game preview: Duke

Date/Time: Friday, April 13; 6:00

TV: ESPNUVA

Record against the Blue Devils: 49-26

Last matchup: Duke 19, UVA 10; 4/22/11; Durham (ACC tournament)

Last game: UVA 15, UNC 10 (4/7); Duke 11, Marist 10 (4/7)

Efficiency stats:

Faceoff %:
UVA: 56.4%
Duke: 57.4%

Clearing %:
UVA: 89.6% (off.), 85.8% (def.)
Duke: 82.1% (off.), 86.7% (def.)

Scoring %:
UVA: 39.7% (off.), 29.4% (def.)
Duke: 37.8% (off.), 30.9% (def.)

O-rating:
UVA: 19.78 (#2)
Duke: 18.39 (#5)

D-rating:
UVA: 12.88 (#13)
Duke: 13.53 (#21)

It's one of those big weekends.  Tomorrow, the Duke game, and the UNC baseball series begins as well.  Saturday, more baseball and the spring football game.  And then there's the Anthony Gill visit (about which Whitey Reid has some excellent info.)  I suspect the Friday scheduling of the lacrosse game is because of the football game, which is too bad because I thought the combination football-lax extravaganza was a big step in the right direction toward the sort of all-out fun-time festival the spring football game should be.  It rained last year, which sort of soured things, but I'd still enjoy seeing all these things treated as part of a larger whole instead of getting in the way of each other.

Tomorrow we'll talk spring football.  Today, Duke.  We got good news this afternoon when it was announced that Ryan Benincasa will be available after sitting out the part of the UNC game that happened after he was hit in the bean.  It could have cost us the game; Benincasa looked as though he'd figured out something on UNC's R.G. Keenan and was winning a lot of faceoffs all the same way.  Having him ready for Duke will be big.

-- UVA on offense

When not playing a man down, Duke has a fairly stout defense, a fact made even more impressive when you consider the streaky play of goalie Dan Wigrizer.  On the whole, Wigrizer isn't a great goaltender, with only a .519 save percentage.  And just when you think you're comfortable with that and you like the idea of Duke having a sieve for a netminder, Wigrizer stands on his head and stops like eight shots in a row.  If you can get off a good shot, you can probably get it past Wigrizer....except when he's in one of his moods, and then he's a wall.

Duke's got some big guys at close-in defense, which is the sort of thing that gave us trouble at times against Hopkins.  Michael Manley is an experienced senior, and the smallest of the bunch, too.  He's not actually small, it's just that sophomores Henry Lobb and Chris Hipps are each 6'4".  But the leader of the defense is LSM C.J. Costabile.  Costabile also takes faceoffs (making him, as a long-stick guy, a rare breed in that department), and has earned a number of honors over his career, including being a finalist for the Lowe's Senior Class Award, which by the way Steele Stanwick is also a finalist for that so go vote for him if you don't want the Dookie to win.

So it's a solid defense they have, and it'd be even better if they were good at man-down defense.  They have to play it a lot - Duke is one of the most heavily penalized teams in the country.  They average five per game, and they're led by reserve defenseman Luke Duprey (by the way, he's 6'5") with 10.  Mostly of the 60-second variety.  Manley is a close second with nine.  And when you get the ball, you just might score; Duke allows a 47% conversion rate on man-up chances.  This translates to two goals a game.

I doubt we'll get a lot of one-on-one chances against Duke's close-in defense, given their size, and it won't be possible to force the ball into the doorstep if it's covered.  Even less than usual, that is.  Lord knows we try, sometimes.  Duke's just too big for that.  But the chances will come like they always have.  They're good, but not fearsome - much like our other two ACC opponents.  When we get man-up chances we must - and probably will - capitalize, and it's worth knowing that a lot of teams have scored on Duke that shouldn't be able to.  Double-digit goals for Marist, Georgetown, Syracuse**, eight goals apiece for Brown and Penn - all teams with below-average O-ratings.  So I expect to keep on finding the back of the net.

**It's really weird to be putting Syracuse in that group, but there they are, right between Delaware and Jacksonville in the O-rating department.

-- UVA on defense

We've got a pretty formidable offensive lineup.  Duke is one of the few teams in the country that can match it.  There's a trio of sophomore attackmen - Jordan Walsh, Christian Walsh, and Josh Dionne - that make a case for the most productive attack in the country, and senior midfielder Robert Rotanz has always been an extremely dangerous player too.  Dionne and Wolf are the guys making the case that five-foot-single-digits is just fine; neither are 5'10" and between them they have 48 goals.  Wolf in particular is dangerous; playing the X, behind the net, he has 24 goals and 20 assists.  Rotanz is an excellent one-on-one dodger, and he leads the team with 26 goals.

