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.

weekend review: championship edition

Big weekend for 'Hoos of all stripes. Lots of blue and orange being represented in assorted venues around the East Coast - none of them actually in Charlottesville, but hey. Records were set, milestones were reached, history was made, championships were won. Yeah, the basketball team got smoked again, but don't let that cloud your perspective. It was a fine weekend to be a Hoo.

Starting with the biggest accomplishment of the week.....

SWIMMING

Huzzah! Like I told you last week, it's ACC championship time. UVA got conference championship #2 on the year - one of only two schools to earn two so far by the way - and did so once again in dominating fashion. The women's swim team added nearly 30 points to their total from last year and finished with 877.5. The results are here; I will summarize for you.

1st place events:
200 medley relay
800 free relay
200 IM
50 free
200 free relay
100 fly
200 free
100 back
400 medley relay
200 back
100 free
200 breast (tie)
200 fly
400 free relay

1st place swimmers (individual only):
Amanda Faulkner (200 IM)
Lauren Perdue (50 free, 200 free, 100 free)
Lauren Smart (100 fly)
Mei Christensen (100 back, 200 back)
Christine Olson (200 breast)
Liz Shaw (200 fly)

NCAA 'A' cuts:
200 medley relay (Christensen/McDonnell/Smart/Davis)
200 free (Perdue)
100 back (Christensen, Smart)
200 back (Christensen)
200 breast (Olson)

NCAA 'B' cuts:
800 free relay (Narum/Flynn/Harris/Perdue)
500 free (Bachrouche, Harris, Narum, Myers)
200 IM (Faulkner, Crippen, Shaw, McDonnell)
50 free (Perdue, Christensen, Flynn, Davis)
200 free relay (Christensen/Flynn/Perdue/Davis)
400 IM (Crippen, Olson, Bachrouche, Faulkner, Myers)
100 fly (Smart, Shaw), 200 free (Flynn, Harris, Narum, Moores)
100 breast (Olson, McDonnell, Freeman)
100 back (Cavalier (note - yes this is her name and that's awesome), Stewart)

400 medley relay (Christensen/McDonnell/Smart/Perdue)
1650 free (Narum, Bachrouche, Myers, Harris)
200 back (Smart, Stewart)
100 free (Perdue, Davis, Flynn, Moores)
200 breast (McDonnell, Faulkner, Freeman)
200 fly (Shaw, Crippen)
400 free relay (Christensen, Flynn, Moores, Perdue)

ACC records:
200 medley relay (1:37.33)
200 free relay (1:29.25 - meet record only)
200 free (1:43.86)
400 medley relay (3:32.97 - meet record only)
200 breast (2:09.94)

Miscellaneous domination notes: 4 of top 5 and 1-2-3 in 200 IM, and only one is a senior ... 4 of top 6 in 400 IM ... first place in all five relays and 9 of 13 individual events ... five records set and the final relay came within 0:00.02 of setting another one

Perhaps more records would have been toppled if we hadn't set so damn many last year. Oh well.

By the way, the difference between A cuts and B cuts isn't quite as gaping as it might sound. They're actually fairly unnecessary; the NCAA has a maximum number of swimmers they'll invite to their championship for each event. To oversimplify it, they invite all the A cuts and then go one-by-one and invite B cuts til they hit the max. Why not just have one cut time? I don't know. I liked it better in high school where if you swam a state cut time, you got to go to the state meet - period. (Not that I was ever in danger of making it.)

Anyway, as you can see, we're pretty well set to make a splash (HA!) at nationals, which will be nice for Director's Cup purposes. We won't win (not all those swimmers above are going to score points), but the girls finished 12th last year and maybe a top ten finish is on the horizon.

By the way, Lauren Perdue's name shows up a lot, as you might notice. That's because she's really, really good. And she's a freshman. There are some phenomenal swimmers up there, like Christensen, but Perdue is unbelievable. How good? Like, maybe Olympic good. You can use this to convert these yards times (used here) to meters (used in the Olympics.) Right now, that time is just off the pace that would have put her in the 200 freestyle semifinals in Beijing. You have to be elite as all hell to get onto the US national team, and she's not quite there yet. Give it a couple years. You just might see her in London.

But all these ACC teams have some incredible swimmers. I mean, we did let the other teams win four of those individual events, after all. The difference here is we have incredible swimmers in every event two, three, four deep. That's where the meet really is won. In no event did UVA place fewer than two swimmers in the A heat (top 8) and in just under than half of the events, UVA was in four of the eight A lanes, piling up the points. The B heats were similarly stacked with Cavaliers. (Sometimes literally. Tell me this young lady wasn't destined for Virginia.)

Bottom line: congrats to the ladies for kicking ass at the ACC's, and on Wednesday, get ready for the men to do it all over again.

