game preview: Hampton

Date/Time: Thursday, March 17; 3:10

TV: truTV

Record against the Pirates: 7-0

Last meeting: UVA 69, HU 40; 11/26/13, Charlottesville

Last game: UNC 61, UVA 57 (3/12); HU 81, SC St. 69 (3/12)

KenPom:

Tempo:
UVA: 61.4 (#351)
HU: 72.2 (#44)

Offense:
UVA: 118.4 (#9)
HU: 100.0 (#244)

Defense:
UVA: 91.9 (#4)
HU: 104.8 (#192)

Pythag:
UVA: .9483 (#2)
HU: .3663 (#220)

Projected lineups:

Virginia:

PG: London Perrantes (11.0 ppg, 3.0 rpg, 4.4 apg)
SG: Malcolm Brogdon (18.7 ppg, 4.1 rpg, 2.8 apg)
SG: Devon Hall (4.5 ppg, 2.5 rpg, 1.8 apg)
PF: Isaiah Wilkins (4.6 ppg, 4.1 rpg, 1.4 apg)
PF: Anthony Gill (13.3 ppg, 6.1 rpg, 0.6 apg)

Hampton:

PG: Reginald Johnson (18.3 ppg, 3.7 rpg, 4.1 apg)
SG: Lawrence Cooks (8.0 ppg, 3.6 rpg, 1.5 apg)
SG: Brian Darden (13.2 ppg, 2.1 rpg, 1.9 apg)
SF: Quinton Chievous (17.0 ppg, 11.0 rpg, 2.1 apg)
PF: Dionte Adams (5.2 ppg, 5.8 rpg, 0.6 apg)

Last chance.  This is the best senior class for UVA hoops in quite a while.  Three different players in it have won ACC honors of some kind - Player of the Year, DPOY, 6th Man, you name it.  The cruel reality of the NCAA tournament is that hundreds of seniors will end their college careers with a loss, and only a tiny handful can say otherwise.  Whether Brogdon, Gill, Tobey, Nolte, and Kirven can avoid the usual fate of seniors remains to be seen, but they're writing the last piece of their legacy regardless.

It's not just the careers of five seniors, though, that are wrapping up.  This is also the last page of the First Book of Tony in the UVA basketball bible.  These guys - Brogdon in particular, way back in August of 2010 - made their commitment very early in the Tony Bennett era.  We're still carrying over from the initial rise to the top.  (And yes, with ACC banners in the ceiling and being ranked at times #1 in the AP poll and in KenPom, it's fair to say UVA has been at the very top of the basketball world.)  This is the final chapter.  When this tourney is over, whether after one, two, or three weeks, the next time the sun rises on UVA basketball it'll be the same author, but a new book.  Hopefully it's more "Harry saves the day and gets rid of Voldemort for now" and less "holy shit, they killed Ned."

-- UVA on offense

Hampton, on the surface, is a respectable defensive team - the stat that really drags down their defensive efficiency is "free throw defense."  I maintain that's not entirely out of one's control - fouling other team's guards will generally result in higher free throw percentages than fouling their bigs - but Hampton's guards aren't very foul-prone.  Their bigs are; maybe they foul lane drivers a lot.  Regardless, Hampton has played solid defense all year long, to just go by the efficiency stats.

Against MEAC competition, that is.  Against bigger fish, their tempo has worked against them and they've been flattened.  Colorado scored 95 in 75 possessions.  SMU rolled up 105 points in just 69 possessions, which is more than 1.5 points per.

Hampton's lineup being essentially a four-guard setup just about all the time, opposing big men tend to have a field day on them, even in losses.  The best comparison is probably Colorado's Josh Scott, one of the Pac-12's best centers and scorer of 21 points and 8 rebounds against Hampton.  UVA has made no secret of their intent to feed the post early and often, and Anthony Gill should be about that productive.

Surprisingly for an up-tempo team, Hampton doesn't pressure a lot on defense, so UVA will have room to work.  Malcolm Brogdon and Devon Hall will both tower over whoever guards them, and outweigh them by 20-30 pounds, too.  Hampton does good work on the boards at both ends, but with the height advantage UVA has at any position you like, there'll be second-chance points, too.  Execute as per usual and the scoreboard will light up.

-- UVA on defense

The Pirates want to push on offense, so one thing that will limit those second chances for UVA is a likely extra emphasis on getting back - more so than usual even for Tony Bennett.  Some teams - like, some we know real well - will pass on a good shot in order to look for a great one.  Hampton just takes what's there and then crashes the offensive glass, hard.  They have three players in the top 300 in offensive rebounding, per KenPom's figuring.

For the most part, Hampton's starting guards are volume scorers.  Brian Darden is a low-percentage, high-volume shooter whose efficiency numbers are saved mainly by his almost impeccable free-throw shooting.  Reginald Johnson can get to the rim fairly well and gets fouled all the time, but he's a senior whose career three-point shooting is under 30%.  Doesn't stop him from shooting - he's launched 173 of them this year.

Hampton's biggest offensive threat - besides their propensity to try and beat you down the court - is the interior games of their biggishes, Quinton Chievous and Dionte Adams.  Chievous gets some putbacks, shoots 63% from two, and mainly eschews the jumpers - though he will at times shoot a three and very, very occasionally make one.  He's much more of a threat down low - but you can save a lot of points by fouling him, because he misses more free throws than he makes.  Hampton's biggest guy is 6'8", 250 Jervon Pressley, who's a shot-blocker but a liability on offense.

Conventional wisdom says you beat UVA by shooting threes, as aptly demonstrated by UVA's 1-3 stretch in January where the winning opponents (VT, GT, FSU) combined to make more than they missed, and UVA's only win (Miami) couldn't buy one.  Hampton cannot shoot threes.

-- Outlook

After the last couple years, in which both Coastal Carolina and Belmont put a scare on the Hoos and threatened to list them among the all-time tournament upsets, I ought to be highly cautious.  It's hard, though, when the opposing offense is so badly geared to succeed against one of the nation's best defenses.  One day, somewhere, a 16 seed will beat a 1, but there's no point ever trying to predict it.

Final score: UVA 82, HU 63

building a Program

They picked the wrong sport to do a video series on.

I think there are two ways, and only two ways, a coach can earn the trust of his players.  Being nice is not one of them.  Being honest isn't even one of them.  (Not being honest can lose you their trust, but players will not follow an honest, incompetent coach.)  So much is made of someone being a player's coach or a disciplinarian and so on, and some players respond better to one style than another, but it's still just style.  If being mean was a deal-breaker, nobody would've ever heard of Bobby Knight.  But nobody ever said he'd lost the trust of his players.

How do you earn their trust, then?  Simple.  If a coach says: do X, and Y will happen, and the player does X, and Y happens, that's how they come to trust him.  That goes for everything.  Maybe Coach says, move your feet a certain way and you can beat that defender.  Maybe Coach says, the next dumbass who misses a class doesn't play.  Maybe Coach says, this is an important concept and the first one of you to pick it up, starts.  Maybe Coach says, this team we're playing is lousy at chasing through screens, so we will get an open shot if we run this play.

Or maybe Coach says, if you come with me and work hard, we will put this place on the map.

And then Akil Mitchell learned how to beat defenders, Sylven Landesberg got parked, Will Sherrill became a starter, Malcolm Brogdon found himself open against Pitt, and Virginia Basketball is on the map.  For five years this team has done X.  And Y happened.

Most coaches get at least some traction this way, or they wouldn't be coaches.  At some level, they can make their players better.  They can teach their players footwork, fundamentals, shooting, they can draw up plays that work more often than not. The more they fail to deliver Y, though, the less their players will want to do X, and that's how most of them eventually get fired.  And the bigger Y gets, the harder it is to deliver.  Uncommon is the coach that can deliver on the biggest of his promises.  Bo Schembechler became a legend at Michigan because he promised, "Those who stay will be champions" and those who stayed literally became champions.  Tony Bennett sold his first recruiting class on a similar theme, and what a feeling of fulfillment it must have been for Joe Harris and Akil Mitchell to watch it coming true around them, first in Charlottesville, and then in Greensboro.

How can anyone see that promise delivered and fail to trust the man after that?  It's impossible.  This is not to say there'll be no more transfers.  (This is not to say there will.)  But if someone leaves the program now, it's not because they don't believe what Tony Bennett is selling.  It'll just be that they want something else more.

Such a person would probably be hard to find on this team.  I said there were two ways for a coach to earn a player's trust.  The second is this: when someone new joins the team and his new peers are hanging on every word Coach says, they'll do the same.  That's what they call a culture.  A guy like Justin Anderson, it's not so much that when Tony Bennett says jump, Anderson asks how high.  It's more that he already knows how high.  A fresh crop of players will arrive in the summer, three of them, and they'll be integrated into team activities and they'll see the Andersons and Brogdons and Perrantes's and everyone else, who don't need to be told stuff, and pretty soon the new guys won't need to be told stuff either.

I'd say, for all that, that we're witnessing the beginning of a new team culture, but that already happened.  We saw it when a former afterthought of a walk-on, whose millions will be made on Wall Street instead of a basketball court, got tossed into the starting lineup because he set better screens than the other guys.  Will Sherrill, if he'd ever tried to guard a Jabari Parker, would've been gooshed like a spider, but he could do one thing better than just about anyone else - that being, "what Tony wanted."

Will Sherrill is just one example; a process like this will have far too many to list and we fans won't see most of them.  But it's telling that when Joe Harris saw his promise slipping away, that a 35-point loss in Knoxville didn't fit with the proposed vision of the program, he didn't call a player's-only meeting or put his head down and sulk or commiserate with his teammates or retreat to an empty gym and shoot angry free throws til his fingers bled.  Tony Bennett had delivered Y every time his players gave him X, so Joe Harris simply asked for another X.

