Dance partners set

Given the events of the last week, the Boston College men's basketball team seemed more than content to be dispatched to Cleveland as the No. 4 seed of the NCAA Tournament's Chicago Regional. It mattered little to the Eagles (24-4) that the Selection Committee did not keep them near home in Worcester to play their first-round game Thursday against 13th-seeded Pennsylvania, or that BC had been placed in the same regional as -- gulp -- Illinois, the tourney's overall top-seeded team.

Nevertheless, it seemed a blessing in disguise that the seventh-ranked Eagles -- who fell out of contention for a No. 1 or 2 seed by going 4-4 in their last eight games -- were shipped to Cleveland and able to get away from all the potential distractions posed by playing in Worcester, where the University of Connecticut was placed as the No. 2 seed.

BC will not have to contend with an avalanche of ticket requests, any venemous fallout from UConn's legion of rabid fans still upset over the Eagles' planned departure to the Atlantic Coast Conference, or have to deal with as many questions about its hasty exit from Madison Square Garden with Thursday's first-round loss to No. 8 seed West Virginia, 78-72, in the quarterfinals of the Big East tournament in New York.

"We won't have the ticket problems, we won't have the things that help you to break your concentration," said BC athletic director Gene DeFilippo. "We'll be able to get away and focus, and it'll be wonderful. From that standpoint, I think the committee did us a favor."

The Eagles, who were seeded No. 4 once before, in 1983 when they defeated Princeton in the first round of the West Regional, will face Penn (20-8), champion of the Ivy League, at Cleveland State's Wolstein Center at 2:55 p.m. The winner will meet No. 5 seed Alabama (24-7) or No. 12 Wisconsin-Milwaukee (24-5), the Horizon League champion coached by former BC grad Bruce Pearl (Class of 1982). Starting times have yet to be determined.

"I feel great about this team," said DeFilippo, who noted the last time BC was placed in the same bracket as the No. 1 overall seed was in 1994, when the Eagles upset top-ranked North Carolina in the second round of the NCAA East Regional in Landover, Md. "I think in light of what's gone on in the last couple of days, and our ability to concentrate, we've been a great road team. We've been a terrific road team, winning more road games the last 4-5 years than any other team in the Big East. So let's go play."

It will enable the Eagles to put behind them the distraction of Jermaine Watson's off-campus incident early Saturday morning, when the senior guard fled 4-5 men armed with guns, knives, and bats by jumping out of a second-story window after the assailants invaded his Brighton apartment following a party. Watson, who was treated for cuts to his left ear and left hand at Brigham and Women's Hospital, seemed eager to get out of town for a while.

"Sometimes we tend to thrive on being away and are able to focus on the task at hand," said Watson, declining to comment on the incident that is still under investigation by Boston police. Given what he had been through, Watson said, "I am glad to be able to focus on basketball."

So, was it good for the Eagles to be able to get away?

"There's good and bad in that," said coach Al Skinner, the Big East coach of the year who guided the Eagles to their fourth NCAA berth in the last five years, and five consecutive postseason appearances overall if you count a National Invitation Tournament bid in 2002-03. "I think it's easier when you leave, when you get away, to focus and concentrate when you just don't have the constant attention. I think because everyone felt we had a chance to be in Worcester, it may have been a little disappointing that way. But, at the end the day, I'm not real disappointed about going to Cleveland. It's not a bad trip for us, it's an easy trip, and I think we'll do OK."