Those four are the names you'll hear the most.  Beyond that, it gets thin.  There are capable players, but complementary parts at best; Justin Turri has 11 goals and the third starting middie, Jake Tripucka, has nine, but the thing is this: practically nobody after the top four has a shooting percentage above .300.  Consider this: Rob Emery and Matt White put about the same percentage of their shots on net as do Turri and Tripucka, but the Duke players' shooting percentages are .212 and .205, respectively; Emery and White have a much more normal .352 and .382.

Still: the top four.  And you'd think with all that offensive talent, Duke would have a scary man-up unit, but they're merely 11-for-51, a conversion percentage of .216.  That's..... pretty bad, actually.  Here's a little mental exercise: Duke's opponents have handed them 47 minutes' worth of penalties in 13 games.  Duke themselves have committed 56.5 minutes' worth of penalties.  Let's subtract those from the 780 minutes of game time they've played.  That leaves 676.5 minutes.  (I know that penalties usually end when a goal is scored; just bear with me.)  Divide the 676.5 minutes in half to approximate the time that Duke spends on offense and we get 338.25.

So in our theoretical world, Duke has played 47 minutes a man-up and 338 minutes of even-strength offense.  With 11 man-up goals, that's a goal for every 4:16 of man-up time.  (We'll pretend you spend every second of man-up play on offense, even though you don't, because you should.)  They've scored 138 even-strength goals, or one for every 2:27 of even-strength offense time.  Duke gets worse when you give them an extra man.  With as easy as it is to score on their man-down defense, theoretically, then, the best game plan is to spend the whole game trying to beat them into submission and hoping maybe they retaliate once in a while.

(In case you're wondering, the same tortured mathematical calisthenics when performed on UVA's stats give us a goal for every 1:44 of man-up time and a goal for every 2:22 of even-strength offensive time.)

This is kind of a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, of course - obviously I don't want to actually break their players over our sticks in hopes of earning a parade to the penalty box.  I want to break them legally.  The point here is that Duke probably needs a new special-teams coach.

-- Outlook

It's Senior Night, and it's Duke; you shouldn't need any more reason to want to win by 13.  In the standings there is none; thanks to the way the tiebreakers work, the ACC tourney pairings are already set.  We got UNC, Duke has Maryland.  Duke lost to Maryland in the regular season, but I don't see it happening again, which means there's a decent likelihood we'll match up in another week's time, same teams, same field, just like last year.  That's no reason to look ahead to a rematch that might not even happen, of course, but we lost twice to these guys last year, and we can't flip the script without winning the first one.  I know these Dookie bastards are our kryptonite year in and year out, but we've got Steele Stanwick and Chris Bocklet making opposing fans go "please hurry the eff up and graduate" and a machine of an offense and I'll be damned if I predict this team to lose.

-- Final score: [redacted to appease the fickle lacrosse gods]**

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-- Did I mention Steele Stanwick?  I did, but I must again.  He is mere tenths of a percentage point ahead of Costabile the Dukie, and trailing two guys from Siena(!) and Ohio State.  Siena has three fans and Ohio State is the devil.  Steele Stanwick : lacrosse :: Danny Hultzen : baseball.  VOTE FOR HIM DAMMIT

-- This was too fun to wait til Monday's weekend review: UVA got a shout on the Colbert Report the other day.  We are a school that is Doing It Right, at least in the mind of Colbert's smart-sounding interviewee, who was not kidding even though Colbert usually is.  We're also the only school that Colbert heard on the Doing It Right list and earned a cheer instead of a snarky reply upon mention.  (Colbert's wife is a Hoo.  He is not stupid.)  Click, then, to hear Wahoowa, Stephen Colbert style.

**OK, OK....13-12.  Shhh!

weekend review

Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news?  Bad news it is, and that means lacrosse.  UVA surrendered its #1 ranking this weekend by surrendering an overtime goal to Johns Hopkins.  As was only fitting with the direction of that game, it happened with five seconds to go.

The final sequence of the game was laced with some of the finest examples of traded attempts to give away a game that I have ever seen.  Hopkins, with a golden opportunity to win the game in regulation, was called for offsides and followed it up with a too-many-men penalty.  UVA, for its part, decided to wait out the penalty in order to guarantee first possession of overtime (a strategy I disagreed with) and then watched as Rob Emery allowed a routine pass to sail over his stick, handing possession right back.  Hopkins didn't actually want it, but another too-many-men penalty - this one on UVA - forced them to actually try and take a shot to win.  And so it went until John Ranagan of Hopkins said to hell with it and potted the game-winner just to spare the crowd the agony of watching another overtime play out like that.

What will give the Hoos confidence should there be a tournament rematch is this: Hopkins hardly ever scored in settled situations.  Rob Fortunato's brilliance in net may have had something to do with it.  Hopkins scored 11 goals, and I count at least seven in "special" situations; three man-up goals, two directly off faceoffs, and at least two fast breaks that I can remember.  Six-on-six, offense vs. defense, the UVA defense was outstanding.