That's a powerful statement of trust.  And Tony delivered again, as he's done for his players without fail for five years.  In doing so, he also delivered the one thing UVA fans have been craving for a long time: relevance.  It's impossible to be upset for very long about exiting the tournament, because this is a built program now.  Not everyone wants to believe that (you'd be surprised, or maybe not, about how many Maryland fans went from "lord I hope they don't win this conference in our last year" to "they're just this year's Miami.")  "This year's Miami" is actually kind of a theme for a lot of people, even ones I've talked to up in my neck of the woods, who in about 11 months will not remember they said that.  This was a great friggin' ride, a phenomenal three months, by far the best months of my roughly 14 years as a Hoo.  And for all the joy and wonder of every single game this team played, it was all the better for the realization that it doesn't have to stop when the dance ends this year.  For the first time in almost six years, I can turn around a favorite lament of mine: we can have nice things.

2015 big-picture recruiting

One of these days, a 2015 recruiting board is going to hit the streets.  Cross my heart for real.  I'm hoping you've been distracted by basketball.  For now, we need to take the annual look at the likely positional makeup of the class.

First, we establish the actual size.  The answer: big.  The senior class now sits at either 20 or 21 by my count (I'm not totally sure if Chris Brathwaite got his scholarship back, but I'm assuming he has unless I ever read otherwise.)  At that number, you're taking 25 in the class if you can, that's all there is to it - unless you take more by counting some early enrollees toward 2014.  This is a limited-only-by-imagination class, essentially.

This is actually bad news if you buy into the likelihood that this will be a transition class between coaches.  For purposes of today, we'll assume it won't be, since obviously the coaching staff is not going to recruit with that in mind.  But hold no illusions about the obstacles we have to overcome: 2-10 will have poisoned the well for a lot of recruits, who simply won't bother returning any phone calls with a 434 area code.  Most of the key assistants are in the second year of a two-year contract.  London's seat is the hottest in the ACC, quite possibly the country. This is the sort of thing Li'l Shane Beamer knows by heart and will remind our recruits of approximately once every four seconds.

Before embarking, some depth chart notes.  I updated it for spring, by the way.  Not a whole lot of position changes; those are hereby detailed:

-- Kwontie Moore from LB to DE.
-- Sean Karl from OT to OG.
-- Eric Tetlow from OG to C.
-- Ross Burbank from C to OG.
-- Wil Wahee from CB to S.

For the record, the official roster lists just five OTs.  Sweet.  And that's with putting Jay Whitmire back at the position where the coaches wanted him all along, which is tackle.  Karl's move to guard is a byproduct of his being bypassed, but the center moves are sending a more pointed message: Ross Burbank probably ran out of chances to win the job, and drops into the shuffle at OG.  Hopes are now apparently pinned on Eric Tetlow, who nosed his way into the depth chart last year as a freshman.

Kwontie Moore's move is the other major thing here; this is probably a combination of two things.  The first is the admittal that he wasn't going to crack the lineup at linebacker unless he wanted to wait til he was a senior, and even then maybe not.  That's as much because of Henry Coley as anything.  Two, DE certainly does need some shoring up.  Far too many unknowns there; not having any real known quantities except for Eli Harold, you might as well add another unknown just to boost your odds of finding a workable combo.

Jake McGee is still listed as a TE here, just for giggles if nothing else.  His roster position is "TE/WR" and he's been doing some more actual WR work than nose-to-the-ground TE work, so we'll see if I change my mind later.

The following names are gone from the list (not including graduated seniors):

-- Adrian Gamble
-- E.J. Scott
-- Pablo Alvarez
-- Matt Fortin
-- Kyrrel Latimer

Scott will spend a graduate year at Wake Forest.  Latimer sort of faded away as early as last year - he was still on the roster, but in sort of a ghost capacity.  Gamble is transferring to parts unknown as of now.  Alvarez has been extraordinarily injury-prone and there was probably a fair amount of mutuality in not bringing him back for a fifth year.  Fortin is going to chase his dream as a Navy SEAL.  (Long-snapping wasn't exciting enough?)

This leaves 88 names on the roster, so, attrition of a minimum of three more is to be expected.

Now, on with the show.

QUARTERBACK

I won't be surprised if the coaches take one.  I won't be surprised if they don't.  You should probably take one each year, but things don't work out in that highly idealized fashion, particularly if you've spent the last couple years fumblefucking the position.  UVA will have five on the roster this year, and, assuming no attrition (quite a stretch, honestly) they'll have five on the roster next year, too.  So I'd look for either one or none in the 2015 class, and I don't think either answer is wrong.  If we take one, it means either we got one the coaches are really high on - think Nick Johns - or they know of some impending attrition.  Or both.  If we don't get one, I don't mind going into next year with this same group of five.

RUNNING BACK

With two good ones graduating this year, it leaves four on the roster for 2015 (not including Daniel Hamm), and that's if LaChaston Smith never makes the move to linebacker.  Two backs in the 2015 class would be a very sound investment.

WIDE RECEIVER

This position got slammed with attrition during the offseason; nevertheless, it remains fairly deep.  Three seniors will graduate - Gooch, Jennings, and Terrell - leaving behind seven.  I don't think it's especially nuts to carry 10 on the roster, and you know how Mike London is about generic athlete types.  Let's say anywhere from 3-5 as a possibility.  I'd prefer three or four, as the junior class consists of just one player (Caanan Severin) and you risk glutting up the position again if you go all the way to five.

TIGHT END

We lose Zach Swanson, and if truth be told, Rob Burns and Mario Nixon aren't likely to be big-timers at the position.  Tight end recruiting is one of the positions most susceptible to offensive philosophy - no matter who you are you need linemen and quarterbacks and so on, but recruiting a tight end is a choice you make, one that's often sacrificed in favor of prospects elsewhere that you want to close on or lose.  Still, there's a need here, and some viable targets, too (Chris Clark would be the dream candidate) and it's a safe bet we'll take at least one, maybe two.

OFFENSIVE LINE

You know how I am about this.  We have a grand total of 12 scholarship players lined up for 2015's roster.  That's before attrition.  So we could take ten linemen and I wouldn't bat an eye.  Well, I would out of sheer surprise, but certainly not in protest.  Five OLs usually constitute a big class - and if we took five I'd still consider the position undermanned.

Need-wise, the barest of bare-bones minimums here should be four.  That's still not enough, but when someone is starving - I mean actually starving - you don't feed them a big steak dinner.  I'd like to take seven, on account of thinking 19 linemen (again - you need a hedge against attrition) is about right, but that would cause problems down the road.  Namely, needing huge classes again later on.  I'll settle for five in the class - the undermanning of the depth chart just isn't going to be fixed in one year.  It's going to be two or three before we have this thing back up to snuff, and that's if we don't neglect the recruiting again.  Call the target 4-6.

DEFENSIVE TACKLE

In only losing one player after 2014, this will be a fairly well-stocked position if it's recruited correctly.  Signing at least one is a must, because five DTs doesn't do the job; I'd rather see two and wouldn't exactly mind three.

DEFENSIVE END

Moving Kwontie Moore to DE puts us at 10, which is a big number, but it solves nothing long term because that junior class is five large.  Getting three (maybe four depending on what you call J.J. Jackson) in the 2014 class was smart, even if they're mostly projects - we needed numbers.  We need them again in 2015 because that junior class will eventually leave and we'll be up on the rocks unless we can get two or three more DEs.  Three would give us the appearance of having just way too damn many in 2015, but that would serve to smooth out the numbers a little, and the best part is they could be redshirted.  I'd say 2-3 is the target, but Jon Tenuta's philosophy might muddy up the numbers a little, particularly in the distinction between DE and LB, and we're probably looking at also continuing to recruit another tweener or two.

LINEBACKER

No complaints about the numbers here; even with four in the senior class, I wouldn't complain if they were replaced with three signees - maybe even two, if one was really good.  Again, the tweener factor complicates the numbers a bit.  This class does have to include, however, at least one prototype middle linebacker, as Henry Coley is graduating and the only other one listed is Micah Kiser.  I'd say a class of 2-4 would be in range, with three as the probable sweet spot.

DEFENSIVE BACK

Honestly, the need here in terms of numbers is really slim, which is why I'm combining CB and S into one.  Even with four graduating seniors, we could honestly get away with sitting tight right where we are, which is to say, one commitment in the form of Juan Thornhill.  I have him listed as a safety, which gives us seven and the luxury of being tremendously picky with any more safety candidates.  One cornerback is all I'd bother taking as well.

What I absolutely wouldn't do is replace all four graduating seniors.  Some of those are scholarships that need to be reallocated, stat.  OL or DT would be a good start.  OL as well, and possibly OL and even OL too.  London's been doing this long enough that it seems safe to declare his philosophy as one of building a football team on athletes that you can try and turn into football players, and most of those generic athletes end up as defensive backs, so if we took four I'd sigh and be totally unsurprised; if we took five I'd complain loudly and still be totally unsurprised.  One more DB besides Thornhill is all I want, but in the business of predicting, 3-4 total seems like a more likely bet.

KICKER

We offered two last year - neither of which took the bait - and will probably try again.  One kicker/punter type is the target, but there's no point offering a scholarship to just any kicker, so it'll probably be another this-guy-or-bust year.