BASKETBALL

Ah, now for the crash back to earth. Let me keep this short and sweet: Until the hoops team re-learns how to shoot the ball, we will go nowhere and there won't be any point in analyzing why. Turnovers, defense, rebounding, size, grueling travel, matchups, none of it matters at this point. We're losing because we can't shoot. It's 2009 all over again. Sylven and Mike Scott can't be effective, because the moment the ball goes inside, whether on a drive or pass, four defenders collapse on it because they don't respect the shooters. Bad offense begets bad defense, just like last year, and the result is ugly.

It does tend to debunk two myths about Dave Leitao's coaching style that were taken as gospel last year:

- The team was shooting poorly because they couldn't get into a rhythm thanks to Dave's incessantly inconsistent substitutions and rotations. No, they couldn't shoot because they can't shoot. A few more games of this will give us a very definitive answer to that particular chicken-or-the-egg question.

- The team's confidence was shot because Dave was screaming at them all the time. No, it was shot because they were losing. A lot. Tony doesn't scream, at least not during games, and don't tell me there's a small part of you that sorta wishes he would, just a little.

LACROSSE

Little closer than it should have been, but the lacrosse team earned Dom Starsia his 200th win at UVA. First college coach ever to rack up 200 wins at one D-I school and 100 more at another.

Part of the reason it was so close is that the Drexel goalie did really well for himself. Last year in our game he earned himself CAA rookie of the week honors for his performance, and statistically he was even better this year: 17 saves against 11 goals. A save percentage over .600 is pretty dern good.

On the one hand, it was nice to see more people besides just Steele Stanwick lighting up the scoreboard. We knew he'd be good, but six other Hoos besides him scored a goal, including hotshot freshman Connor English. (English is from, let's see, Manhasset, NY - I just bet that's on Long Island (checking: aaaaaand, yup) - and damn if Connor English doesn't sound exactly like a kid from Long Island who's really damn good at lacrosse. Between him and Steele Stanwick I think we're all set.)

I'm not sure yet where the faceoffs are going to come from, though. I hope we turn out better than the very average showing we had this weekend. Chad Gaudet was a one-year wonder for us, and he was very good, but his replacements (Benincasa and Ince, mostly) need to prove themselves all over again in his place.

Still: #1 ain't bad. (Even if it's a "tepid" #1.)

BASEBALL

Think this says it all, no?

We're similarly gracing the front pages of the baseball coverage on Rivals and ESPN. (Lax made the same ESPN page as well as the NCAA's.) Wahoo indeed. That's what happens when you're #1. Not just "power rankings," either; Baseball America and Rivals are generally accepted as legit actual rankings. UVA is #1. Just say it. It feels good.

The bats did their thing in Greenville, taking two of three on the road to start the season. That's good enough when the opponent is ranked #11. And I'll tell you what, I'm not even worked up over the disastrous 8th inning on Sunday in which ECU scored 7 and threatened to actually win a game in which they had been facing a 13-4 deficit. A lot of that was thanks to O'Connor's decision to start up the Dan Grovatt and Corey Hunt experiments as relief pitchers. We may not see a lot of that going forward, given the results. Nor am I concerned about Saturday, when the bats fell silent. They came back alive on Sunday, hitting .441 for the day, and Kevin Brandt (ECU's Saturday pitcher), I suspect he's going to be making a name for himself before all's said and done this year. Sunday was a hitting party and everyone was invited. All nine starters in the lineup gathered at least one hit, seven of them got at least two, and Keith Werman managed to be hit by a pitch. Werman has been found to actually be smaller than the strike zone itself, so this is pretty remarkable.

Actually, the only thing that worries me is that Cody Winiarski's debut was a little less than stellar, and Neal Davis had to be brought in to get the last out of the fourth. Yes, ECU has some hotshot bats, but so does most of our ACC competition. Consider the third starter spot still up for grabs, with Will Roberts being another candidate.

All in all, a weekend that true blue 'Hoos should bask in. Never mind the basketball team, Bennett knows what he's doing and they'll come around sure enough. Enjoy the dynasties we have going: one that's reloading, one that's ongoing, one being born in front of your eyes.

laying to rest a misconception

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to put to rest a common misconception about Virginia basketball. It is the halfway point of the ACC season and so it is only fit that we do this today.

As I need not explain to you, Tony Bennett came in as coach this year and made as his #1 priority the installation of the pack-line defense, a strict system that, when properly executed, is godawful painful to try and score upon. Just ask North Carolina. This, plus the demand that his team play a measured, deliberate pace, is the hallmark of the Tony Bennett system. The results on the defensive end have been impressive enough to earn a mention in the NCAA's official blog. Mention, hell: they wrote a whole article detailing the defensive improvement. The spectacular drop from 72.5 PPG allowed to just 60.9 is cited as the reason for the improvement on the standings sheet. They're not the only ones - it's basically conventional wisdom. Improve on defense, improve the record, it sounds simple. Hooray for Tony Bennett and his pack-line.

Wrong.