The offense, yes and no.  Some nice plays, but I think the story of the game ultimately is the UVA failure to capitalize on chances.  10 goals in 32 chances - that's a good number against the Hop defense but a bad one for the UVA offense, and you can't pile on mistakes and expect a team like Hopkins not to take advantage.  The one that sticks out most prominently is a pass to someone all alone in front of the goal (Bocklet?  Briggs?  Can't remember exactly) from behind the net in semi-transition.  The pass was in the dirt, and was scooped by Hopkins and instead of a two-goal lead, it was tied five seconds later.

At any rate, the #1 seed is now out of the picture, and fine whatever, We Don't Want That Bullseye Anyway and all that.  The ACC season is upon us, with some opportunities to do some major damage.  It is now Hit A Terp With A Stick Week, which is my way of saying it's time to play Maryland, and you know how it is here at Maryland: we don't lose to Virginia.  So they have that going for them, especially in things like football and baseball and basketball and whatnot.  Maryland will go in slightly shorthanded after this little altercation that forced us to miss the first five minutes of our game while the refs decided who exactly should be ejected.  Maryland's #41 in that video - the guy who delivered the cross-check, and shortly thereafter several punches, to a Tar Heel's head - is second-line midfielder Kevin Cooper, who'll miss the UVA game by NCAA statute that requires a one-game suspension for players ejected for fighting.  This isn't exactly Cornell minus Rob Pannell, but they did seem to think enough of Cooper to have him out there for the game's crucial furious-rally moments.  I don't care enough to get involved in the debate between There's No Place For That In Lacrosse and He's A Classy Kid Who Got Caught Up In The Moment - I simply enjoy watching players from our next opponent, regardless of who it is, remove themselves from our game with them.

Ultimately, though, the impact of Cooper's suspension on the UVA game is likely to be so negligible as to be not worth analyzing.  Unless for some reason the NCAA suspends both Carolina's and Maryland's entire team - except for the guys currently on the field - for leaving the bench.  That'd be fun if it happened, which it won't.

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Fortunately, the baseball weekend went a lot better, with a sweep over now 3-6 Clemson.  I fear I may have overrated the Tigers in my season preview; they have no hitting, and in my humble estimation the wrong pitchers are in the starting rotation.  The bottom of the order is terrible, and the bottom starts at like #5.  The one guy who should have been bashing - third baseman Richie Shaffer - went zero-for-three-games with four strikeouts.

The stories of each of the three games were, in order, Jared King, Branden Kline, and Jason Stolz's absolutely terrible bunt.  (This is why Brian O'Connor's philosophy is you don't play if you can't bunt.)  Said bunt was representative of UVA's fielding cutting down Clemson's chances and limiting them to one run in the innings they did score, when they could've had more.  UVA turned, on Sunday, some unorthodox double plays, including 3-6-3, 1-6-3, and most notably, 1-6; the latter was Stolz's popped-up bunt to Austin Young, who then doubled off the baserunner at second that had no business not already diving the hell back to the bag when that bunt went upwards in the first place.

The starting pitching was outstanding all weekend, especially Saturday's starter, Kline.  To start the game, Kline allowed a triple and a sac fly, and then nine innings of zeroes save for one scratch single.  That's how you earn ACC Pitcher of the Week.  (That article notes that UVA leads all teams with 23 Pitcher of the Week awards in the last nine years.  If I were less lazy I would find out how many of them are Danny Hultzen.  I bet the answer lies somewhere between "several" and "many.")

It's also how you earn the confidence of every observer, including the ones that matter and make the decisions.  Artie Lewicki was also strong on Sunday, and if that kind of thing continues and Whit Mayberry comes back strong from his elbow issues, the Hoos will have four solid starters, a prerequisite for serious contention in postseason play.  I don't think there'll ever be a group that holds a candle to what we had last year - for crying out loud the third-best guy was the one who threw the perfect game - but this group of four, if pitching up to their actual reachable potential, is the kind of group that launches you to postseason overachievement.

UVA has two games against Towson this week, and then a very tough weekend matchup looms against NC State.  The Wolfpack always seem to have our number, and the games are on the road, and that's a tough team this year that took two of three from Georgia Tech, swept the halfway-decent Wake Forest, and threatens tonight to also take a series from North Carolina.