Here's the sum total, then:

QB: 0-1
RB: 2
WR: 3-4
TE: 1-2
OL: 4-6
DT: 2-3
DE: 2-3
LB: 2-3
DB: 3-4
K: 0-1

That's a range of 19-29.  19 won't suffice to fill up the roster, so if this wasn't a hot-seat year I'd say lean hard to the upper end of all those ranges.  This is a combination of a prediction and a wish list; a true wish list would say 5-6 OLs and 2-3 DBs while a true prediction would say more like 1-2 DTs.  Recruiting is a really fudgy science and I'm allowed to do that. It's even fudgier when you throw in the potential transition; you never know how the recruit pool will react.  Al Groh actually managed to recruit a pretty balanced 2010 class before he was fired, but an extremely small one.

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It was a foregone conclusion, but Tony Bennett is the ACC COTY.  As no coach in ACC history has ever improved his team's ACC record in each of his first five seasons - and yes, that includes his first one, as Tony went 5-11 to follow up Dave Leitao's 4-12 - it's fitting timing for the award.

The voting went like so:

ACSMA 2013-14 Coach of the Year Voting
Tony Bennett, Virginia (68)
Roy Williams, North Carolina (6)
Jamie Dixon, Pitt (1)
Brad Brownell, Clemson (1)
Jim Larrañaga, Miami (1)

That Roy Williams got six votes doesn't surprise one bit - it just tells us that there are six voters, certainly all within the borders of North Carolina, that aren't aware the conference extends beyond said borders.  We knew that.  I'm just surprised it wasn't more.  Don't take this as me suggesting Williams is the least bit deserving, of course.

Brad Brownell is not a completely batshit selection.  Certainly much less so than Roy.  This same media poll picked Clemson 14th in the conference, and they finished 6th - that tends to earn some worthy COY consideration most years.  Jim Larranaga (when, by the way, did he start using that ñ?) is a bizarre decision.  I guess finishing 10th when you were picked 12th is overachieving?  As Jamie Oakes pointed out, though, Miami provided Virginia Tech its only two conference wins.  That's much closer to grounds for firing than Best Coach In The Whole Damn Conference.

The real space-cadet pick, though, is Dixon.  Who the hell voted for Jamie Dixon?  Pittsburgh was supposed to be one of the league's pacesetters.  Instead they'll be watching Selection Sunday and hoping Wisconsin-Green Bay doesn't steal their bid.  (Hey, all I'm sayin' is, one school beat UVA, and one didn't.)

I tried to find Caulton Tudor's ballot for all these awards, just so we could all point and laugh at the homer, but have been unsuccessful.  However, I did find this gem from 2011:

With today’s announcement that no one from the regular-season champs was voted first-team all-conference, the Tar Heels were clearly low-balled by voters.  Never before has an outright regular-season ACC champ failed to have a player on the first unit.  This season’s first-team members — Duke’s Nolan Smith and Kyle Singler, Maryland’s Jordan Williams, Virginia Tech’s Malcolm Delaney and Boston College’s Reggie Jackson — had big seasons.  But can anyone seriously think the championship team didn’t deserve at least one first-team berth?

Read more here: http://blogs.newsobserver.com/accnow/tudors-take-tar-heels-robbed-in-all-acc-voting#storylink=cpy

Emphasis mine.  Do you think Tudor voted for any Hoos this year on the first team?  Yeah, me neither.

Read more here: http://blogs.newsobserver.com/accnow/tudors-take-tar-heels-robbed-in-all-acc-voting#storylink=cpy

orange, out

By and large, I'd say we UVA fans are a pretty fatalistic bunch.  Whether more so than other fans, I couldn't say, but I'm sure Michigan fans don't have a Rule 2b, so there's that anyway.  But pretty damn fatalistic, some of us very seriously and earnestly so.  To varying degrees, UVA fans are convinced the refs have it out for us, the conference has it out for us, and the very fates have it out for us.

The events of Saturday can only make this fatalism worse - the difference, of course, is that for once, the fates have a benevolent side.  Most of the action can be chalked up to big-time coaching from Tony Bennett, big-time shooting from the shooters, and big-time rebounding by the rebounders.  Thomas Rogers - the senior we all forgot - hit a three-pointer, though, and right then it went from sanity to storybook.

The first thing I thought, after thirty seconds of gleeful laughter at the sight of the UVA bench going more totally apeshit than they had all season, was this: My lacrosse prediction is so screwed.  It doesn't take a lot of prolixity to write the story now, not anymore.  Senior Day, championship, scholarship, pandemonium.....it's so tailor-made for the fairy tales, just throw some conjunctions and stuff in between and you're all set.  Rogers's shot didn't even hit rim.  With the gods smiling on Charlottesville so, could there be any doubt how the lacrosse game would go?  Syracuse, on both fields of play, played just well enough to let the Hollywood scriptwriters get their moment of tension in the movie that's surely coming out any day now.

Why, the day even moved Tony Bennett to sideline emotions.  The man has two emotions on the sideline: stoic, and blind seething fury at jag-off refs.  The latter is expressed with an eye-roll.  The roof was already blown off the place and sailing toward the ionosphere and Tony sat in his crouch, watching the defense for any sign of a missed help or hedge, as if that was going to let Syracuse make up 19 points in as many seconds.  Later his eyes glistened.  Shortly after the horn.  We all saw it - living proof that it means something to the guy to really and truly be able to follow through on the promise that brought his seniors to Charlottesville in the first place, one of them from three time zones hence.

As this very same stoic coach will remind his team fifty times a day between now and Saturday, there's still work to be done.  The great part about this team and this coach is there's never a doubt the message will sink in.  The other great part about this team and this coach is that we just had enough magic to last the next 30 years, and probably won't have to wait that long for the next batch.

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Further stuff.....

-- Along the same lines as the above, let me tell you this.  Steve Yzerman - hockey fans know the name.  Absolutely revered up here in Detroit.  The man could drive a tank through a nunnery while firing live puppies out of the cannon and half of us would blame the nuns and the other half, the puppies.  Living legend.  He is to Detroit what, say, John Elway is to Denver, Larry Bird is to Boston, and so on.  So it's with a small amount of pride that I say I was there the only time he was ever booed in Detroit, and furthermore took part lustily.

It was at his number retirement ceremony.  Stevie Y got up there when it was his turn to speak, and because he's Stevie Y and shits more class and humility than anyone you care to name, talked about how it really wasn't his night, it was all thanks to his teammates.  Right, Stevie.  692 goals, 1,063 assists, one each of the Conn Smythe, Selke, and Masterton trophies (this latter is for the player who "best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship, and dedication to ice hockey"), 6th on the NHL's all-time scoring list, three Stanley Cups, and it had nothing to do with you.  Whatever.  Also, boooo.

This is how I felt listening to Tony say he "didn't deserve this" or whatever he told the sideline reporter lady.  Listen, Tony.  You da man.  I know you're a God-fearing man, but if you don't deserve this, who does?

-- Tony's attacking of the zone was masterful.  Syracuse started with heavy on-ball pressure and denial of wing-to-wing passes.  Relatively heavy for a zone, at any rate.  UVA was looking, however, to go inside, and did as much as possible.  So much so that players were passing up fairly open looks at the three, and forcing it inside to what looked like a worse look.  All else being equal, would you rather have an open Brogdon three-point attempt or the ball in Akil's hands, ten feet from the rim and right on the baseline, guarded by shot-blocker extraordinaire Rakeem Christmas?

I'll take the Brogdon three any day, but that wasn't the game plan; the obvious strategy was to force-feed the post and look for anything they could get from the free-throw line in.  Jim Boeheim then made exactly the half-time adjustment Tony wanted: he tightened up his zone to deny the post, at which time the launch pad was open for business.  UVA took five threes the entire first half; they needed just five minutes of the second half to take that many and finished with 11 in the latter 20 minutes.  Generally you figure, when you play a zone defense you try and loosen it up with a barrage of threes so you can do the work you want to inside; UVA went the opposite and saw it work to perfection.

-- Occasionally something is made of the "unbalanced schedule" that UVA has.  The schedule has been unbalanced since 2005, of course, and nobody decided to taint anyone else's championship with such accusations.  In 2007, when UVA went 11-5 and shared the title with UNC, nobody seemed to mind that UVA played 10-6 Maryland and VT twice and UNC only once, but anyway that's beside the point.  The point really is this.  Pick any team you like among the contenders - Cuse, Duke, UNC, Pitt.  Find all the instances of any of those teams playing each other twice.  Let them replace one loss with a win against a scrub team.  For example, Duke and Syracuse - we'll let them each take credit for the win against each other and wash away the loss.  Still, none of them can catch UVA.  Duke isn't 12-4 because of too many games against Cuse and UNC.  They're 12-4 because they failed to take care of business against Clemson and Notre Dame.

-- Storybook Saturday was so compelling that it trashed preconceived notions of what the storyline would be.

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Let's talk lax.  I said "show me" before the game.  I consider myself shown.  UVA won by dominating the stat sheet and letting the goals come.  More than 3 out of 4 faceoffs, and almost 5 out of every 7 ground balls, went UVA's way.  If the ball's on the ground, and you have a 5-in-7 chance of getting to it, you're going to get your way more often than not.

This is not the sort of thing that will happen every game, but we've now also managed to establish that UVA has a damn offense.  You got two guys on pace for 50-goal seasons without even counting the tournaments.  They're gonna need it, as they're getting no help from the defense and goalie in particular,

-- 32 is the new 6.  James Pannell has 22 goals and is a damn sophomore.  But what got Steele Stanwick comparisons running through my head was a goal he scored in (I think) the second quarter.  While the announcers were all fired-up about his "question-mark dodge" which reminded them of his brother Rob, I was more interested in the shot itself, sort of a twisting jump shot that snuck into an impossible corner of the net.  Stanwick announced his presence as a freshman with exactly that sort of otherwordly accuracy.

