weekend review

So it's been kind of a crap spring so far, relatively speaking.  It's much colder than last year's, I've had all this damn work to do, and worst of all from the actual perspective of the blog, the lacrosse team has stunk up the joint.  We've been spoiled, man - I've gotten used to spring being the season when being a UVA fan is at its peak.  Weekend reviews speak of glorious triumphs on two fields at once.

So this weekend was pretty refreshing.  Even if the lacrosse game ultimately meant very little in the grand scheme, hey, at least it was a Senior Day win, and it was nice to watch the ball go in the net for once.  Nobody's scored 12 goals on Bellarmine all year, not even likely #1 seed Denver.  A few bullets on that game:

-- Mark Cockerton scored four goals, but the game's MVP is Tyler German, who won two out of every three of his faceoffs.  Mick Parks was absent for personal (not disciplinary) reasons, and might find his seat taken when he gets back.  German was only 5-for-14 coming in, but certainly deserves a few shots against Maryland next weekend.

-- Also, while we're on the subject of faceoffs, anyone who didn't enjoy watching Thompson Brown truck his opponent on the garbage-time faceoff he took must not actually like lacrosse.

-- I'll touch on this more when the season's over and I write a seasonal postmortem, but one thing I've gotten tired of is watching our shooters try the same shot over and over with the same result, which is usually a save.  I lost track of how many times our guys were on the doorstep and tried to lob the ball into the net as if there were no goalie, which was a failed strategy every time.

-- I was incredibly surprised to see UVA credited with 23-of-24 on clearing attempts.  We had to be worse than that.  Had to be.

-- Maybe the best thing of all was scoring a goal with three seconds left in the third quarter after watching every team all year do that to us.

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Baseball brought the brooms to Davenport this weekend and knocked Florida State off their top-5 perch.  Before the series I wrote a Sabre post that said something to the effect of: if the team could simply go .500 in the rest of their ACC games and win all the nonconference ones, they'd be in the conversation for a top-8 national seed in the tournament and a near-certain regional host.  That'd have put them at 41-14 plus whatever happened in the ACC tourney.  Now they've swept a team that they could've easily dropped two games to.  It's not a stretch to say they could win their next ten in a row and be 45-6 going into the Carolina series.

That said, finals break is before the Duke series.  At the moment, Duke is in the 9th slot overall in the ACC, with VT in the 8th slot, a mere one game ahead.  Duke has Maryland this coming weekend, so the odds are decent that they'll pull ahead of the Hokies.  So just to be dicks I think we should sweep VT and then activate our secret powers of post-finals suckery to get swept by Duke.  Just for a laugh at the Hokies' expense.  And as a public service - to spare ACC tournament viewers the agony of the eyes.

Yet more bullets from the weekend:

-- It's pretty amazing how we're 36-5 and we don't even have any good players.  The ACC media has not yet seen fit to award even one single player of the week honor (or pitcher) to a Cavalier.

-- It's time to put some padding on the wall next to the right-field bullpen.  Past time, really.  Joe McCarthy jammed his finger (that's not, like, Kevin Ware-gruesome, but you click on that link, you'll see a finger going a direction it weren't ever meant to) catching a foul ball, and slammed his elbow on the cement top in the process.  And later, FSU's right fielder Jameis Winston nearly broke his kneecap sliding into it in another foul ball attempt.  Winston happens to be FSU's selection for starting quarterback in the fall - we'd have looked like a bunch of assholes if he missed the year because of our brick wall.  I seem to recall an Irvine player taking a hard run at that wall as well, and coming out rather the worse for the encounter.  Let's get some padding there before someone breaks their skull open.

-- Winston, by the way, is one of the least comfortable-looking players I've ever seen patrol an outfield.  When Derek Fisher hit his three-run triple, I swear Winston ran right past the spot where the ball eventually landed.

-- Pretty much every pitcher we ran out to the mound had themselves a really nice weekend.  Scott Silverstein pitched seven innings of shutout ball and FSU was held to one hit in a game for the first time since 1998.  Nick Howard was wild for two innings and then got himself together - and that's the kind of thing pitching coaches love.  They know you'll be off your game sometimes.  If you can get back on, mid-contest, that's the mental makeup they're looking for.  I'm awfully surprised at the impotence of FSU's bats, though.  Much credit goes to our pitchers, but you have to cast an eye at the FSU bats as well, who might've hit two or three balls hard all weekend.  So many of their hits were Texas Leaguers or choppers that slithered just past the infielders.