Wait, what? Yup. The truth is, the team hasn't actually improved that damn much on defense at all. Somewhat, yes. But the main reason we've gone from doormat to an outside shot at the NCAA tournament is because of the huge improvement on offense, not defense. I shall explain.

For those unfamiliar with the KenPom ratings, the fundamental point is this: What's the point of defense? Answer: to stop the other team from scoring on the current possession. Therefore the possession, not the game, should be the base unit of measurement. KenPom's offensive and defensive ratings are based on points per 100 possessions. Very very roughly, the average team gets about a point per possession, so above 100 on defense is bad and below is good. Roughly.

KenPom further adjusts his stats by applying some complex logarithmic exponential differential whatever formula to the raw stats. This is to take away the effects of strength of schedule and try to simulate how the team would do against a perfectly average opponent on a neutral court. We'll be using adjusted stats here.

This year we're averaging about 93.7 points allowed per 100 defensive possessions; last year we averaged 95 points allowed per 100 possessions. There's hardly any difference. Tony Bennett is known for his slow pace, and that is most definitely borne out in KenPom's stats. In 2009, a UVA game averaged 68.2 (adjusted) possessions, 92nd in the country; in 2010, that number is down to about 63 (adjusted) - 322nd in the country. (That's per team per game.) They weren't kidding when they said Bennett slows the game down.

Multiply 93.7 by 0.63 and you get about 59. What do you know - that is just about exactly how many points per game we actually give up. Only off by a point or so. The stats work. Do the same for 2009 - multiply 95 by .682 - and you get 65. That's actually quite a bit fewer than our actual PPG average, but the discrepancy is very easily explained the fact that we average four fewer turnovers than last year. That's four fewer possessions for the opposition, and possessions off turnovers - those caused by steals anyway - tend to be fastbreak opportunities, meaning more points. The four-turnover difference is actually more like an eight-possession swing in our favor: four fewer possessions for the bad guys, and four more chances for us that don't turn into an automatic zero.

But our offense? Improved? Obviously. Again, if you look only at points per game, you'll miss the point entirely. Last year, 70 points per game. This year, 70 points per game. But remember: that's on six fewer possessions per game. Whether you look at KenPom's raw or adjusted numbers, we are scoring ten more points per 100 possessions. We're 43rd in the country in offensive efficiency at 111 points per 100, up from 165th in the country last year.

The numbers don't lie. Our defensive efficiency is about the same as it was. (If you use real-world numbers the improvement is a lot greater, but that doesn't account for the fact that we have yet to play the hardest part of the schedule.) Offensively, we're much better. So what's the real difference?

One, we can shoot. Last year I repeatedly lamented our inability to hit a simple jump shot. This lousy shooting caused a lot of long rebounds and hurt our defensive numbers because teams were scoring easy transition buckets. We're shooting so much better it's unbelievable. Sammy has found a shot, JJ has found a shot, Sylven has found a shot. Such a difference when you can make your three-pointers.

Two, did I mention Sylven Landesberg? He's no longer a freshman and there are two major differences in his game: Turnovers are down and three-point shooting is up. This is big. He's not a deadeye shot from downtown, but he's good enough that people now have to respect it. Good enough to get a little pub for POTY, in fact.

Three, the ACC has been playing out exactly as I told you it would. We are better because we didn't lose any major pieces from last year's team, and the teams we've beaten, with the exception of Georgia Tech, are worse. NC State has taken a step back, Miami has taken about twenty steps back, and UNC has crashed into the goddamned mountain.

If all this sounds like it's taking credit away from Tony Bennett, it's not meant to. He did, as I've harped on, walk into a good situation in that his team is basically the same as last year only a year older, a year wiser, and a year better. And the ACC is, in general, worse. But the turnover numbers are all Bennett. He emphasizes "take care of the ball" more than Leitao did, and his slow pace makes it much easier to do so. Leitao's offense was almost literally indescribable, because nobody was quite sure what it was. (OK, that's not quite fair to Leitao, but the offense was still a mess last year.) Bennett has a philosophy and it results in better shots. Bennett is calmer; Leitao's style was a bit rough on a young team. And Bennett's slow pace keeps the game closer, a plus for a team facing a talent deficiency the way we have been against teams like GT and Wake.

And finally, there's this: Leitao played a pretty traditional man-to-man defense. The guys have been doing that for a while. It's not hard to learn and the players had experience with it. Bennett brought in a whole new thing, which demanded the players scrap their old ways of thinking and do things, in some cases, entirely the opposite of what they'd been taught: do not switch on screens, and such-like. Yes, the defense is only just as effective as it was last year, but to be as effective in a totally brand-new system is an accomplishment in itself - while at the same time improving rather dramatically on offense. Just you wait til this pack-line defense becomes second nature.

linkpile

There's only so much to ramble on about in the offseasons, so I'm going to turn it over to The InterWebs today:

First, some CDP fluff about the lacrosse-playin' Gill family: eldest Conor, the spectacularly-named Brendan, and current senior Gavin. Walk into a fourth-grade classroom. Try to do it without being a creepy stalker who hangs around elementary schools. Those li'l monsters have not even been alive at any point in time in which a Gill was not playing lacrosse at Virginia. End of an era, my friends.