-- It's very, very difficult to assess a goalie's play on any individual shot, in real time.  It's real easy to look at 5 saves and 12 goals and not be real happy with the result, but I got at least one chance to find a spot where Matt Barrett ought to have made a save.  On one Hakeem Lecky shot, the ball would've flown straight into the pocket of Barrett's stick had he just stood there like a statue (not that I advocate this as a strategy.)  Instead he flinched, moving his stick away from the shot, and by the time he recovered it was obviously too late.  Maybe he's overthinking these shots; regardless of the cause, I think we're deep enough into the season to declare this a Problem.

-- Cornell is next.  Whatever they're ranked when they enter the game, it'll be too high.  They've played three really bad teams so far and struggled to put away all of them.  There's a very good chance UVA will be 7-0 and match their win total from last season halfway through this one.  With VMI yet to appear at Klockner, getting that Cornell win would clinch, at a minimum, "team that everyone hates for getting into the tournament with a lousy record" status.

-- Keeping in mind that you actually have to work to make the ACC tournament this year, that was a very big win.  Theoretically two conference wins should do the trick.  With this offense, it shouldn't be at all impossible to find one more in four more conference games.

christmas presents

Technically it's already 2013 and Christmas was a week ago, but it's still not too late to look back at the year 2012 that was, and see who got a nice pile of presents from Santa and who got.....something else.  Without much further ado, the Naughty and Nice List from 2012.

-- Teresa Sullivan.  Let's face it, the top story of 2012 didn't take place on the field or in any locker room.  It started with the email that showed up in your inbox if you're an alum, announcing President Sullivan's abrupt "resignation," and more or less ended a couple weeks later with her reinstatement.  In between was a raging firestorm that caught national media attention.  The grace and class displayed by the president at the time was exemplary.

-- Mike Scott.  Now plying his trade with the NBA's Atlanta Hawks, Scott did something at UVA that's been all too rare for Virginia fans: he lived up to his potential.  Actually, he rather exceeded it.  His transformation from emotional fireball and rebound specialist to a complete basketball player was a joy to watch, and when an ESPN columnist failed to include Scott in the conversation for national player of the year, UVA fans did it for him.  And they were backed up by KenPom, whose statguruizing placed Scott among the top ten players in the country.  That was the kind of notoriety that had been sorely missing from UVA hoops of late.

-- John Swofford.  Look, Swoff has his critics.  Sometimes they're right.  But I don't consider myself one of them.  If the ACC falls apart, it'll be difficult to blame the conference commissioner, who's been creative, and mostly successful thus far, in his attempts to hold the league together.  His success in attracting Notre Dame, a school that gives the ACC badly needed cachet, should not be overlooked.  And even though the Irish aren't technically a football member of the league, their five games a season against ACC teams is not really that far from a full schedule, and should give the ACC a few barganing chips at the all-important TV rights negotiating table, which is really where leagues are held together or destroyed.

-- Tony Bennett.  Let's take a second and acknowledge our basketball coach, who got the Hoos to the tournament probably ahead of schedule, despite watching attrition and injuries whittle his team down to six and a half scholarship players by season's end.  And this season he has them threatening to go back to the Dance, again despite a major obstacle in the form of the extreme youth of his charges and a nagging foot injury to the team's only scholarship senior.

-- Mike Rocco, pre-transfer.  Let's face it: having Phillip Sims transfer in was a potential boon for UVA's offense, but it was also a really awkward situation.  During the season, Rocco handled the see-sawing as well as anyone could have demanded.  Few quarterbacks in UVA's recent history have been jerked around as much as Rocco was.

-- Most of the ACC's presidents, both current and future.  Their statement of solidarity doesn't guarantee anything long-term about the stability of the ACC, but it was the most they could've done under the circumstances and much appreciated by those of us who like the ACC, dammit.

-- Helen Dragas.  Stipulated: that it's the Board of Visitors' job to hire and fire the school president, that UVA faces a number of challenges that are not exactly existential but must not be underestimated, and that I have no real idea whether or not Teresa Sullivan is the person to handle those challenges.  That said, Dragas's orchestration of Sullivan's resignation this summer, sans actual BOV vote, was far more reminiscent of a banana-republic military coup than the lofty ideals of American governance.  It angered practically everyone associated with the school and cast UVA in a poor national light.  The story, fortunately, had a happy ending, and one hopes the board is a little bit chastened, as well as smarter, for the experience.

-- Wallace Loh.  The University of Maryland president who engineered the Terps' move to the Big Ten flat-out admitted that the only knowledge he had of athletic conferences was that "there are games."  This is a man with a PhD from Michigan, faculty stints at Texas, Houston, Vanderbilt, Washington, has been a dean at Colorado and Washington and a provost at Iowa, and is now president of Maryland.  All of these are schools with big-time college football in big-time conferences.  This is a man who's spent 30 years with his head so far buried in ivory-tower academia, in ambitious pursuit of the position he now holds, and hasn't learned anything about the athletic organizations to which his school belongs except "there are games."  And this is the kind of person in charge of making decisions about college athletics.  (But who would certainly be appalled at the idea of a non-degree-holding football fan being in charge of any academic decisions at his school.)  The truth here really is that Jim Delany played Loh like a fiddle, and the ACC is worse off for it.

-- Mike Rocco, post-transfer.  The flip side of Rocco's good behavior during the season was that he let loose the frustration afterwards.  He wasn't speaking untruths, but even some truths are better left out of the public eye.

-- Foot bones.  And those slightly above the foot, as well, like in the ankle area.  Broken bones have sidelined Jontel Evans, put an early end to Assane Sene's UVA career, and canceled the season for Malcolm Brogdon as well.  These foot injuries represent one of the bigger threats to UVA's hoops season.

-- Mike London's clock management.  The failure to call timeout at the end of the VT game is a much-pilloried decision (for the wrong reasons, and the criticism is misguided in that it obscures a much more egregious error earlier in the sequence) but it really was little more than a symptom of a larger problem: London barely knows what he's doing at the end of a half.  Sometimes he is left without a timeout when he really needs one; other times he leaves them on the board.  At least Pete Gillen had a philosophy, however maddening.

-- Special teams.  The #1 reason why UVA did not go bowling.  And make no mistake, for all its flaws, it should have been in a bowl.  Simply beat Maryland and Wake Forest, two other non-bowl teams in the ACC, and UVA finds itself most likely in the Independence Bowl.  Not a great assignment to be sure, but better than where we found ourselves in real life.

the recruit: Justin Anderson

Name: Justin Anderson
Position: SF
Hometown: Montross, VA
School: Montrose Christian (MD)
Height: 6'5"
Weight: 210

24/7: 97; four stars
ESPN: 94; four stars; #13 SF; US #54
Rivals: five stars; #3 SF; US #23
Scout: four stars; #6 SF

Other offers: Maryland, Texas, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma, Georgetown, Louisville, no doubt a million others - Anderson could've gone to "any college he want[ed]" but hasn't been one to flaunt his offers.  Those are what I could find, but I'll go out on a limb and say a few other schools were probably interested.

First Justin Anderson, then lacrosse.  Pretty awesome week to be a Hoo, not so much to be a Terp.

Anyway, this is unfamiliar ground.  Anderson is the first five-star basketball recruit to choose UVA since....I dunno, since Ralph Sampson, I guess, if they'd had star-ratings back then.  So, basically ever.  Sylven Landesberg was a McDonald's kid but even he never got that coveted fifth star.  (Anderson is four stars to everyone but Rivals, but I'm semi-quasi-media, and according to the media one five-star rating is all you need.  Boom, you're a five-star.)  So I hardly know where to begin.

Let's start with a list of some of the adjectives assigned to Anderson's athleticism:

- Freakish
- Hellacious
- Elite
- God-given-off-the-charts

The basic scouting report on Anderson is this: wicked athlete, tenacious defender and rebounder, needs work on his shooting.  People might wonder how he'll fit into the lineup with so many similar players already on the team or on the way: Joe Harris, KT Harrell already here, Paul Jesperson coming in the fall, Evan Nolte arriving with Anderson in 2012.  All are 6'5"-6'7" types (Anderson is listed at 6'5" by most of the sites but it's been suggested at times he's a legit 6'7") who pretty much fall under the "wing" umbrella.

Me, I don't worry.  Anderson's skill set is just that different.  Harrell doesn't go straight to the hoop much, and Harris has deceptive slashing ability but only to a point.  Minutes might get a little cloggy but these guys are all different enough that it's not hard to envision three of them on the court at once.

Anderson's numbers aren't crazy gaudy - he averaged 14 ppg in this past season at Montrose, solid but not going to jump you out of your seat.  Well, not his scoring numbers, anyway.  He also grabbed 7 boards and chipped in two blocks and two steals a game as well.  It's that kind of well-roundedness that Tony Bennett just loves.  Play elite defense and you have a fan in Tony Bennett.  Anyway, it's really the teams Anderson plays on that raise eyebrows.  Montrose is a powerhouse, ranked #3 in the country in USA Today's high school rankings.  Anderson's AAU team is the heralded Boo Williams squad.  And he's got another little side project going on during his summers: winning the gold on Team USA's U17 squad.  As Yogi Berra would say, Anderson's kinda young for his age, being one of the few class of 2012 players on that team and the youngest player on the whole squad.  Even if Anderson ends up as a Burger Boy (likely) I don't think he'll have better company than he does on Team USA: Duke's Quinn Cook, UNC's James McAdoo, Kentucky's Marquis Teague and Mike Gilchrist, just to name a few of the five-star wunderkinds Anderson was selected to play with.