-- Kyle Crockett's instructions for his trip to the plate on Sunday (necessitated by the lineup shifts following McCarthy's injury removal) basically boiled down to this: Just keep the bat on your shoulder unless they're all fastballs, in which case I guess sure why not try a swing just for giggles.  He will probably never let his teammates forget the resulting base hit.

-- The following batter was Brandon Downes, and the strategy looked awfully odd.  Downes was still bunting with two strikes.  My guess: The coaches decided that even a foul-bunt strikeout or allowing the out at third was preferable to the possibility of Crockett having to try and slide to break up a double play.  As it turned out, the out at third is what happened, and at that point, Crockett was moved up a base and he wasn't going to be caught up in any double plays.  Good thing he didn't have to slide into home, though.

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I'll do a recruiting board update later, but yes, J.J. Jackson committed to basically take Chris Nelson's spot - which, assuming we can land Andrew Brown, is a good positional tradeoff because Jackson plays a position of much greater need.  The coaches were dead serious about trying to land Jackson even though his offer list sucks, so they must like something.

Even more interesting, really, are these two Monday developments: the post-spring depth chart and the ACC's media rights thingy.  The depth chart doesn't change too many of my post-spring impressions, but does leave a few surprises.  The list of position switches that I can see:

-- Pablo Alvarez from the bottom of the secondary depth chart to the bottom of the WR depth chart.  This is a likely indication that Alvarez isn't to be counted on for contributions.  Injuries played a major role in that.

-- Luke Bowanko to LG and walk-on Jackson Matteo to center.  That's the top surprise right there, and somewhat related is Sean Cascarano sticking at RG while Conner Davis moves to the second string and Jay Whitmire has the RT job.  (And Cody Wallace now backs up Whitmire instead of a guard.)  This Matteo thing could either be really good or really bad.  A walk-on freshman beats out a senior for one of the most important positions on the line.  I could see that turning out very badly, as Matteo hasn't played a single down of college football.  It's just as possible that Matteo is a minor prodigy with a talent for the nuances of the center position that Bowanko never had; center is a tricky thing to master.  This brings us the potential to have four years of the same center, which is the kind of continuity that coaches salivate over.

-- Kelvin Rainey at safety is also interesting.  As is Wil Wahee at second string corner.  After Matteo, the next thing people are talking about - in this case putting up a whiny fuss about, more than anything else - is Maurice Canady backing up Drequan Hoskey.  Even if the crowd that thinks he's the second coming are correct, being the third cornerback is like being the third wide receiver.  He'll have plenty of time on the field.

Part two of the weekend review runs tomorrow, as the brave new ACC - which includes the first wave of Notre Dame games - deserves its own post.

weekend review

Back in 1999, Alabama had a kicker named Ryan Pflugner.  Besides the fact that my brain is calibrated to remember absurdly trivial details (and forget that I have homework due this week) there's no good reason for me to remember this, except for one: the 2000 Michigan-Alabama Orange Bowl.  I don't even remember who kicked for Michigan in that game.  But I remember Pflugner, because Michigan needed overtime to win that game and won it when Pflugner honked an extra point wide right.  Wasn't even blocked.  Just, oops.

The UVA side of me might now have its own Ryan Pflugner in the person of Sam Ficken, the poor bastard who Penn State depended on for points after its sputtering offense failed to muster any forward progress for most of Saturday afternoon.  Ficken failed in a way that only a small fraternity of fellow kickers can empathize with (oh hell, I'll come right out and say it: Ficken's kicking looked like my golfing), and Penn State's kicking game left 13 points in all on the field instead of putting them on the board.  Bill O'Brien will probably talk all week about how it wasn't an individual failure, the whole team could have done better, and then trot someone else out for placekicks next Saturday, because that is how coaches handle this.

So it's obviously natural to assume we only won because of that.  It's true, but it's just as true that you have to put the other team in position to make those mistakes.  You might call it an ugly game because the offense looked so out of sorts most of the time, but you couldn't have asked for a better performance out of the defense.  Most teams aren't going to be as offensively inept as Penn State, but that doesn't take away from the yeoman work done by the defense.

