws and Braxton Beverly happened.

If you ever wondered about the infinite cruelty of sports, just look at how well Clemson defended that final State possession, forcing a pretty awful shot from Beverly—who hadn’t made a three all day—which of course he drained. It’s a cold world, man.

But that’s what we love about sports—sports are never required to make sense, and that’s what can give us random one-time-out-of-a-hundred wins like what we saw this afternoon.

There’s about 500 different ways you could put the improbable nature of NC State’s win into some perspective. Here’s one: Marcquise Reed missed four straight free throws in the last 20 seconds. Marcquise Reed is a career 83% free throw shooter. What are the odds on an 83-percent shooter missing four in a row, under any circumstances? Pretty low, I’m guessing.