It's funny how the dominos fall.  When Maryland's Jordan Williams announced his intention to stay in the draft, that was cool, but who'd've thunk this would be the result?  That decision was supposedly one of the catalysts for Gary Williams' retirement; in the main, Williams is a stand-up guy who hates - hates - having to deal with the shitty people on the fringes of the game: the handlers, sketchy coaches, agents, runners, quasi-scouts, shoe reps, and various other people looking to make a quick buck by dangling fame and fortune in front of bling-eyed kids who gravitate toward swag like Charlie Weis to the donut buffet.  As the story goes, Williams might have been tossing retirement around in his head but the Jordan Williams decision - likely influenced by some of the above shady characters - was the last straw.  So he decided he'd had enough.  Justin Anderson always had his eye on Maryland, and it was no surprise whatsoever when he picked them in March, but mainly he had his eye on playing for Gary Williams and his lead recruiter, Rob Ehsan.  Ehsan wasn't retained by Mark Turgeon and left for Blacksburg, so Anderson, not having his two favorite Maryland coaches around any more, went with another guy who'd worked up a good relationship: Tony Bennett.

So Anderson will get here as part of Tony Bennett's best recruiting class yet.  In fact, the best in a long, long time.  Rivals has 'em down as a five-star and two four-stars in the outstanding Evan Nolte and the skyrocketing Mike Tobey.  If Bennett can also land a terrific point guard (L.J. Rose?) it'd be mind-boggling and probably enough to boost the class into top-five status nationally.  Jontel Evans will be a senior when Anderson gets here so it's not a desperate need to get a point guard in 2012, but man, that would be the time to get one.  A 2013 PG like Nate Britt or Big Cat Barber is a must.

But I digress.  How will Anderson fit in?  Like I said above, really well.  He's that guy who can get to the hoop on demand.  If Malcolm Brogdon can also be that guy, it'd be a dimension that Tony Bennett didn't have this year.  He's assembling a deep and deadly lineup of shooters, but that's only so useful if you don't also have someone who the defense is legitimately scared of with the ball in their hands.  And while the pack-line defense has turned mediocre defenders into really good system defenders, Anderson adds a new wrinkle to it.  It's already hard to drive on UVA if the pack-line is clicking, but Anderson is the kind of guy who can actually punish teams for trying.  In a perfect world, UVA has a nice season in 2011-2012 and goes to the tournament as maybe a 10 or 11 seed, and then the 2012 recruiting class shows up, headlined by Justin Anderson, and Tony Bennett's team really and truly arrives to stay.

For your edification, the hoops depth chart is now updated with Anderson.  Huzzah.

baseball preview, part 2

I guess it's a little late-ish for a preview since the baseball team is already 3-0 in ACC play, but whatever. Besides a few rocky innings here and there - none of which happened on Friday - the pitching staff acquitted itself very well thank you in the first weekend of the ACC season, and not against a schlub opponent either. It doesn't get easier this weekend with FSU on the docket.

The batting lineup, though, isn't what we're used to. The hitting is feeling the effects of losing a few key players. But it's warming up and scoring runs, which is the thing. Brian O'Connor is still juggling the order and the positions, which will probably continue most of the year; there isn't quite as much quality as in the past but there's a ton of quantity. Plenty of players who could easily be regulars.

You know I like to go position-by-position, so why don't I just do that?

Catcher

The duties behind the plate have been split pretty evenly so far between John Hicks and Kenny Swab; they probably will be all year. Both are hitting too well for a day off. Hicks especially. He's been the team's second-best hitter after Robo-Danny Hultzen. When he's not catching he's usually at first base; Swab plays first as well, sometimes, but is as likely to show up in right field.

Hicks and Swab are mainstays in the middle of the lineup. Hicks looks like he's settling into the coveted third spot and Swab is sort of nominally sixth, but can float around depending on who else is starting.

Infield

This has been a transient lineup so far, but the infield has been mostly immune to that. Keith Werman is cemented in at second base and Steven Proscia at third. Both should be hitting better than they have, frankly, especially Werman. Werm was a .414 hitter last year, and his BA is less than half of what it was. It may be that defenses are figuring him out, or it may be that the new bat is turning his singles into easy ground balls - Werman has all the power of a grasshopper - but regardless, he's dropped from leadoff to 8th or 9th in the order.

Even so, he's the starting second baseman, because his glove is irreplaceable. Just too good in the field to remove. Proscia's not bad himself, and his hitting isn't that far off last year's pace. He hit the first home run of the season on Sunday to stake UVA to a lead it wouldn't relinquish, and he'll continue to hit square in the middle of the order - often cleanup.

Stephen Bruno started the season as the regular shortstop, but he hasn't played since an injury in the first week of the year. Chris Taylor moved from the outfield and is doing a great job of making it really hard to figure out what to do when Bruno returns. Taylor's hitting has been exemplary (good enough to work his way up to batting leadoff) - regardless of Bruno's status, Taylor will have a spot in the lineup, and his defense has been solid if not amazing.

First base is where Hicks or Swab end up when they're not catching; on days when Hicks catches and Swab is in the outfield, Jared King and Cyber-Danny get their shot here. Danny is Danny; King is truly making it hard to keep him out of the lineup with nine hits in 20 at-bats. He may push for extra time as the season goes on, and we'll probably see less of Danny at first so he can stay fresh for his pitching duties.

Outfield

It's awfully fluid out there, but slowly settling. Nominally, you have John Barr in left field, Reed Gragnani in center (for now), and David Coleman in right. When the season started, Barr was in center and Coleman in left, but that changed after the ECU series. Taylor moved from right to shortstop after the Auburn tournament, and Swab played right field against ECU, except for Sunday when - guess who - Danny Hultzen started there.

For now, O'Connor seems to have settled on Barr, Gragnani, and Coleman, but Coleman still gets bumped in favor of Swab every so often; this is when you'll see King at first. The offensive production from the outfield is less than amazing, though. Coleman and Gragnani are hitting OK so far, not great; Barr has started off slowly. In the Sunday game against Clemson the trio occupied the 7-8-9 section of the order.

I wouldn't count on this being permanent. Swab will continue to see time in right field, and when Bruno returns there'll be further juggling to be done. It may even be Bruno and not Taylor that gets inserted into the outfield. The arms and fielding abilities of the outfielders remain under evaluation. And freshman Mitchell Shifflett remains a dark horse to get some time as the season goes on as well.

DH

Primarily the bailiwick of Danny the Droid, who happens to be the team's best hitter as well as pitcher. At times there is no DH; Hultzen simply bats for himself when he's pitching. As long as he's mashing the ball he can't be taken out of the lineup; he's simply hitting too well. When Hultzen isn't DHing or hitting for himself, Ryan Levine is the usual replacement. Levine's a sophomore that's come out of almost nowhere - he didn't play at all last year.

Overall, this is a lineup that graduated most of its home-run power (Gosselin, Parker, Grovatt) and had the rest pretty much surgically removed by the new college bats. In other words, it's Brian O'Connor's ultimate dream. BOC loves carousel ball, stealing bases, bunting, the hit-and-run. It's sometimes derided as "small ball" but it isn't really, because that would more correctly describe teams that try to manufacture a run here and a run there with sacrifices, squeeze plays, sac flies, and runner advancement. BOC prefers to flood the box score with hits, hits, and hits, steal whenever he can, and use bunts and the hit-and-run to keep the defense off balance rather than try and squeeze a single run out of an inning. He likes the big inning, he just does it without home runs.

So far the team has attempted about three-and-a-half times as many steals as the opposition (and it should be noticed that the catchers are doing a great job of cutting down base-stealers, and the pitchers are cleaning up after themselves with pickoffs.) There are no specialists. Everybody runs.

As I've said, the hitting is down from previous seasons, but not far enough to keep UVA from being a serious CWS contender. Probably everyone looks "down" thanks to the new bats, and those bats give us a big advantage this year; as a team that's never really depended on the home run to begin with, the lack of them doesn't take away one of our weapons. The lineup isn't awesome, but it's good enough.

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Last word on Tony Bennett and Utah and I do mean last. He's not going, never was, and you can believe either Craig Littlepage and TheSabre or semi-delusional Utah fans. You'n'me know how this goes. A name shows up one time in print and no amount of debunking will make that go away until the actual coach is hired. Bennett's failure to show up in Salt Lake City on the day he was said to be there is not enough. Littlepage's denial won't be enough, either, at least not for Utah fans, but it should be all the proof you need. I mean, if you were originally willing to believe Bennett would be willing to take on yet another rebuilding job for a team with lesser facilities, fewer resources, and in a lesser recruiting base, headed to a four-bid league after miserably underachieving in a three-bid one. Oh, and they can't pay him as much. I'll personally guarantee you that Tony Bennett does not get hired at Utah and then let Mike Scott do my talking, and I promise, not a peep more.

weekend review

Eventful weekend. Always is. Good news, too. Except for the tournament selection show. We got snubbed again. Totally ridiculous. If 16-15 doesn't get you in the tournament, then it's time to expand to 96. Or 128. Whatever it takes. Got my hopes up and everything. To assuage our hurt feelings, let's have our yearly laugh at Seth Greenberg, the whiniest bitch alive:

"Just disappointed. You almost wonder if someone in that room has their own agenda and that agenda doesn’t include Virginia Tech. Just plain and simple. I totally wonder it, if someone in that room has an agenda."

Probably not, but could you blame the committee for submitting the bracket and then starting their traditional when-does-Greenberg-flip-out pool? Hard to see how anyone could have an agenda against such a likable guy.

"I guess they even brought up our non-conference schedule. Kansas State, Purdue, Oklahoma State, UNLV, Penn State, St. Bonaventure that was supposed to be big and Mississippi State that was projected to win the SEC."

You don't get to take credit for the games you lost, you dumb fuck. You gotta love taking credit for beating teams that were supposed to be good but in fact sucked. (I don't know who said St. Bonaventure was supposed to be any good, but whatever.)