As a result, we sit here, 2-0 for the second straight year, and for the second straight year after a narrow, come-from-behind win against a Big Ten team, with a game-winning drive (OK, last year it was game-tying) engineered by Mike Rocco.  Fans are rightly concerned about the rest of the season what with that offensive line looking pretty offensive and affording us no running game whatsoever, but one thing people always do too much of is to assume the rest of the season will look like the most recent game.  Hence the college football tradition of hilarious overreaction to losses.  The possibility for improvement (or injury, or regression, or other teams getting better faster) is rarely considered.  Therefore we see a lot of gloomy predictions for the season.  I am unapolegetically optimistic at this point, despite all.

These next two games - Georgia Tech and TCU - are tough, but keep in mind I said I'd be OK if we won just one game in this three-game stretch, and we've accomplished that.  After that....

-- After TCU, we could easily see a four-game winning streak - Louisiana Tech, Duke, Maryland, and Wake Forest await. 
-- Wake, Miami (which is not a good team), Maryland, and UNC (which lost to Wake) are all at home. 
-- If Wake can beat UNC - this is the same Wake that beat Liberty by three - then so can we.
-- NC State isn't too remarkably impressive so far either.

There should be no reason that a repeat of last year's 8-4 season isn't achievable.  Achievable, I said, not guaranteed.  I won't be all kinds of surprised if we don't make it.  You shouldn't be all kinds of surprised if we do.

Short-form items:

-- That run-blocking was horrible, though.  When Penn State didn't stack the box, typically we ended up with no gain.  When they did, we went backwards.  The coaches will need to keep the possibility of moving Morgan Moses to guard in their back pocket, just in case.

-- Steve Greer: 15 tackles, two sacks.  Henry Coley: 11 tackles, one blocked kick.  Laroy Reynolds: 9 tackles.  And Daquan Romero looked decent when he was in.  The linebackers definitely ruled the day.  On both sides of the ball, mind you, but ours turned out just a little better.

-- Jake McGee looks like an absolute matchup nightmare.

-- Mike London needs to forget about this fascination with quarterback rotations.  It has yet to ever result in good things happening.  About the only useful thing gained from putting in Phillip Sims for two drives was to bring the hype train back to earth; Rocco wasn't having an awesome game, but Sims clearly isn't ready.  It's one thing to look really damn good when the game is in hand and there's no pressure and you've been set up for success, but it's a completely different story with the game on the line.

-- PSU's offensive line is pretty crummy for the most part, and they have one wide receiver worth a damn, and even that guy (Allen Robinson) had a really bad drop that cost them a ton.  And all that said, I'm still coming out encouraged by the pass rush and the play of the secondary.  We did have to dial up some blitzes in order to record any sacks, but Eli Harold and Ausar Walcott got into the backfield pretty effectively.  There is some solid tackling going on in the secondary, too; I like the fundamentals that I see out of Demetrious Nicholson and Anthony Harris in that respect.  Nicholson had a good day outside of getting torched on Robinson's touchdown, and kudos also to Drequan Hoskey for sticking with his assignment and ruining Penn State's flea-flicker. 

-- PSU would later score on that opening drive, but I wasn't actually too perturbed about that.  Penn State needed 17 plays to score.  No offense in the world can replicate that often enough to win.  What was perturbing was handing the ball right back, immediately.  Sure, we needed Sam Ficken to kick the ball everywhere but between the uprights for us to win, but PSU needed our help in the form of friendly turnovers in lousy field position in order to even put Ficken in position to miss.

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Prediction summary time: let's see how I did this week.

-- UVA's run game isn't any better than last week's.  In retrospect, kind of a weak prediction.  True, but weak.  If I'd wanted to get really ballsy I'd have said the run game would've sucked giant anteater nuts and I'd still have been right.

-- On the flip side, Penn State is held to about 2.5 yards a carry.  We're going to take out their fake punt, because that's special teams and not strictly the run game, and what we get is 102 yards on 41 carries for an average of 2.49 yards per attempt.  Niiiiiiice.