Don't be fooled by Groh's attempts at watering down the praise he hands out to Rodney McLeod for his play this spring at safety. Scarcely a report comes out of spring practice that doesn't include Groh raving about McLeod's play out there. The secondary will be the deepest part of the team this year, likely with three players at both safety and corner with the ability to roll in and out of the lineup. Four at corner, depending on how much defense Vic Hall plays.

Those hoping for a UVA alum with Virginia connections to be hired as an assistant to Tony Bennett should be guardedly optimistic about this Jason Williford blurb.

The ACC Sports Journal sat down with Taylor Rochestie for an interview. The subject? Rochestie is the departing senior point guard at Washington State, so, not cheeseburgers.

Also from the ACCSJ is a pre-pre-preseason (their word) and probably premature (my words) ACC basketball power rankings. We are - how shall I put a positive spin on this - behind only 11 teams! The rationale:

"Bennett has inherited a genuine rebuilding project and unlike Washington State, where he was a previous assistant, the players will need some time to buy into his defensive-minded style."

Fair point from the above: At Wazzu, the instant turnaround was partially possible because Bennett had already been an assistant there for three years, so anyone not brand-new to the program anyway had already gotten used to Bennett's style. Counterpoint: It's not like "defensive-minded" wasn't a hallmark of Leitao's style. We're not making any sudden philosophical changes around here. Really, it's Bennett's offense that the players will have to get used to. One criticism leveled at Leitao was the perception of a do-it-yourself offense - John Brandenburg's words, not mine. So in a perverse way maybe that'll only help. Maybe when the players find themselves having a tough time with the Bennett offense, which actually has a system to it, they can just revert to what they know - do-it-yourself. No, that's probably just me bullshitting you.

But, I take issue with the 12th place ranking regardless. 10 ACC players averaged more points than Sylven Landesberg this year. Five are seniors, two have declared for the draft (sans agent though) and one more probably will. That leaves two. Maybe as many as five, though I think Gerald Henderson is probably going to leave, Jeff Teague is 50/50, and Greivis Vazquez will probably return and be a stone-cold lock to lead the league in cocky douchebaggery.

Point is, there are six teams losing their leading scorer to expired eligibility and three more whose might also leave. And we're the ones with a rebuilding project?

yet another post which was supposed to be about anything else at all is gobbled up by the monster that is a coaching search

Obligatory coaching search tracking results in three links, only two of which have to do with our next coach and one of which is about the past coach.

Minnesotans were no doubt happy to read the column in the Star-Tribune today reassuring them that Tubby Smith expects to stay at Minnesota. I would probably take it as the usual bla bla bla about being happy where you are right until you sign on the dotted line somewhere else, but for the part where Tubby rang up the school president. If we want this coaching search to wrap up quickly, then I think we're all Syracuse fans on Friday night. That or Pitt fans. (Tangent alert: Pitt is the champion in my money bracket, which you can imagine led to some heart palpitations on Friday night when they threatened me with losing to #16 seed ETSU. I would have hated Pitt forever for that.)

And wrap up quickly it had better, because we're not the only school looking for a coach. Arizona's out there looking, as is Alabama, Georgia, and quite possibly Kentucky. Alabama's already looking at VCU's Anthony Grant, which, if that goes through, would remove one of our possible fallback candidates. Craig Littlepage needs to get cracking, but is kind of in a tough spot - if Tubby won't come, unfortunately Candidates 1B and 1C are still in the tournament, and just to spite us will probably meet in the Final Four.

Kentucky, by the way, is interesting. Though we might find ourselves in hot competition for Sean Miller if Billy Gillispie is fired - Miller already plies his trade just 90 minutes from Lexington and would be a natural fit - if we haven't already hired a coach by then, Littlepage would be stupid not to at least give Gillispie a look.

So then there's this, a rather less than flattering look at Dave Leitao and his well-known public disposition that resembled a wolverine with Tourette's syndrome. Actually much of this is not new, especially to anyone within hearing range of Leitao shortly after witnessing the game's 12th defensive breakdown. But I hope we didn't fire the coach because he uses naughty words. There is one troubling aspect to the article:

Hobgood wasn’t alone in his frustrations. A number of former players never made Leitao’s inner circle. One recent Virginia graduate, a starter for Leitao, e-mailed The Daily Progress shortly after the coach’s departure. “Justice served, ha ha,” the player wrote.

This does cause me to soften my stance somewhat, the stance that says Leitao's relationship with his players being too combative was wildly overblown. Soften - but not change. Players do not punt trash cans on their very angry way out of the locker room following the coaching change announcement if they are happy about the firing, as Mike Scott was reported to do.