"They didn’t beat an Oklahoma State. They didn’t beat a Penn State. They didn’t beat a Mississippi State. We chose to go on the road to Kansas State."

And also chose to lose by 16. I think the committee noticed. God I love that VT isn't in the tournament because of UVA. Twist the knife a little.

Not that there aren't Hokies with perspective and a sense of humor. The comment section here is what you want. You'll know what you're looking for when you see it.

Now for the boring stuff, like all those wins our baseball team piled up this weekend.

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Actually, first lacrosse and Cornell. I did say we needed to shut down Rob Pannell, and not doing so made a closer game out of what didn't have to be. That and the hibernating offense. If the game of lacrosse hinged entirely on individual players making plays, UVA would destroy everything in sight. Defenses are smarter than that, though. I'm going to slap myself for saying this, but this lacrosse team reminds me of a way more talented version of VT basketball. A guy gets the ball and he tries to make an individual play for a goal. If he decides he can't, he passes it to someone else who tries again. And so on. Passing isn't used to set up an offense, it's used so that different players can try for a highlight. I'm not saying the team is selfish, even though it sounds like I am; I'm saying the offense is individualized and stagnant. I wish there were more motion without the ball. If we didn't have phenomenal athletes we'd be 3-3.

Fortunately, the defense is coming together well and Adam Ghitelman continues his frankly outstanding play in net. Ghitelman saved 13 of 21 SOG, bringing his SV% up to .590. Good stuff. Excellent stuff.

The team also won a majority of faceoffs and was actually 12 of 17 in the first three quarters, but I'll wait for that to happen more than once before I call it a trend and get excited about it. Still, it's better than a sharp stick in the eye.

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Even better than the lacrosse result is the baseball result. Three wins for the price of one! Debate exists as to whether Clemson - the victim of the sweep - deserves the top-5 rating they've been given (I lean toward not really) but it doesn't matter. They are a likely tournament team, and the sweep was on the road. The bats were alive; Steven Proscia picked a perfect time to hit the first home run of the season, to give UVA a lead in the Sunday contest and went 6-for-12 on the weekend.

Danny Hultzen had 14 strikeouts on Friday. 14, in 6 2/3 innings. Sheesh. He started this season eighth on the UVA career list with 230; he's now second with 50 more on the season and will pass Seth Greisinger's record of 290 either next Friday or the week after. That record is a goner. But there'll be a Danny Hultzen K Watch in this space anyway, as Hultzen takes aim at Tim Burcham's single-season record of 146. If he keeps racking them up at the pace he is now, he'll beat that easily. He has a shot at 200. Hell, he has a shot at making his 2011 season be good enough for a top-ten career, which would require 214. ACC competition makes it a longshot, but we're gonna find out week-by-week just how long it is.

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Football spring practice begins this week, which is pretty cool, I guess. Don't forget about the roadshow: a practice in Hampton this coming Saturday and in Alexandria the week after. Especially don't forget about them if you happen to be a big-time recruit, OK?

To commemorate, the depth chart has been updated. Spring practice is when I push the graduating seniors off the edge of the map and bump the freshmen into the picture. Keep in mind the only freshmen actually in camp are David Watford and Daquan Romero. Here are the changes, most of which are per the Sabre's press conference tweets:

- Linebackers are shuffled big time. They didn't list Ausar Walcott as a starter like he used to be, presumably because he's suspended so hard for being a punk in Harrisonburg. Nominally, for now, your starters are Aaron Taliaferro, Steve Greer, and Laroy Reynolds, with the backups being Tucker Windle, Henry Coley, and.... Daquan Romero? Though the comment about Romero being "behind" Reynolds might easily have meant "more than one space behind," at least we now know where exactly Romero is ticketed.

- Players who aren't participating fully are in purple. Was gonna make them red but red means out for the season and I didn't want to scare you.

- Miles Gooch is now a WR. Big surprise.

- A few additions: Former academic casualties Billy Cuffee and Buddy Ruff have worked their way back onto the team, but not in a scholarship status.

- And a few subtractions: Academic casualty Torrey Mack, injury casualty Aaron Van Kuiken, and one that I don't think I ever saw mentioned anywhere: Jared Detrick. It's totally possible I spaced out and missed the latter. But he's not on the roster at the moment, so subtracted he is, along with backup punter Logan Spangler, who's also not on the roster. Let's hope Jimmy Howell has a healthy senior season because he's the only one left.

By my count, the team is now three over the scholarship limit of 85. Hmm, there were three players arrested in Harrisonburg. I'd be sweating it out if I were them.

I do really wish, by the way, that Kris Burd were participating in spring drills, which he's not. Not because he needs it, but because there aren't that many veteran receivers in camp, and the quarterbacks will really need consistency from their receivers as they battle for position.

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That would be the end, but I feel compelled to address the wackiness emanating from Utah. Somebody out there got the idea that Tony Bennett was reaching out to Utah expressing interest in their now-vacant coaching job. (Kind of like Jeff Capel was angling so hard to get the UVA job in order to get back to the ACC. Hint - no he wasn't.) I wouldn't bother, because this is dumb, but it's out there so what the hell.

Streaking the Lawn does a pretty good job of laying out why this is a stupid rumor, but they're a little too equivocal for my taste. How about this: There's no fucking way Tony Bennett ends up in fucking Utah, and their fans are delusional as fuck for thinking it's possible. Even Washington State fans think it's nucking futs. I wish I could find where this originated, but supposedly Bennett was even in Utah today. Pretty damn hard to do when you have a radio show all day, which he didn't exactly skip.

This must have been what UVA fans sounded like two years ago. I hope we weren't as ludicrously uninformed as the guy who's never heard of Dulles Airport, but regardless. Remember "Rick Barnes was spotted at a 7/11"? Remember when we were totally, definitely hiring Tubby Smith? Now I know how Minnesota fans felt, except not really because the UVA job is a step up from Minnesota by virtue of being in the ACC and in better recruiting grounds. Among other reasons.

So. Dear UVA fans: Stop worrying, because Tony Bennett isn't going to Utah. Dear Utah fans: Hands off our coach, who isn't going to Utah, and yes he'd be a home-run hire but that's what we thought Tubby Smith was going to be and we didn't get Tubby Smith, we got a guy none of us had ever heard of and two years in he's someone else's wishful thinking already. You'll find your prince, just not in Charlottesville.

the kings of unlikely

The lacrosse team is 2-0, the baseball team is 4-0, both are headed for a big weekend of games, and the basketball team is barely over .500 on the season, playing out the string en route to another likely quarterfinals exit (at best) from the ACC tournament, which they do every year. They ain't exactly making history. If they're lucky they'll get a CBI invite, which isn't even the junior NIT - it's more like the NIT's janitor. No offense to janitors. If they're really lucky they'll get a low seed in the NIT. How does a basketball team get anyone to care about the longshot chase for a 7-seed in the NIT?

By caring very, very hard themselves. You might ask, if you were a national observer: how can you keep devoting so much attention to a mediocre bunch that missed the tournament bubble about two months ago? Then again, how can you not? This is the raggediest, misfittiest UVA basketball team in recent memory. It's held together - as an on-court product, not in the intangible locker room - with baling wire, Elmer's, rainbows, and the wishes of orphans. No duct tape. Duct tape hurt his ankle in December. There's an adolescent giraffe playing center, a shooting guard playing power forward, and another shooting guard that's sort of a point guard and can only hit three-pointers when flying backwards into the Gatorade jug with the shot clock expiring. And now they're winning basketball games. In the ACC.

Consider this: This team lost Sylven Landesberg, Mike Scott, Jeff Jones, and Jerome Meyinsse, replaced them with four freshmen, and that change resulted in a likely increase in wins - assuming they can win just one of the next three. That's how you know you have the right coach.

Now we have the kings of unlikely, trying to do the unlikely. Make the postseason and the NIT. Sure, it's a longshot. North Carolina did it at 16-16, 5-11, just last season, but of course they have something we don't: the name "North Carolina." And Assane Sene is gangly and awkward, and if you look up "assane sene" on YouTube half the results are "Travis McKie posterizes Assane Sene". He is the least likely person to create his own Sportscenter highlight and he just created his own Sportscenter highlight by MANBLOCKING two Georgia Tech shots. Somehow this guy who can't catch a bounce pass ripped someone's weak stuff right out of the air not two feet away from the hand that fired the shot. In the second half, he encored by belting a Daniel Miller dunk attempt into Mongolia. If you'd asked me two years ago or last year how I felt about a team led by Mustapha Farrakhan - who had made a career of shooting 4-for-15 - I'd have seriously considered demoting the basketball team to club level. Today I exchanged Q&A with BC Interruption and they asked me how to go about stopping Mustapha Farrakhan. An unlikely team leader, an even more unlikely clutch player - and yet without a trace of irony yesterday I exhorted the inbounder to find Mu and get him the ball.

Slowly but surely, and painfully, the kings of unlikely are coming up with unlikely wins. It is nothing to anyone whether they finish with 14 or 15 or 16 of them, but the journey, to recycle a hackneyed phrase, is more important than the destination. The process is one of learning how to win - another hackneyed, overused phrase, but never more apt than when describing a team that blows lead after lead after lead and then finds itself not blowing the lead any more. ESPN's announcers may condescend to marvel at the effort given by a team headed - from their lofty perspective - nowhere, and you might be crazy to keep letting your sanity hinge on every Sammy Zeglinski desperation heave. But as long as there's effort like that coming from this team, it's not only your right, it's a sworn duty. Lacrosse and baseball will still be there when they're done.

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Other things you should know:

- No, seriously, Assane Sene. He's playing like a man possessed and is Exhibit A in the case for Tony Bennett's player development skills. Easily the team's most improved player.

- Or not so easily, given Farrakhan's progression.