-- Mike Rocco tops 300 yards again.  Well dammit, he might have if we hadn't seen at least three flat drops.  Adrian Gamble should've had that beautiful fade throw in the first quarter, although that will come with a little experience - that is, he'll learn that when the coverage is to the inside like that, the quarterback ain't throwing where the coverage is.  Dominique Terrell also stonehanded another perfect strike from Rocco.  As it is, I lose this one since Rocco totaled only 258 yards.

-- Darius Jennings goes for 100 yards and a touchdown.  Jennings didn't reach either milestone; if I'd said Jake McGee here I'd have given myself this one since McGee ended up with 99.  But one thing is coming clear regardless: Jennings is rapidly establishing himself as easily the team's most dependable wide receiver, and is on pace for a 900+ yard season.

-- McGloin completes 60% of his passes.  No.

-- But doesn't top 7 yards per attempt.  And yes; he scraped by at 5.6, which is another encouraging thing for our defense.

3-for-6 this week; add to my performance last week and I'm now 5-for-11.  Not completely terrible, but the goal is to be over 50%.  I predicted the win, yay me, but managed to predict a margin exactly the same as the spread, which makes me 2-0 straight up and 0-0-2 ATS.

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It's late and you've been waiting patiently all day, so I'm cutting this one off at the knees and moving the Senior Seasons feature to tomorrow.  One last depth-chart note: no substantial changes this week, or changes of any kind really, except that the team announced that Pablo Alvarez is out for the year, which makes Anthony Cooper the backup at strong safety.  I'll get around to putting up the adjusted depth chart sometime before Thursday.

weekend review

Well, the big news of the weekend was the bad news of the weekend: James Robinson's decision to go to Pittsburgh instead of UVA.  Damn you Pittsburgh for stealing Cam Saddler and what was that other guy's name in football and now the one guy that would've fit like the last puzzle piece from our basketball team.  Right out of our backyard.  Tony Bennett is assembling a lot of talent for the coming years, and a point guard like Robinson would've fit like a glove.  Not least because Sammy Zeglinski leaves after this year and that means 2012 we have Jontel Evans and nobody else manning the point.  Malcolm Brogdon may get a look but that's not ideal.  What to do now?  The staff will go after L.J. Rose, probably with the fullest-court press imaginable, but that's not a likely proposition.  Chances are either they grit their teeth for 2012 and try to make the most of it with Evans and whoever else can handle a ball - or they take a fallback option and try to turn mid-major talent into an ACC player.  Either way, the 2013 PG crop (Nate Britt, Big Cat Barber, etc.) just became the most important recruiting challenge Tony Bennett's yet had in his UVA career.

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Fall camp chugs on, and so do position switches, and this means we need a depth chart update.  Last week we covered Ryan Cobb's departure and Zach Swanson's move to fullback (the latter may have happened before the former, and if so might well have precipitated it) and this week, the dominos keep falling into place:

- Demetrious Nicholson won himself the starting cornerback job opposite Chase Minnifield.  That puts Rijo Walker in a bit of a playing time bind, as the coaches think highly of Dom Joseph.  Joseph could play safety, if necessary, but that wouldn't be ideal because there's a crying need to develop playable depth at safety for 2012 and beyond.  Right now the backups are LoVante' Battle and Pablo Alvarez, neither of whom have anything resembling decent game experience at safety.

- Vincent Croce, to nobody's surprise, moves to DT from DE.  Redshirt year is a lock barring an epic DT disaster, because he needs to pack on the pounds.

- The same article is primarily about Ausar Walcott's move back to linebacker.  The stay at defensive end?  More a wake-up call to Walcott than anything else.  Get him out of his comfort zone, remind him that his position on the team is not to be taken for granted.  Though he's been running with the third-team defense, it wouldn't surprise to see him make a leapfrog move or two up the depth chart as the season goes on.

- A few other changes have been made, most notably listing Landon Bradley as injured, and shuffling the quarterbacks.  London hasn't come out and said it, but for all purposes now, Mike Rocco is your starter.  The backup hasn't been really decided yet, I don't think, but for now it's David Watford since that's where the reps are going.

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Another sign that football season approaches: for some, it's already started.  It's weird that seasons start earlier in the South and later as you go north, which I guess a Southerner would say that's because they give a shit down there.  Me, if I were being recruited for college football, not doing my conditioning drills in 500 percent humidity would be a real attraction, and I'd feel awful weird about being done with the regular season before Halloween.  But Georgia is Georgia (or Jawjuh depending on your perspective), and that's where we go for the first edition of Senior Seasons this year.