(Side note: If I could remember whether or not Lars Mikalauskas graduated, I'd suggest maybe he's the phantom emailer above. But that would be rumormongering, and that would be wrong because you can't rumormonger on the InterWebs.)

But it's not like we didn't know what we were getting into, and frankly it's not like Leitao didn't deliver what he promised. This is what Leitao said when he was hired:

“I can tell you that the next time we play a basketball team, these young men will play and fight together like never before. … Whoever plays against us will know that we will fight you for every inch of the floor.”

And Sammy Zeglinski, ibid from the CDP article above:

Added freshman Sammy Zeglinski: “His competitiveness was unmatched. He just really taught me how to compete.”

Maybe Leitao is that hot dog salesman from the commercial: "I sell what I say! Hot dogs." You know, the one where there's no bun. Maybe we got a hot dog without the bun and watery mustard. But I'm still of the opinion that it wouldn't have been long and we'd be back where we wanted to be, with Leitao at the helm. Littlepage better not screw up this coaching hire.

Anyway. If you haven't already done so, do vote in the poll on the right. It's this blog's first foray into the wide world of completely unscientific and statistically insignificant opinion canvassing. Seems like a natural question. The poll ends on Sunday, by which time I hope that most of those candidates aren't already out of the running.

My thoughts on the first lacrosse game that I got to see this season will have to wait, as I'm learning, rapidly, that I have no ability to shut up when it comes to this coaching search. Suffice to say this for now: This team could absolutely coast to the national championship if they could play offense like they did in the first quarter and defense like they did in the fourth and play it for four quarters, every time. But any game in which they play like that third quarter for more than 15 minutes, they'll lose. Badly. Let's just hope they don't do any of that in the NCAAs. By the way, I TiVoed that game so look for it some time in the future in highlight form in the video section.

soapboxing: the Dave Leitao Fired edition

Let's get one thing straight first: Dave Leitao did not resign. Not in your humble blogger's opinion. For a college basketball coach, few jobs are more prestigious or pay better than an ACC head coaching position. You get one of those, you're in like Flynn. What coach alive would go to his boss and say, hey, I don't think I'm earning my paycheck here and I'd like to quit and by the way yes I would like that $2.1 million buyout also? I don't for a minute believe that this was Leitao's idea. So this post is written with that in mind.

And I don't agree with the firing. At all. As I've said repeatedly in the past, Leitao's had to try and deal with having three freshmen playing all the key minutes at all the key positions, as well as the ice-cold shooting touch from players who were supposed to be shooters, and a bunch of players with more minutes than their talent would indicate because of poor play from those that should have been higher on the depth chart.

I'm fully aware of the criticisms, by the way. Leitao's a drill sergeant. He refuses to talk to his players. He can't coach offense. Can't develop players (except for that Singletary guy who managed to become an NBAer under his tutelage.) I'm also fully of the belief that practically all of these are overblown to some extent. Not nonexistent, but overblown. Even in the slamjob WaPo article where Mamadi Diane's father ripped Leitao left right and center, Mo himself seemed to try and back away from those comments.

As for coaching offense, there's no denying it stunk, but the players couldn't shoot. They just could not shoot. Shooting is something you teach to 6th-graders. By the time you get to college, you can either shoot or you can't. Leitao didn't come in to practice with a Shot Sucker and suck the ability to hit a three-pointer out of guys who previously could. The inability to hit a jump shot doomed the offense from the get-go. Unless Leitao actively coaches poor shooting techniques - unlikely, as his DePaul squads improved their shooting while he was there - he's not the primary culprit in the poor offensive performance.

I'd have liked to see a postseason-or-bust ultimatum given to Leitao for next season. The pieces are there for us to take a tremendous leap. Sylven Landesberg returns, or at least was going to when last asked. He's not so happy about the firing and while I still think he stays (his game isn't quite NBA-ready yet and he could really help his draft position with another year or two of seasoning) it wouldn't surprise me if he at least had a second thought or two. The kids have been through the gauntlet once and will be veterans. I expect Zeglinski to still be up-and-down at the point, but more up than down instead of vice versa like we saw this year. So many ACC teams will be rebuilding in '09-'10 and we won't be.

Leitao ought to have been given the chance to see it through. Because the question for me is, other than a couple unimportant nonconference losses, what about this year failed to meet expectations? I'd love to see the answer to that. What couldn't we see coming? Would 12-16 instead of 10-18 have been enough to save Leitao's job? Was this supposed to be a team good enough for the NIT? No. 4-12 is about what we guessed we might see once we decided to be honest with ourselves. If that's bad enough to fire the coach, then it should have happened before the season. If the difference is we weren't supposed to lose to Liberty and Auburn, then it should have happened then. After a bad season that was supposed to be bad but before one with realistic expectations of improvement is not the time to fire the coach.