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The latest hilarious googletubes rumor is the idea of Seth Greenberg going to SMU - remember they will be in the Biggish Eastish next year as part of that conference's master plan to to dilute the everloving piss out of their basketball product - to replace the lately fired Matt Doherty. (As the guy who led North Carolina all the way to the NIT and took the SMU program from 11th place in a 12-team conference to 11th place in a 12-team conference, Doherty's skills will no doubt be in high demand.  In, like, Estonia.)  I don't put any stock in the idea really; unless there's a huge pay raise involved or Greenberg just loves Dallas, that job would be a huge step down.  Even from VT.  Still, the idea is sobering.  The day Greenberg is no longer in charge in Blacksburg will be a sad one at the FOV offices.  Greenberg's style is enjoyable if you're rooting against the Hokies; his teams are undisciplined and just this side of unwatchable most of the time, and he's always good for some quotes when the tournament committee once again deems VT the 39th-best at-large team in the country, out of 37 actual tourney entrants.  That said, he's an excellent recruiter.  Unless they're paying lottery jackpot money, I'm very skeptical of the Hokies' ability to find a coach, when the time comes, that can match Greenberg's success.

weekend review

What'd you do this weekend?  Decent time?  I hear you had a little snow down there.  Like four inches or so in Richmond?  (It's cute how you think that's a "snowstorm" down there, although it's been such a weird winter here in Michigan that four inches is at least half the entire winter's total.)  If you're a Virginia fan and only a Virginia fan, it was a halfway decent weekend all things considered, but this kind of weekend is why I highly recommend ardent double-fanhood.  Actually, now that I go to grad school, it's really more like two and a half.  I had a great frickin' weekend, part of which involved going down and watching my grad school beat up on JMU in hoops.

But I'm not here to brag on Michigan's eight(!!!) four-star recruits that committed this weekend, or the weekend sweep in hockey**, or the big win over Ohio State in basketball.  Actually, yes, I kind of want to brag about the Ohio State thing.  That one is germane to UVA hoops, because the win over Michigan is probably the difference between being parked on the tournament bubble, and not.  Michigan is in great position to get at least a share of the Big Ten regular season title, and, depending on tiebreakers, the top seed in the B1G tournament.  So having very compellingly beaten them earlier this year gives UVA a Big Thing on which to hang our hat.  (Now you see why I say that if Michigan and UVA ever play each other in something, I root for the team that needs the win more.)

Of course, if you're trying to get to the tournament, it helps to beat the teams you're supposed to.  Maryland is a team we're supposed to beat, and 71-44 is the kind of beating you always want to hang on Maryland.  It's proof that our defense is our Linus blanket.  It's always there, comforting and secure.  The offense can be a ticking time bomb, but lo and behold if Malcolm Brogdon AND Sammy Zeglinski hit a few shots, then this is what happens.  Tony Bennett is starting to find ways to make opponents regret allocating their biggest guy to guard Mike Scott, because those guys aren't used to running through screens at the elbow.

Terrapin football has Randy Edsall, who's fantastically easy to lampoon because (among other reasons) he's being a huge twat about the Danny O'Brien transfer.  (In fairness, Edsall's percentage is pretty good, as he didn't decide to publicly be an ass about the other 23 guys who left in one year.)  VT's Seth Greenberg is a funny guy too.  Unfortunately for the humor section, though, it appears at first glance that Maryland has replaced one classy hoops coach with another.  Mark Turgeon couldn't stop talking about how well Virginia played and refused to use the 36-hour turnaround from Thursday as an excuse.  That said, he did produce an amusing bit of honesty in his post-game interview: "If we put Terrell (Stoglin) on the point, we might go 17 possessions where nobody else touches the ball."

Would that be worse, though?  Maryland had all of three assists on Saturday.  They might still only have three assists with ballhog Stoglin running the point, but they might cut down the turnovers; Maryland had fifteen.  A 1-to-5 A/T ratio will lose you every game.  As expected, Jontel Evans totally abused Nick Faust on the defensive end; Faust had five turnovers and no assists.  Evans is seven inches shorter than Faust, but weighs 13 pounds more, and poor Faust looked like a lanky ninth-grader trying to beat a tornado one-on-one.

Maryland fans fully expect a win in the rematch, naturally, but the truth is that the ACC continues to shake out into the four-tier system I identified two weeks ago.  At 10-2 and now a full three games ahead of the pack are Tobacco Road and FSU.  At 7-5 is the bubble trio of UVA, NC State, and Miami; the main thing keeping us actually off the bubble is that Michigan game as well as a few road wins OOC.  The kids with loaded guns are either 5-7 or 4-8, and the only one of those without a win against a higher-caste team is Maryland.  Then there's the win farms at the bottom, all with 10 losses, where the rest of the league goes to puff up the left side of their W-L column.  Sadly, there aren't any games left against the win farms; only two road tilts against the loaded-gun children and two home games against the high seeds.

**Seriously, wouldn't it be neat to have a varsity hockey team?  We'd be terrible, I don't doubt, but I take a perverse delight in rooting for shitty teams because there aren't any expectations and you can just blow off some steam and enjoy the game without worrying about the consequences of losing.  This is the part of my fanhood that's been carefully honed and developed by the Millen Era of the Detroit Lions.