In case you're wondering, this is the part of the every-Monday weekend review where I check in on how our commitments did in their game that weekend.  Only one this week....

Buford 42, Blessed Trinity 0: This is C.J. Moore, who had a nice game with an interception and a 33-yard touchdown catch.  Buford has won four straight state championships at the AA level in Georgia, which goes from A to 5A.

Despite also living in Georgia, Greyson Lambert waits til next week to start his season, but in a scrimmage a week ago he threw for 192 yards and three touchdowns in one half, before the scrimmage was called for weather.

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I leave you til tomorrow with the most unintentionally ironic thing that has ever or will ever emerge from an ESPN the Magazine article, in this case primarily about Ohio State president Gordon Gee:

At Miami, president Donna Shalala personally hires each coach.  She studies the NCAA rulebook and weekly compliance reports.  During football games, she scours the sidelines for suspicious guests.  "I'm on alert all the time," she says.

You could not have timed this quote better with a stopwatch.  How's that 24/7 alert status working out?

some stuff

Stuff goin' on - let's do a little catching up on it.

- Hat tip to Gobbler Country on this one; you can see a screenshot of the new football uniforms in action here. Screenshot because it's from NCAA '11. Picture #14 is what you want. There's only one problem: they messed them up. The players in the screenshot are wearing the NFL-style socks that disappeared along with most of the rest of Groh's additions to the look. (You have to admit, it probably looks better that way because there's hardly anything on the uniforms to break up all that white.) There's also no ACC patch, even though the rest of the depicted ACC teams have them. (Nutjob conspiracy theorists, you now have your flimsy ammunition: Big Ten teams wear no conference patch.) And I can't tell if there's an orange outline on the numbers, but if there's supposed to be, it's nowhere as distinguishable as it is on the real thing.

I still say this new look will be a lot better if we keep the white-on-white and blue-on-blue to a bare minimum.

- All-ACC baseball teams are out and the Hoos are very well represented. As you'd expect from the regular-season champion, no school has more players named than UVA does; seven in all with three on the first team (Arico, Gosselin, and ACCy Young winner Danny Hultzen) and four on the second team (Morey, Parker, Werman, and Cannon.)

- This has nothing at all to do with UVA athletics, but please oh please oh please let this guy's middle name be Maury.

- Speaking of baseball, the ACC tournament got off on the right foot for UVA with a 6-4 win over Boston College this afternoon. A game that was a little closer than we'd have liked to see means that top long reliever Tyler Wilson is now used up til Saturday and won't be available tomorrow. That puts a little more pressure on Morey to go a long way. However. Florida State lost to Miami today as well, so in all but the most unlikely of scenarios (that being BC winning both the rest of their games) UVA will have to beat Miami to play on Sunday. The flip side is that beating FSU tomorrow might not be absolutely necessary.

In fact, the strong possibility exists that it'll be totally meaningless. The early game tomorrow is Miami/BC. If Miami wins, the FSU game won't mean anything and the Miami game will determine the championship. Why? Say we lose to FSU but then beat Miami. Then we're 2-1, Miami is 2-1, and Florida State is either 2-1 (with a win over BC on Friday) or 1-2 (with a loss.) Either way, the tiebreakers break in our favor. If I were Brian O'Connor, I'd have both Morey and Kline (or Neal Davis) get ready and wait for the result of the early game before choosing a starter. Being able to save Morey for a possible Sunday game would be big. Reason not to: If he pitches on Sunday he won't be available for early NCAA regional games. Still, it's a strong consideration.

- Recruiting board update! It was getting a little old. It's also getting a little long. The evaluation period just finished up, and the coaches aimed the offer cannon out of state at players they were getting their first good looks at. Not a lot of players come off the board during this time, because they're getting flooded with offers and aren't narrowing things down yet. And they're taking SATs and ACTs and final exams, so campus visits are at a minimum. When the summer camp circuit and visit circuit fires up, that's when players will start knocking schools off their lists or make their commitments. So here are the updates - many more additions than removals:

- LB Daquan Romero (committed to UNC) and QB Gary Nova (Pitt) are the only removals.