But, he's fired and that's that. So where do we go? For starters we have to do damage control with the current players, who are "kind of in a haze." Not a good reaction if you're hoping to avoid transfers and/or leaps to the NBA. Second, we have to do damage control with Tristan Spurlock, whose relationship with this staff went back a looooong way. Jontel Evans is likely to stay but Spurlock is the prize of the class. They've signed their LOI's, of course, but they can always request a release. Third, we have to do damage control with the 2010 recruits. I'd like to think we looked good for the services of Eric Atkins and Mychal Parker. All in all though I think our recruiting just got sent to jail without passing Go or collecting $200. Fail to roll doubles on the first try as we do our coaching search, and we're in trouble.

Speaking of coaching searches....yes, we're going to have to put ourselves through that. The top three names bandied about today are Jeff Capel of Oklahoma, Tubby Smith of Minnesota, and Sean Miller of Xavier. The common thread there is that all three of them are coaching in the tournament and the NCAA says hands off until they're done. That's well and good - we want coaches who can get to the tournament after all - but the problem is that Craig Littlepage has just done something rather impetuous and needs to hit a quick grand slam with this hire or be known as the guy who sent UVA basketball into a decade-long downward spiral with his coaching hire-and-fire patterns. And of those three, I think the only one we have a real shot at is Tubby. It's well known that it wouldn't be the first time we'd talked with the man. Not only that, but his Minnesota squad, which he's done an admirable job of resurrecting, is the lowest-ranked and the likely earliest exit. Capel and Miller head up a 2-seed and 4-seed, respectively; at first glance I'd have to say they'd both be crazy to leave for a reconstruction job, ACC or not. Oklahoma is a relative newcomer to the powerhouse game, but to many eyes Xavier would be considered a bigger-time program than we would despite the conference affiliations; Xavier's been to eight NCAA tournaments this decade and two Elite Eights, and it's not all Sean Miller's doing.

To my mind, the best-case, pie-in-the-sky scenario would be for Texas to dispatch Minnesota on Thursday, freeing up UVA's reps to go have a chat with Tubby Smith the very next day and get a deal done by the end of next week. If Tubby really is the guy they want, would we be willing to wait if Minnesota upsets the Dookies and makes it to the Sweet 16 for another week of tournament play? That's why Littlepage makes the big bux. If no Tubby, then my best guess is we'll be forced to take another chance on a coach from a lower-profile school (and by "another" I mean "DePaul is not a big-time high-profile place I don't care if they are in the Big East.") Perhaps Siena's Fran McCaffrey or BYU's Dave Rose, though I'm just tossing out names of coaches who've brought success to their programs and not out of any real connection with the ACC or the state of Virginia.

Regardless, one last word remains: Thanks. As in, thanks Coach Leitao for your service to the University. In my opinion Leitao's a stand-up guy - let's not forget his trips to the war zone to entertain the troops, nor the fact that he worked his tail off for four years for this team. It should have been more than four years, but it's water under the bridge now. Time to roll up the sleeves and get busy rumormongering and tracking plane flights.

regular programming will be pre-empted today

By this. Several places including the trustworthy folks at TheSabre are confirming that Dave Leitao is outski as coach. Fired, that is, along with the entire staff.

This blog exists as my megaphone for thoughts on the haps in UVA sports, so when I get home from pays-my-bills work, soapboxes will be mounted. The baseball/lax/football recruiting mumblings I'd planned for today are just going to have to wait. Sit tight: Coaching Search Mode is about to kick into high gear.

the basketball season: an autopsy

First thing on the docket is the congratulations that are in order for ACC Rookie of the Year Sylven Landesberg. Truly deserving - and the vote was much less close than I thought it would be. Landesberg is the fourth UVA player to win the award, and all the first two ever did was become UVA's only first overall NBA draft pick, and become UVA's all-time scoring leader. So, no pressure?

Unfortunately that's about three-fourths of the good news for this season. It was not, on the whole, good. 17 losses. In every conference but a select few of the worst (MEAC, for example), 17 regular season losses will land you squarely in the bottom half of the seedings. Whether it's the ACC or the Ivy League, 17 losses sucks. The season is about four months long - in the cutthroat world of the ACC, if you lose just three times a month, your ticket is punched for the bottom half of the conference and you tend to wonder if perhaps a change of head coaches is needed.

So it was a bad season, and you knew this. What you may find it interesting to be reminded of is that, as bad as things looked, we actually outperformed expectations. You'll note we were picked dead last in the preseason poll. A crude but fair way to use the poll to find the media's projection of conference wins is to divide the number of points in the poll by the total number possible (480) and multiply that by 16. That gives us a projected record of 2-14, which actually is what the last-place team got, only it wasn't us. We doubled that win total and did not finish last -take that, pundits.