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In the non-revenue world, things went according to plan and then some this weekend.  The ladies wrapped up a fifth straight ACC title in the pool, finishing 233 points ahead of their closest competition.  Four of the 11 teams at the meet didn't score that many points.  Of the 18 swimming events, UVA won 10, and took a 1-2-3 in the 200 backstroke.

And how about a sport that gets hardly any love around here, because I don't really know anything about it?  I refer of course to wrestling, which polished off its regular season at 11-1 in dual meets, the best record in the history of UVA rasslin'.  For the next-best record, you have to go back to 1974.  Wrestling coach Steve Garland is a member of the Craig Littlepage Hired Me coaching fraternity that includes guys like Brian O'Connor, and he directs the latest up-and-coming program in the school's repertoire.  It would be a terrific thing to get really good at wrestling, because wrestling is one of only two sports where Virginia Tech has the better program.**  (Guess who is responsible for the lone blemish?)  Getting to the point where we have forced VT to second-place status in the state (or worse) in every sport is the ultimate goal, and to take the rasslin' title from them would be a great next step. The team won a surprise ACC title two years ago and might just do it again this year, too.

**Football is obviously the other - for now.  There might be more but this is the kind of claim I can make without much fear that I'll be corrected by a Hokie, since in Blacksburg, sports are divided into two categories: football and money leeches.

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The baseball team could've started off a little better.  The weekend in South Carolina finished up 1-1-1 thanks to a rainout, and I hate ties because it's this little -1 that'll hang off the end of the record all year like a little vestigial appendix.  The loss was to Boston College, which took a surprise 3-0 record home.  Even Coastal Carolina had trouble, and that school is sort of the Butler of mid-major baseball, minus any final four appearances.

It really drives home the issues facing the team this year, though.  The winning runs scored by Boston College came from two passed balls by catcher Nate Irving, followed by a Branden Kline mistake that ended up on the wrong side of the fence.  In years past, the bats might have overcome that issue, but the hitting this year is still three-quarters potential.  The bats waited til the CCU game to break out, instead.  I'm going to write off the tie against JMU as a product of playing in rain that would've washed out 90% of baseball games much sooner than it eventually did.  The fielding is what let the team down and gave up a 4-2 lead, but you can't draw any conclusions from that when the ball is sopping wet.

And speaking of things that we expected to look better: 9-8 over Drexel might've caused a few raised eyebrows, too.  I mean, shouldn't we beat them by more than one goal?  Is there something wrong with the offense that caused the output to be limited to nine goals?

Well, no.  This is exactly why I started doing lacrosse efficiency stats.  See, last year, UVA averaged more than 35 offensive possessions per game, the second-most in the country.  And we scored on 35% of those possessions.  Against Drexel we had only 26 OPs.  And that wasn't the fault of lousy faceoff work (won 12 of 21) or bad clearing (13 of 15.)  Nope, it was just a slow-paced game.  60 offensive possessions and 68-70 total is your average lacrosse game; this one had only 49 OPs and 52 total.  It was just a very slow-paced game.

In that light, the offensive production was just fine.  UVA's O-rating for the game was 16.81; last year's total was 16.64.  Drexel's excellent goalie, Mark Manos, saved only five of 14 shots on net.  We got nine goals from seven players, and better yet, seven assists from six players.  And not a single point from Steele Stanwick, either.  Owen Van Arsdale was the offensive star, and two goals came from Rob Emery, too.  Young'uns.  UVA was badly outshot, 41-24, but it hardly mattered; we did a much better job of getting our shots on net, and Rob Fortunato saved 11 of 19 SOG.

Could I fret a little about the defense?  Yeah, I could.  Eight goals is a little too many.  Drexel's O-rating (and our D-rating) was 15.81, rather above the D-I average of about 14.10.  But there are too many positives to come out of this game to get all worried.  Ryan Benincasa was excellent on faceoffs (and freshman Mick Parks held his own), and there was only one penalty called on the Hoos the whole game.  Plus a huge ground-ball advantage for UVA as well.  The world will probably look at the 9-8 final score and a few of them will conclude Virginia is overrated.  Not to worry: a deep dive into the refreshing tempo-free pool should give you all the peace of mind you need.

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Small bullets:

-- The multi-year scholarship rule barely survived an override vote.  This is proof only that the rule for D-I membership needs to be tightened; it's out of hand when a school like Chicago State, which has the bare minimum of required sports and sucks at all of them, has an equivalent vote to the Texases and Ohio States and such of the world, which have nine-figure budgets.  The requirements for D-I membership were established ages ago; it's only a natural consequence of expanding economies and populations that more and more schools would be able to meet them.  And of course, the more FGCUs and Nebraska-Omahas and Presbyterians that make the leap, the more they'll be able to outvote the schools that help keep their budgets afloat.  There are two reasons they don't tighten up the requirements and split up D-I: one, some of the conferences would be torn asunder as half their schools failed to make the grade.  I think we'd all survive, though.  Number two: none of the HBCU's would make the cut, and such a move would have Al Sharpton up in the NCAA's grill faster than you can say "race card."