- DT Vincent Croce is added to blue. Originally I figured his offer list was just entirely too big to even bother adding him, but what do you know, he has UVA in a top 3.

- TE Darius Redman, LB Nick Menocal, DEs Zach Wood and Stephon Sanders, and CB Blake Countess are added to yellow. All were beneficiaries of the offer gun. Menocal attends school in Florida with 2010 signee Pablo Alvarez.

- WR Tacoi Sumler is added to red. Sumler's offer list is divided into Volumes I, II, and III, it's that big, so we're not getting him, but he's a former teammate of early enrollee Michael Strauss, so hey, why not.

- Moved WR Dominique Terrell from yellow to red.

- Moved WR Daniel Adams from yellow to blue.

my plans are ruined

For at least a month now, probably more, I've been kicking around a big-picture sort of look at football recruiting, and the plan as originally conceived was to celebrate the halfway mark in the 2010 class with a where-do-we-go-from-here sort of post. We lose 12 scholarship seniors next year, so I have the class size pegged at 14 (there's always more attrition than just the seniors), which means halfway would have been 7. So naturally, we blow past the 7 mark while I'm focused on my long weekend and catching up on the really important things in life like golf, beer, and cheering as Kyle Busch's stupid ass goes careening into the wall where every Toyota in NASCAR belongs.

So today we'll get down to just that. You can start with a little supplemental reading: my latest Examiner.com piece, a four-man wish list that wouldn't quite complete the class, but would make me pretty happy with it if they all signed up. The other beginning point is that perhaps 14 is too small a guess. That would be by far the smallest class in recent memory (and by recent I mean like within a generation or two); the '08 class was 18. I'm still mad uncomfortable with the scholarship situation; you might remember we still have 88 on the books, although that's assuming Kyle Long will still be in camp this August and that is looking a lot less likely than it was two months ago.

Anyway, let's split this up by offense and defense:

Offense

Where we stand: We've got a well-rounded class of one QB, one RB, one WR, and one lineman, and I really like the haul so far. I continue to be of the belief that Kevin Parks, were he three or four inches taller, would be a mid-level four-star recruit. And even without that, he'd have about ten or fifteen offers if he were still uncommitted at this point. The other three have loads of talent too, and not only that, are local-ish guys who had offers from exactly the schools we want to keep the talent away from. No complaints at all about our work here.

Where we're going: The class needs, at a bare minimum, another WR for the outside and two more linemen. It looks like we're in the hunt for another quarterback too, and I think we'll take three receivers - two wouldn't be enough for the receiver-happy offense Gregg Brandon runs.

As far as quarterback goes, Purdue just landed a commitment from Illinois quarterback Sean Robinson. Why does this matter? Purdue was the other front-runner (besides us) for Stephen Morris, who we have an offer out to. Morris would drop like a hot potato if Florida or Ole Miss offered him, but as yet they haven't, and Robinson's commitment to Purdue just put us in the drivers' seat for now. Florida's not likely to offer Morris, and Ole Miss might but they'll probably wait for Munchie Legaux (another of our targets) before they send out any more.

On the other end of the passing game, I really really really want Alex Kenney. If we get him, another receiver such as the 6'6" Brandon Coleman would be in order, because both Kenney and Scott are slot types. Then there's Robby Havenstein and Khamrone Kolb for the line, both of whom cause solar eclipses. Along with the equally massive Shane Johnson, those are the three linemen we're after the hardest, because Al Groh wants his offensive line to be able to run blocking drills on the Statue of Liberty.

We're probably looking at anywhere from four to six more commitments for the class on offense; I guess I could see us taking seven but that would really, really be pushing it. We're in fair-to-good shape for most of the above players but none of them are the foregone-conclusion sort where the question is when rather than if.

Defense

Where we stand: This is a lot less....exciting.....than offense. I try very hard, in the introductory posts when a recruit signs up, to accentuate the positives on everyone, but here's a moment of uncomfortable honesty: I'm getting really tired of looking for reasons why we were after someone that nobody else was. There are five recruits on board right now; outside of Pablo Alvarez, the other four have five non-UVA I-A offers between them: two Navy, one each from Louisville, Temple, and New Mexico. Alvarez's aren't mega-inspiring either. Individually, you can look at each one and see quite a few reasons why they'll be a contributor, and odds are at least one of them will cause us in three years to point and laugh at the silliness of all those schools that didn't bother. Taken as a whole, though, it's kind of less than inspiring; it's not considered a recruiting coup to beat Temple and Navy for someone's services.