- The NCAA is not happening, obviously, barring ACC Tournament insanity. The NIT is also unlikely. But you know what I've been saying about unlikely. NIT bracketology is a bizarre thing to do and I'm not gonna bother, but if you're holding onto that hope, the best bet is to root for the chalk in the small-major conference tournaments so they don't take up space in the NIT. Fairfield, Oakland, Vermont. Teams like that. Winning, at a bare minimum, two more games, is also obvious. Probably at least three would be needed, including a tournament game.

bastaball, part 2

Continued from yesterday....

#15 - Billy Baron

Best-case: No change in the minutes he gets after Sammy Zeglinski returns from his knee injury.

Worst-case: Overwhelmed. Point guard duties with Evans out of the game fall to some combination of Harris, Harrell, and Farrakhan until Zeglinski returns.

In a perfect world Billy Baron could get his feet wet playing the 2 and get some low-pressure minutes at the 1 when the opponent is USC-Upstate or Howard. In a perfect world Sammy Zeglinski's various joints that keep him upright wouldn't keep bugging out on him. Instead, Baron is your default backup point guard, which means he's in for serious minutes in a pressure situation.

Baron is actually older than your average freshman, having spent a year at prep school in order to play basketball against better competition than he had in high school. This inspires a certain level of confidence. As does his being a coach's son. "Overwhelmed" is the worst-case, because it's the default worst-case for any freshman point guard, but there's little reason to believe Baron is in any danger of that. Standard stuff about how if he can shoot he'll be infinitely more valuable goes here, but if he can just be a better-shooting version of Evans without the yard-dog defense, while probably running less of the offense until he catches up, then that's a win.

#22 - Will Sherrill

Best-case: Is able to shut down the opposition's bench players.

Worst-case: Forced to try and shut down the opposition's starters.

Sherrill wormed his way into the rotation by being better than anyone else at doing the things Bennett demands but nobody sees on TV, like footwork on defense, setting screens, and generally always being in the right place at the right time. Excellent basketball sense. Unfortunately, he's also inordinately slow, can't jump, and is strong like ferret. Ivy League athleticism to go along with his Ivy League mind.

He's largely a defensive player, therefore. Other than a couple SUPRIZE big-man three pointers and some putbacks, he won't be scoring. If the rest of the team is performing well enough in the Bennett-demanded facets of basketball, Sherrill can come off the bench and probably do a pretty good job against the other team's backups. If Sherrill is a starter, he'll almost certainly be physically outmatched.

#23 - Mike Scott

Best-case: As with last year, double-double machine. Also, emotional team leader who sparks game-winning second-half runs.

Worst-case: Overdoes the emotion thing, goes on tilt, gets streaky, occasionally gets benched and/or tossed out of a game.

Mike Scott has a way of letting things get to him. When Dave Leitao announced to the team that he'd been fired, it was Scott that stormed immediately out of the room, overturning innocent trash cans in his wake. He has a way, sometimes, of letting that get out on the court, too, and it's not always constructive.

But it often is. Scott has a nose for rebounds, a jump shot (which he probably uses too much), and some soft-touch post moves. He can be streaky, disappearing from some games and dominating others. The key this season will be to channel that emotion positively and let it work for him, not against him. He's a senior captain, so it's imperative he make that effort. More than anyone else on the team, he's got the capacity to get the JPJA fired up beyond belief, and if things are going well he'll probably be the most visible guy on the court. If not, he'll be conspicuous in all the wrong ways.

#24 - K.T. Harrell

Best-case: Nothing less than the ACC Freshman of the Year.

Worst-case: J.R. Reynolds-level willingness to shoot, Mustapha Farrakhan-level consistency.

Harrell is probably going to assume the mantle of primary perimeter scorer. Yes, the competition for top freshman is fierce, especially with Harrison Barnes at UNC and Kyrie Irving at Duke. If those guys are productive starters, one of those two will get that award based largely on the uniform they wear.

But the talent level on the respective teams means Harrell will have more chances to shine. Granted, I've set the bar a little higher for Harrell than the other freshmen. But they're largely specialists, at least to start out. Harrell has a chance to lead the team in scoring. I don't know whether it's a good sign or a bad sign if he does, but he might.

The problem will be if he starts feeling the need to do too much. Which will happen if the rest of the team can't also score a little. Inconsistency is the hallmark of freshmen, and it's a flat guarantee for freshmen who the opposition keys in on because the rest of the team doesn't scare them. The other concern is that Harrell gets bypassed by other players because of their performance, or his lack thereof, of the Bennett-demanded facets of the game. (I might need to start abbreviating that.) Bennett's proven himself beyond willing to bench talent in favor of guys who play his system better. Because Harrell was handpicked by Bennett, unlike for example Tristan Spurlock, the chances of that are much smaller. But still.

#25 - Akil Mitchell

Best-case: Will Sherrill, only athletic.

Worst-case: Redshirts.

As with Regan, that's worst-case for this year for Mitchell personally, because it means zero out of him, but not even remotely the worst thing that could happen big-picture.

Anyway, Mitchell and Sherrill are about the same size and play about the same role. But Sherrill's knowledge of the system is impeccable and Mitchell's is an unknown quantity right now. It's not likely Mitchell will, in just one season, know the whens and wheres like Sherrill does, but if he can mimic it passably enough, he'd represent a galactic athleticism boost.

In any case, Mitchell is definitely one of the biggest wild cards of the class. The proverbial X-factor. How Akil Mitchell does this year will affect practically every other frontcourt player except for Mike Scott. Because he's such an unknown, he's the hardest to project, but my initial thought is that if Mitchell excels, the domino effect will be tremendous, allowing a number of other players to fill more natural roles.

#34 - James Johnson

Best-case: Forms a potent 1-2 punch down low with Mike Scott.

Worst-case: Garbage time only.

Besides Assane Sene, Johnson is the biggest dude we got, so he'll be given every chance and then some to succeed. If he plays defense the way Bennett wants, I think the offense will come naturally. Optimally, Johnson could either be able to spell Scott alongside someone like Sene or Sherrill, or play alongside Scott if Bennett wants to go big on offense. The former can happen if his offensive game develops, and the latter, if his defense is where it should be.

I don't like to think of the possibility, because it'd leave a big hole in the frontcourt, but a lack of defense means he'll sit. Frontcourt is where Bennett has his options - I wouldn't say he has depth, because that would mean he has options of more or less equal quality. Not really the case, but there are options, and whoever plays the least defense, sits. If that's Johnson he'll be a human victory cigar (or, uh, loss cigar), because, being as big as he is and as skilled as he hopefully is, he's one of the most important building blocks.

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It should be said here that these "best-cases" are set up so that they really can't all come true at once. Mostly for the freshmen. They're going to get in each others' way at first, because there aren't enough minutes to go around so that all of them can play huge roles. But they'll all have their chances. The rotation, obviously, isn't going to be too well set until the ACC season is well underway. And some of these guys are going to end up stashed on the bench pretty permanently, once that rotation settles: Bennett only wants nine or ten, which means a couple odd men out. Who might that be? Damn near impossible to say right now.

I make no predictions for the course of the season, except for very general ones. There should be a minimum of seven wins to be found in the nonconference schedule, barring any oh-shits coming our way from someone like William & Mary. Assuming the 50/50 games like LSU and Stanford turn out just that way - 50/50 - then you're talking nine or so wins in the OOC. That means in order to improve on last year's 15-16 mark, we need to also improve on our showing in the ACC itself. As ever, that's a tough road. So when they say UVA is about the 11th best team in the conference, they're probably right. The results will be what they be, but the real takeaways from the season aren't going to be in the win/loss columns.

the recruit: Malcolm Brogdon

Name: Malcolm Brogdon
Position: SG
Hometown: Norcross, GA
School: Greater Atlanta Christian
Height: 6'5"
Weight: 200

ESPN: 90; #47 SG
Rivals: four stars; #26 SG; #102 nationally
Scout: four stars; #22 SG; #87 nationally

Other offers: Clemson, Notre Dame, Minnesota, Butler, Vanderbilt, Arkansas, Georgia, Providence, various mid-majors

Tony Bennett's plan of attack on the recruiting warpath is starting to settle into a pattern. We're still not able to snag the Marshall Plumlees of the world. If a guy has a great junior year, or has been a prospect for even longer than that, and other schools (the likes of which we're aiming to compete with, like Duke or even just Maryland) are onto him, UVA might get a long look but in the end someone else closes the deal.

So you take a look at the camp circuit, because there are always players blowing up there. Players like K.T. Harrell and Paul Jesperson. Enter Malcolm Brogdon, whose story you've heard before. He's a superstar fish in a smallish pond, leading his team to a state championship at the AA level in Georgia (GA has levels A through 5A, the latter being the highest) and gets major-league pub for the state's Mr. Basketball in 2011. (And 2010, though he didn't win it.) He had a smattering of offers after his junior year and was choosing between Clemson, Georgia, and Minnesota until he played in the Peach Jam, one of the top AAU tournaments nationwide. Suddenly his offers tripled. He must have done okay.

So Bennett swoops in, and did something he's done a terrific job of in his recruiting work: kept things on the DL until it's too late for these other schools. Brogdon's name only surfaced in connection with UVA a couple weeks ago. This probably came as a big disappointment to UGA, which had spent a lot of time cultivating this particular relationship.

And with the boost in offers came a corresponding jump in his ratings. Scout and Rivals added a fourth star, and they're both in pretty close agreement about where he stands in relation to the other prospects in the country. ESPN is the outlier, but their last evaluation of him was in May, two months before the Peach Jam. If they re-evaluate, he'll go up.