I'll divide this up into four sections: the pluses, the "non-negatives" (of which there is only one), the minuses (AKA "What Went Wrong") and a premature look at what the future holds. The first two parts are today; the second two are Thursday or Friday otherwise this will turn into some kind of huge postmonster. Without further ado....

Pluses

- Sylven Landesberg, obviously. There's little need to expand much here. After two games it was evident the kid had major talent; after three, it seemed clear he was taking the reins as the go-to guy. If he stays four years, his #15 is the next number to be retired.

- Timely wins. Entries to the win column were few and far between. After beating Brown on January 7 to move to 7-5, there would be only three more victories in the following two months. But you couldn't have picked a better three to win. A home game romp over Virginia Tech and a season-finale, storybook victory over Maryland to give Mamadi Diane a night to remember. And a stirring home overtime win over Clemson to put an exclamation point on Sean Singletary's ceremony. Sometimes it's not how much you win but who you beat and when.

- Starting to crack the road jinx. Historically, we suck, and I mean suck, outside of Charlottesville. Especially in places like oh say Puerto Rico. Worse than a normal team. Now, we had some awful clunkers on the road, of course, but we had some awful clunkers at home, too. The point here is that going on the road, for once, didn't cause the clunkers, and we had some very good competitive games away from JPJA. Especially early in the season - right after the loss to Liberty would have been a great time for a Pete Gillen team to go to Syracuse and then Minnesota (two teams that are likely to end up in the Dance) and be a floormat. But we played those guys tough and could have beaten Syracuse with a little second-half defense. We went on the road for our first ACC win and played some very gutsy games in other teams' gyms as the season went on.

Non-negatives

There's really only one entry here, and his name is Dave Leitao. Most UVA fans have some kind of complaint about Leitao, and most of these fall into one of two categories. 1, he can't coach offense, and 2, he can't develop players. To be bluntly honest, I don't think there's much wrong with the offense that couldn't be fixed by having a couple players that could hit a gotdamn jump shot once in a while. Last in the conference in shooting both beyond and in front of the arc.

As for player development, one of the arguments that he can't develop players properly centers around John Brandenburg, a highly rated four-star recruit. The obvious counter is Assane Sene, a guy most thought would take tons of seasoning and experience before he really became useful. Turns out the guy can defend.

Anyway, the evidence just doesn't stack up. To say that Leitao can't develop players is to suggest that six-foot-nothing Sean Singletary should have been a first-round draft pick. Or maybe that Leitao turned Mamadi Diane from a real threat from outside into a benchwarmer. Or that a lightly-recruited transfer/walk-on from a local mid-major should somehow develop into a stud.

Another sometimes-cited example is Jeff Jones. True, Jones is one fine example of a guy who hasn't lived up to the recruiting ratings. But a guy who can't shoot, can't shoot. A coach can teach a lot of things. He can inspire a guy to play defense and he can teach how to run an offense and where to be, when. He can teach a guard the proper way to come off a screen and he can teach a post player correct footwork techniques. He can teach a point guard how to recognize a trap in a half-court press, and he can instill in his players a sense of when to shoot and when to pass. But if a guy can't shoot, he can't shoot, and two seasons of sub-.370 shooting is enough for me to know, Jeff Jones can't shoot. There's only so much a coach can do. Leitao's task here is not to wave a magic wand and turn Jeff Jones into J.J. Redick. He will have to find a role for Jones that minimizes his bad shots and sets him up for good ones.

I don't blame Dave Leitao for going 10-17. Leitao took what he was given, which was essentially a roll-of-the-dice recruiting pipeline and a superstud backcourt that covered up a lot of flaws, and molded it as best he could into as much success as could reasonably be expected. Pete Gillen didn't leave the cupboard bare, but if he'd had a really quality program to turn over to Leitao, he wouldn't have been let go in the first place. Having Sean Singletary and J.R. Reynolds around masked a ton of weaknesses and made a lot of players look better than they really were. With them both gone, Leitao is now rebuilding with his own pieces. And it's worth noting the cliff of irrelevance that DePaul has fallen off of in the four years since Leitao left.

In the next installment of this, I'll get down to the heart of the matter: Why We Sucked. And I'll try to guess at what next year might look like, and offer up my opinion on just how long 'Hoos should be patient with Dave Leitao

yes, yes, same-same

I TiVoed the game yesterday. I always do this when it's on TV, first, so I can make highlights out of it and post it if we win. Second, though, the obvious usual benefit to TiVo is that you don't have to start watching the game when the game actually starts.

So last night, I figured I'd take whatever time I needed to write yesterday's post, then go turn on the game and watch from the beginning. When I finished writing, I checked the game online. Halftime, it said. Great - plenty of time to catch up on what I missed. Then I saw the score.

I took a dump instead. Symbolic, I figured.

I mean, are you serious? Boston College shot like 70% in the first half? And we shot 20%? Given that, it's frankly a miracle we were only down 20. I turned the game on for the second half but didn't bother catching up on the first. Not too long into it, the announcers mentioned how flat UVA looked in the first half and how they had no energy, and they really seem to be playing with more fire in the second half. Yeah, they do that. I could tell by the score.