Oh, and #3: any move toward such a split would instantly be massively downvoted, because we're this close to having the FGCUs and Chicago States in charge of this thing.

Anyway, the multi-year scholarship thing is a great thing.  Schools that complain that multi-year schollies would be used as a recruiting tool are stupid.  That's the point.  They benefit the athlete, which is the point of the whole "college sport" thing.  That's like arguing City Council should award the contract to the highest bidder instead of the lowest, because if they don't, the city will have more money to spend elsewhere, and that would be bad.  It's such logic-defying argument it renders one speechless, which might've been the point.

-- Want to write a guest post?  This is my attempt to make the site not a barren wasteland during my spring break in Peru, and your chance to get your opinion out there.  Read here for details.  A week and a half or so is the deadline.

biggest weekend review ever

I feel a little overshadowed this week.  Between Osama getting a bullet in the brain pan (squish), the NFL draft, the royal wedding, and Princess Beatrice dressing up as Cthulhu for said wedding, the little happenings here in the world of UVA seem a little minor.

But that's why there's this blog.  You can read about stupid hats on TMZ.  You can't read about the terrific game played by the lacrosse squad there, which is TMZ's loss because it was the best game of lacrosse this team's played in a long time.  Considering the strength of the opponent, probably all season.  No, scratch that: definitely the best game of the year.  Go down the list and check off the indicators.  Faceoffs, ground balls, clearing, goalie play - all near-flawless.  Terrific discpline.  The defense allowing just two goals and muddling the opposition offense by switching from man to zone and back.

Besides the yeoman defensive effort, the best thing about the game was the offense.  Certainly it was the most refreshing.  Eight minutes into the game you could see the difference in the offense without either Bratton twin on the field.  There was passing.  Sometimes, like, two or three passes in a row.  Or more!  It made the offense fun to watch again.  My favorite statistic of the game was not the two allowed goals; it was the 8 assists on 11 goals scored.  This team has had fewer assists on its goals - barely over 50% - than any in recent memory, which if you ask me was a cause of problems.  It was holding the team back.  Even without the Brattons' athleticism this'll be a harder team to defend if the defenses actually have to give a damn about all six attackers.  I don't know if the awesome defensive effort can continue - Penn's offense isn't the strength of their team - but I've got my optimism restored in the offense at least.

Without the Brattons it's an awfully thin midfield, and Dom Starsia was in an experimental mood with the second offensive midfield.  John Haldy, Rob Emery, and Colin Briggs are the first group, and that's a group that's been on the field a lot this year and they acquitted themselves well in the spotlight.  Several folks not usually seen on the field in actual situations made their appearances. The second midfield was typically Kugler, Harbeson, and once-upon-a-time attackman Mark Cockerton, but even faceoff specialist Garrett Ince got in on the action, scoring a rare goal, just the fifth of his career.  A fine display of team lacrosse.

Our tournament fate is now out of our hands.  That was one last bid to the tournament committee to host a game; Villanova and Maryland are our two biggest competitors in that regard and they each have a game left, albeit neither against an opponent of Penn's caliber.  As you'll see in my tournament bracketology I have UVA as an 8 seed hosting a game; that means realistically we're on the bubble for it.  With Syracuse probably awaiting the winner of the 8 seed's game, it might almost be to our benefit to go on the road against a 7 or even a 6 seed.  Tougher first game, easier path to Baltimore for the championships. And I guarantee you if Villanova or Denver gets their first-ever chance to host a tournament game they're not gonna want to see Virginia headed their way.

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The baseball team lost a game this weekend (oh NOEZ) but it didn't matter because they earned their 13th and 14th shutouts of the year to bookend the loss and picked up a game in the standings anyway (oh yayz) because Georgia Tech lost their series to Clemson.  (Grumble grumble those are the only Tigers that can be said to be hitting well and no I'm not complaining about LSU.)  Friday was an especially outstanding day: the offense generated 18 hits, 17 runs, and Danny Hultzen and Shane Halley combined to allow one walk, one hit (a squib swinging bunt), and struck out 11, eight of which were Danny's.  It's this kind of thing which makes losing one of the three OK.

At 42-5 it's been pretty well established at this point who the best team in the ACC is, and you are well within your rights to brush off the Saturday loss and any loss between now and the postseason with the words "well, that's just baseball."  That's why the NCAA tourney is double-elimination and they have seven-game series in the pros.  From here on out every shutout is a conference record, every Steven Proscia RBI is a team record (he broke through with the record on Friday), and every Danny Hultzen strikeout is also a team record.

The team now sits two games ahead of Georgia Tech - a de facto three game lead - and has one game left (on the road at VCU) before exam break.  I hate exam break but it's a very necessary evil.  After that are a series against Miami and one against North Carolina, so there'll be no shortage of quality competition to keep the team sharp for the ACC tournament and beyond.