Brogdon gets referred to as a wing a lot, which would lead you to think he and Paul Jesperson are redundant - Jesperson is also a "wing." But there's a huge difference. I called Jesperson a two-and-a-half rather than a standard three; Brogdon is more of a one-and-a-half. He's got the potential to be a ball-handler, but his big thing is shooting. The difference between he and Jesperson is that Brogdon can create his own shot. I was tempted to compare him to J.R. Reynolds, but actually he and Reynolds seem like opposites in a way: Reynolds could drive and finish at the hoop like few others, but his jump shot held him back at times. Brogdon can create and finish a jump shot, but his ballhandling garners the kind of lukewarm reviews that suggest he certainly has the ability and potential to be good at it, but needs some work to get there.

Still, his jump shot is said to be silky-smooth. And what's really intriguing is his size: 6'5" is big for a guard. And whether on purpose or unconsciously, Bennett is really upgrading the size of his backcourt. That's where Brogdon's comparison finally comes in: role-wise, he's a bigger Mustapha Farrakhan. By the time Bennett's done making his mark on the roster, the backcourt will be a lot bigger than it used to be. It won't show as much on offense, but it'll make a big difference on defense.

Of course, I've kind of beaten this point into the ground, but there's no way of knowing how, where, and when any 2011 recruit will fit into the roster until we see how this season goes. But if things go about as planned, Farrakhan's exit after this season opens up a space for Brogdon, and he can battle K.T. Harrell for minutes. One thing we won't have to worry about is grades: Stanford was in touch, Vandy and Notre Dame offered, and so did Tulane and Harvard. If that doesn't convince you he's a top-notch fit for UVA, maybe this will:

As good as his stats are (and they are), Brogdon does all the “little things” as well as anyone. He is a natural leader, encourages his teammates, works hard to get them involved in the game, sets picks and dives for balls out of bounds, appears to have outstanding character, and strives for excellence in the classroom.

Say what you will, but Tony Bennett knows how to find easy players to root for.

what could have been

Yup, time to play "Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda: Basketball Edition." Why now? Because today we learned officially what all the signs have been pointing to for weeks: Sylven Landesberg is done at UVA.

We're not going into whatever illustriousness would have happened in the next two years that would have put the #15 into the rafters blah blah blah. I have not much interest in trying to make sense of what the lineup will actually look like next year and how they'll perform - not when the 2010 recruits haven't even gone to senior prom yet let alone get themselves on Grounds. So it stands to reason I have even less interest in pontificating over spilled milk.

I don't know when the hell we've ever seen a five-star basketball recruit actually enroll at UVA. Recruiting five-stars always ends up with UVA as the bridesmaid. Ed Davis, Patrick Patterson, DeSagana "it's pronounced JOP" Diop. You know the story, cause it turns out the same every time. But we've been pretty successful bringing in four-star types, the sort that you still ought to be able to build your team around and maybe even expect them to stay awhile. The Rivals database goes back to 2002, so here's the list of four-star recruits (not counting the '10 class of James Johnson and K.T. Harrell) that have said yes, Virginia:

Derrick Byars ('02)
Devin Smith ('02)
Gary Forbes ('03)
Sean Singletary ('04)
Will Harris ('06)
Jamil Tucker ('06)
Jeff Jones ('07)
John Brandenburg ('08)
Sylven Landesberg ('08)
Tristan Spurlock ('09)

Of those 10 players, exactly three have finished or will finish their eligibility at UVA, and that number includes Jeff Jones who shows every intention of doing so as well as Devin Smith who only had three years to begin with.

- Byars stopped wanting to play for Pete Gillen and transferred to Vanderbilt, where he morphed from useful reserve to SEC Player of the Year.
- Forbes transferred to Manhattan after becoming ineligible at UVA, and ended up eventually at UMass where he morphed from useful reserve to A-10 Player of the Year. (Damn these patterns.)
- Harris kept getting hurt at UVA and led a terrible Albany team in scoring this year.
- Tucker didn't show any interest in the academic side of his obligations and was more or less kicked off the team, having never suited up for Tony Bennett. At least he made it three years.
- Brandenburg was very sparingly used, had some murky family stuff going on, and you'll see him in a Colgate uniform next year.
- Landesberg is singin' dolla dolla bill, y'all.
- Spurlock is off to parts unknown.

Wait! That's not all:

- Donte Minter transferred to Appalachian State.
- T.J. Bannister transferred to Liberty after his minutes went backwards in his junior year.
- Sam Warren left much as Spurlock did: spent a year in the new program after committing to the old coach, and gave up. At least Spurlock didn't wait til the beginning of fall practice.
- Lars Mikalauskas was booted from the team after pissing off Leitao one too many times.

It's hard to find a recruiting class that managed to make it all the way through school without losing some of its members. Only 2004 (Adrian Joseph, Sean Singletary, and Tunji Soroye) and 2007 (Mustapha Farrakhan, Jeff Jones, Mike Scott, Sammy Zeglinski) qualify, and we're not done with '07 yet. Anything could happen. Because the theme here is that if you're going to be a UVA basketball fan, then transfers, academic casualties, and behavior casualties have been par for the course this decade.

And I only started at 2002 arbitarily. We could go back farther: Jermaine Harper to Cal-State Fullerton. Maurice Young to St. Bonaventure. J.C. Mathis to Michigan. Nick VanderLaan in and out again. Majestic Mapp and his injury troubles. Keith Jenifer acted the part of a cementheaded thug, managed to kill our chances for an upset win at Maryland by taunting Gary Williams and motivating the Terps, was accused of assaulting people on the Corner, and ended up at Murray State. (Where by at least this account he screwed his head on straight a little bit, something he desperately needed. In that case, though, the parting of the ways was addition by subtraction for UVA.)

Normally when players leave early, they're off to the pros, which you can deal with because it means they were pretty good; Landesberg and Roger Mason are the only ones in this category.

Basically, though, it boils down to using a lot of guys that were loads of fun to root for and terrific, upstanding people on and off the court, but out of their league in an ACC starting lineup. Jason Cain. Tunji Soroye. Jerome Meyinsse. And a lot of borderline ACC talent that should be competing against the other bench guys but instead have to contend with the Tyler Hansbroughs and J.J. Redicks.

A lot of this we've brought on ourselves. You expect transfers when you change coaches, and we've seen that twice this decade. Even more so, the coaches have been cut from entirely different cloth. Way, way different personalities. Pete Gillen was a nice guy, laid-back, let people get away with a lot. Dave Leitao swore like a sailor and yelled a lot, but doled out playing time pretty liberally. Tony Bennett is soft-spoken and not screamy at all, but not the tiniest bit flexible on his off-the-court standards and uses playing time as both his carrot and stick.

Plus, UVA is always going to be UVA, where the NCAA might say you're eligible, but the registrar has the final word.

But this brings us to the main thing I was thinking about, which is, what this team was really supposed to look like this year:

PG - Sammy Zeglinski
Wing - Sylven Landesberg
Wing - Jamil Tucker
PF - Mike Scott
C - John Brandenburg
Bench - Will Harris, Jeff Jones, Tristan Spurlock, Assane Sene, Jontel Evans

Tucker and Harris would leave after this year and Spurlock would slide into a featured role alongside Landesberg, and Mychal Parker probably would have joined the rotation. That's how it was all supposed to play out.

I don't know how that team would be on defense. It might be better than you think, being that a lot of the lousy defensive reputation of some of these players comes from their ability or maybe lack thereof to grasp Bennett's system. Tucker was never too committed on the defensive end, and this year, neither was Spurlock, but he committed to play Leitao's defense, not Bennett's. So it's not fair to assume he'd have been a liability on defense.

But man would this team score. A lot. And it would start a 7-footer and bring another off the bench. That's the team we'd have had without rotten luck and coaching changes. With the state of the ACC this year, that team would have won 9 or 10 games in conference and gone to the tournament for sure. And barring the sort of luck that tore it apart in real life, it'd be looking at another trip next year, too.

This is why I once said - and still say - that Leitao would have brought this year's team to the NIT. You can't control the luck, and without Brandenburg this team was always going to be a donut team. We knew that. But there's no way Leitao would have kept Spurlock on the bench. Tucker'd still be around too, maddening us with his indifferent defense but bringing a steady, reliable jump shot to the game. And there wouldn't be any issues with struggling to learn a totally new defensive system that requires you to unlearn all your ingrained fundamentals.

This is where I put in the obligatory caveat that this doesn't mean I'm not totally on board with Tony Bennett, here. I'm won over by his recruiting chops and his standards. The fact that he improved the team by five games and one ACC game is impressive, given the above-mentioned attrition and the fact that he's in tear-down mode. But that doesn't change that I don't think Leitao ought to have been fired. I think he'd have had this program on the upswing as well and deserved the chance to see it through. This lack of continuity combined with our higher academic standards is just murder on a basketball program.

The upshot of it all is that for the Tony Bennett program to work, both the admin and Bennett need to be totally committed to it for the very long term. That means four more years at an absolute, rock-bottom, bare minimum. No getting cold feet four years in and firing Tony the same way they did Leitao. You knew what he was going to do and how he was going to do it, and he deserves the chance to see his project all the way through, the way Leitao did not, without having the rug pulled out from underneath. And for Tony, no running off for bigger bucks at a bigger program. Normally I understand that's the nature of the business, but you don't come in, change all the standards and expectations, and tear down a program this way and then leave it half-done. Finish your legacy, whatever that is. And the fans, alums, and donors need to let it play out and not get all impatient and pissy when we don't make the tournament next season, because we won't. Bennett, hopefully, is the guy to reverse this pattern of playing season-to-season and losing all our players all the time, instead of program-building. Turn on him before he's had his chance and we'll find it harder and harder to bring coaches in here and relegate ourselves to the second divison forever.