Where we're going: There's still a lot to covet on the board. And we need linemen. Of the five recruits so far, three are linebackers (two inside, one outside) and two are generic sort of defensive-back types which appear to be cornerbacks for now but nothing is in stone. We took so many DE's last year that I can't see us snagging more than two at the most this year; if I had my druthers Henry Anderson would be one of them. One or two more linebackers are in order, you know Groh is going to pack in the linebackers. One more OLB for sure - Marcus Rush and Jeremiah Attaochu (gesundheit) look like the top two candidates - and then maybe one more grab-bag, whoever-commits-first kind of thing.

There's flexibility at defensive back; we still have offers out to corners and safeties alike. We definitely need at least one actual safety, where Ed Reynolds would fit the bill nicely. I suspect the staff will simply take what comes their way and then shuffle as needed, however.

Four or five more looks like the number here, but with the caveat that nine total is likely to be the absolute limit, so even though I said six max for offense, we're not taking six there and five on defense. What that would do to our scholarship numbers.

Oh, before I forget (and this is a totally unrelated tangent from recruiting) go vote for Mark Reynolds for the All-Star Game. Not only is he a UVA alum, he's pretty obviously the actual deserving National League candidate (dude, 24 home runs. 24!) and it's not even close. Cast your vote for Brandon Inge, a Virginian, VCU alum, and (very importantly) Detroit Tiger on the American League side of things. Inge is also the clear choice: he's hitting better than everyone on the ballot but Adam Lind, who doesn't field a position.

the recruit: Pablo Alvarez

First, some of that shameless self-promotion you've surely come to enjoy by now: my thoughts on the Director's Cup are up at Examiner.com. Go have a look-see.

OK: Pablo. I'll tell you what the first thing that strikes me is: the weekend's basketball commitment, Will Regan, looks young enough to be Pablo's son; likewise, Pablo could pass for 38. Also, he will be to my knowledge the first football player at UVA named Pablo - this is a big plus.

Name: Pablo Alvarez, Jr.
Position: CB (for now, I guess)
Hometown: Miami, FL
School: Belen Jesuit Prep
Height: 6'3"
Weight: 190

ESPN: NR
Rivals: NR
Scout: NR

Out of the blue, this one. For one thing, we don't go into Florida much. Less than most ACC teams, anyway. One recruit last year, one in 2006, and one in 2003 has been the extent of our success in that state in the last howevermany years. Besides that, Alvarez has been flying far enough under the radar that I barely had even heard of him, let alone had him on the board, by the time he committed. Naturally therefore, he's got absolutely zero evaluation from anywhere, so there's very little to go on.

As usual then, we look at the offers, and to me they suggest a high two-star/very low three-star. Iowa, Northwestern, Duke, maybe Kansas State depending on whether you believe Scout or not, and I'm not sure I do.

What I really gather out of this is that Groh went after Pablo mainly for his athleticism, which is tough to match. Lot of football players are also track stars; much less common are hurdling stars, in which Pablo is nationally ranked. This is actually really interesting to me; hurdling requires more than raw speed, it requires technique and some actual leg strength. He's tall for a cornerback, if that's where he ends up, so leg strength is a must because tall, top-heavy cornerbacks don't do well. Did I mention he's really good at hurdles? He's got some times listed here; for comparison's sake, because I really wouldn't know what makes a good hurdles time and maybe you wouldn't either, here are the national best times.

I really don't know how much this'll translate to football though, in no small part because it's anyone's guess where he'll end up, even if it's cornerback to start. Pure athleticism seems to be the primary motivator here; his highlight film doesn't showcase much in the way of cover skills or route-running (he plays two ways, natch, most of the best athletes do) but there are quite a few clips of him coming from outside the play and chasing down a ballcarrier after a lengthy run. Pablo's going to have to scrap to make an early impact though. His tackling's a little rough, things like that. (Of course, you always hope your DB's don't have do any tackling.) It's all coachable stuff though. It's hard to beat the athleticism of a hurdler and even harder to coach that into someone. Given some development time, Pablo's got the makings of a matchup nightmare for smaller wide receivers.