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Normally I devote a whole column to the future prospects of our NFL draftees, but there's only one of them and the lockout prevents any free-agent signings, so this'll have to do.  The Patriots pissed me off by selecting Ras-I Dowling as the first pick of the second round, setting off a run on cornerbacks that kept them all (particularly Dowling) out of the Lions' hands.  I wanted Dowling dammit.  Anyway, he's a Patriot.  The Pats had Devin McCourty selected to the Pro Bowl as a rookie last year, and there are some decent veterans in Kyle Arrington and Leigh Bodden on the roster.  (Then again, Bodden was cut loose by the Lions after his one season there going 0-16, so how much competition can he be?)  Dowling is highly unlikely to jump right into the starting lineup, but he should at least get a chance to show what he can do (and show that he can stay healthy) as a nickel corner.

I don't know what I'm going to do with myself without either lacrosse or baseball this weekend.  I may roll out a mid-week bracketology if events warrant, otherwise there'll be one more before the selection show on Sunday at 9.

weekend review

I like to get the bad stuff out of the way early, which means lacrosse goes first today.  Want to know what's so thoroughly frustrating about this team?  Besides the brainfartitude, there are two huge, gaping flaws in the makeup of this team that prevent it from reaching its potential, which is frankly enormous.

Flaw #1: the obvious inability to win a faceoff.  This frustrates me to no end, not least because I'm about to harp on the problems at the faceoff X after a game in which UVA's faceoff men won 15 of 26 for 57%.  That's not half bad.  It's pretty good.  But you know what makes my head explode?  I've been thinking for a while that Ryan Benincasa should take the majority of the faceoffs, Garrett Ince and Brian McDermott should come in only rarely, if ever, and Chris LaPierre should be the second guy for a change of pace every so often  And then Benincasa wins zero of five against Duke and Ince and McDermott combine for 71%.  I've mentioned before that I think the faceoff problems are basically coaching problems because of the inordinate amount of faceoff violations called on our team, and I think the total lack of consistency also points to coaching.

Flaw #2 is that there is but one player on the offensive side of the field - Steele Stanwick - who can make his teammates better.  And he sat out to rest his foot on Saturday.  For my own sanity I'll just assume that Coach Starsia did that because this game didn't matter half of what the next one did and he wanted that ace in the hole he could throw in next week to change the game around....and not because Stanwick's injury got worse somehow.  I hope to hell not.

This is partly why I have that nagging feeling that the end-of-career fade is beginning for Starsia.  For the last decade UVA has had a star attackman that gathers assists nearly as fast as he gathers goals.  Right now that's Stanwick.  In the past it's been Danny Glading, or Ben Rubeor, or Matt Ward, or whatever.  They score and they help their teammates score.  When Stanwick leaves after next season, who'll that be?  Stanwick's talent was immediately evident as a freshman.  You can always tell who the heir apparent is.  Not this time.  It's not Matt White or Rob Emery; the former has disappointed this year and the latter looks like a nice complementary player along the lines of Colin Briggs.  I dunno, maybe I'm overreacting and the reason nobody's really emerged is because of so many upperclassmen in the lineup, but I doubt it; Stanwick and even Chris Bocklet, not to mention the players of the past, played their way in and made themselves indispensible.

But I digress.  Two major flaws in this team and we still only lose to Duke and Syracuse by two goals.  The talent is there to blow the competition out of the water.  But there are some missing elements.  It's like a Corvette with four-cylinder engine.

It doesn't help that we drive it with the parking brake on and the gas cap hanging off.  The silly mistakes are still there.  They weren't as obvious as against UNC, but there they were.  Example: Shamel Bratton jogging down the field after receiving a nice outlet pass following a turnover and setting up the offense.  Fine, except....you're Shamel Bratton and nobody's covering you!  Jog?  Shamel should've been sprinting downfield and ripping a shot at a corner of the net.  If it misses, fine....then go set up the offense.  Instead, Shamel jogged across midfield and the team proceeded to huck the ball around the box for thirty seconds before lobbing a beach ball at Duke's net, which of course was saved.  I'm not questioning Shamel's effort here, I'm questioning the recognition.  The Brattons are the kings of "argh don't do th.....YES!"  Would've been the time for it.

So as a punishment for losing to Duke like we always do, we get to play Duke again on Friday.  Let's hope Steele Stanwick is the difference.  I'm not brimming with optimism here.

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Fortunately, there's a cure for that: the baseball team.  As punishment for beating our lacrosse team on Saturday, the baseball team beat Duke twice on Sunday - first by ripping their hearts out when they thought they had a real chance to steal a win, and then by stomping on it to the tune of 18-4 in the second game.

Friday was easy, of course, at least after the first three innings.  Danny Hultzen served up seven innings of Danny freakin' Hultzen, although the early going was a little rocky while the UVA hitters tried to figure out how to get to Duke's soft-tossing lefty Dillon Haviland.  Eventually they figured that out and before you knew it, it was 10-0, which is how the game ended.  Shutout woo.

Sunday's game 1 was quite the pitchers' duel.  UVA scratched out two runs against Dennis O'Grady and Duke did the same on a two-run double off of closer Kline, in relief of Tyler Wilson and his disgustingly efficient outing.  Wilson took the blame for the runs but it wasn't fair the way he was pitching.  Duke then  brought scheduled third game starter Marcus Stroman in to finish it up.

Not a bad move, by the way.  A few observers criticized the move but I liked it.  For Duke, I mean.  With Duke's miserable pitching staff you don't look for two of three against UVA.  You look to steal one where you can get it, and so they went all-in and brought Stroman in, figuring that because he's a starter and the best pitcher they have, he could work some long innings in what you had to assumed would be an extra-inning game, and outlast UVA's bullpen while Duke worked on manufacturing a run.  Stroman throws 95 and has the control of a kamikaze pilot.  He plunked the first two batters he faced, which appeared to draw a warning from the home-plate ump - "one more of those and you're gone" is my bet, because UVA's third batter walked on four straight pitches that were so far outside they'd have been behind a hitter in the other batter's box.  Bases loaded, none out, and UVA managed to score not even once.  Then they did the same thing in the 10th.  And then because baseball is a screwed-up game, two straight two-out base hits plated the winning run in the 11th.

Having run out of pitchers who can get hitters out, and having forgotten how to field fly balls, Duke fell apart in the third game and UVA won by 14.  I can't decide which pop-up I enjoyed more: the one that landed about five yards behind second base because three Duke fielders collided on their way to it, or the one that landed about five feet in front of home plate because the Duke pitcher lost it in the wind.  In the nine-run third, two of the three outs Duke recorded were sacrifice bunts.  After that inning UVA had just as many hits as Duke and nine more runs.

If you paid attention to the starting rotation, you noticed Will Roberts got his ACC shot on Sunday, and you probably also noticed it didn't go too great.  Roberts settled down some, but all in all gave up eight hits in five innings.  But he walked nobody, which is the kind of thing that makes pitching coaches happy.  For the same reason Cody Winiarski didn't get yanked after a couple tough outings here and there (that being: Brian O'Connor doesn't have a knee-jerk reaction to things) Roberts will almost certainly start next Sunday as well, and Cody will be the weekday guy for now.  Both will be absolutely critical come the postseason.

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Newsy bits:

- Ausar Walcott is back on the football team, about a week after his charges were dropped.  Because I trust London on matters of discipline, it seems to be a good indication that Walcott in fact was less involved than his teammates in the Great Harrisonburg Party Invasion.  But he's now buried at defensive end.  I don't even want to guess at why, but playing time there is in far shorter supply than it is at linebacker.  The defense is still very much a work in progress and keeping track of the shuffles is sufficient to drive a man crazy, so I'm not going to read much past that into the move for now.

- Speaking of legal matters, the George Huguely murder trial will begin next February.  Surprised at the length of time?  Don't be.  It is the way of the court system.

- When Mike Tobey committed to UVA in January, I thought he looked like a player who'd start attracting a lot more attention as time went on.  Remember, he was supposed to reclassify to 2013 and then changed his mind, and I really think Tony Bennett is a big part of the reason why he changed his mind.  Bennett didn't want another two years to go by for people to get a look at what Tobey could do.  This is why.  Besides Tobey, the other interesting name on that list is 2013 recruit Anthony Barber, who UVA is recruiting pretty hard.  Remember that name because he's a possible answer to the point guard question.  I want him at UVA just because his nickname is Big Cat, which is the kind of old-old-school Harlem Globetrotter nickname they don't even make any more.

- Speaking of bright futures in basketball, Joe Lunardi's way too early bracketology for 2012 has UVA sliding into the ill-conceived at-large play-in round.  (Look, I don't care what the NCAA calls those Dayton games: UAB and USC didn't actually make the tourney this year.)  Lunardi's probably about right in what our expectations should be for the season.  The ACC will be much better, especially if Jordan Williams and Reggie Jackson and Harrison Barnes and whoever else stay in college, and our highly-improved team might not beat it's 7-9 mark from this season but 7-9 will look a hell of a lot better.  Especially if having Mike Scott back with all these freshmen turned sophomores and a functional Assane Sene and a redshirted James Johnson and everything else means we don't screw the pooch against the Seattles and Iowa States of the world.

- Lastly, you remember how there used to be highlight videos around these parts?  There haven't been this year because of a change in my living, and therefore TV, status.  But I think I've got that covered now.  The solution to AT&T's fascist unwillingness to let you download your recordings from DVR to computer arrived on a big brown truck today.  It's hopefully only a matter of time before videos are firing again.