Give credit to Dave Leitao, though. His no-substitutions policy in the second half shows he's getting the notion that something has to be done besides just the same ol' stuff. It's a desperation move, to be sure. Hell, Solomon Tat doubled his minutes all season. It's a wonder he wasn't totally winded by the end - although he was the only one to foul out. But coaching the same old way, the same old conventional, afraid-to-make-a-mistake methods (the kind you see in the NFL every Sunday) and expecting your players to play differently, that's a common mistake made by coaches of losing teams. If sending Solomon Tat in for an entire half - Solomon Tat, who's otherwise played 25 minutes the entire season long - doesn't light a fire under a few butts, then not only will we not win a game the rest of the season, but I'd expect to see a transfer or two in the offseason ... the sort that's "encouraged" by the coaches. Because those guys who sat and watched ought to be embarrassed, and if they're not, they ought to be playing for Savannah State and working on a business degree.

The guys who did play in the second half played most impressively. Had the team got it through their thick skulls to come out with that kind of game in both halves, this would have been a rout of epic proportions and BC would be going home muttering about how tough it is to win on the road in the ACC. They attacked the basket on offense, attacked the ball on defense, and attacked the glass on both ends, and it was intensely frustrating to watch because where the hell has that been during the first half of all these games? Rrrrgghh.

I wish I could get optimistic about the next game, and I would if it weren't Carolina, at Carolina. C'est la vie. The ACC is no place for the faint of heart. The FSU game on Tuesday - I realize it's on the road, and I realize FSU curb-stomped us not too long ago, but if that were Saturday's game, I'd feel like it's a now-or-never game that we absolutely could win if the guys took the right lesson away from last night's game. As it is I'll just sigh resolutely and accept the beating that awaits.

That, by the way, will have to suffice for a game preview. I'm taking a ski weekend this weekend. Back on Sunday with a surprise.

By the way, disclaimer: I bear no responsibility if you smash your screen using the above stress kit. In fact, if you do, send me pictures of your ruined monitor so I can post it and we can all laugh.

in which we are basically the Charlotte Bobcats

The frustrating thing about trying to make any sense of what's going to happen in the next basketball game is that I tend to think in terms of what our players are capable of, instead of what's likely to happen or taking into account the extreme freshmanitude of this lineup. Inside my own head I'm guilty of occasionally taking this to absurd extremes, as in, "well, Sammy and Tucker can each bring about 12 points to the table, and Mike Scott seems like he's good for 12 as well, and Sylven is Sylven, so, 20," and by the time I'm done with the lineup I've given us about 120 points. This is pure fantasy and doesn't make it through the still-developing filter between brain and keyboard when I'm trying to do Serious Writer Stuff.

But I still take certain things for granted. Like Sammy Zeglinski. I did not even consider the possibility, let alone the effects, of a really bad game from him when I wrote up the Maryland preview, but, duh, he's a freshman, and played a total stinker of a game last night. I make this bold prediction now: we will never win a basketball game when our point guard scores no points and has one assist. Sammy has been visited during these last two games by the Bad Decision Fairy and the assist-to-turnover ratio takes a beating because of it.

He's not alone. Just when I think (and write) that certain players need to have more minutes, they get them - and one (Tucker) totally vindicates me and the other (Farrakhan) goes thhpppbbbtttt. And we wonder why Dave Leitao can't settle on a rotation.

Here's the problem with this team. Kris at TheSabre writes today asking us to try looking at this season (and specifically, Dave Leitao) with Year One goggles on. Good article - doesn't go far enough. It's not just Dave Leitao - everyone's in Year One. The leading scorer is a freshman. The point guard is a freshman. The leading defender is a freshman. Scott is playing 10 more minutes a game than he did last year. By season's end, Meyinsse will have doubled his minutes played over last year's total and Farrakhan will have tripled his. Over 57% of the minutes played last year were played by someone no longer on the team, and Diane and Jones struggled so badly early on that they've lost minutes, too.

The closest thing I can think of to describe this team is an expansion team. It looks like an expansion team. Plays like one. So many brand-new pieces all thrown onto the same court. There are 10 players in what you might call our rotation, and on the face of it the breakdown looks like this:

3 freshmen (Landesberg, Zeglinski, Sene)
3 sophomores (Scott, Farrakhan, Jones)
3 juniors (Meyinsse, Tucker, Baker)
1 senior (Diane)

Which is a young enough group as it is - how many other ACC teams are starting three freshmen? But in practice, it's more like 5 freshmen (Meyinsse and Farrakhan are in their first year with actual responsibilities), 3 sophomores (Baker's second year on the team - one year at W&M and one year sitting doesn't really prepare you for the ACC), and two upperclassmen, both of whom come off the bench.

Which means that patience is not only a virtue, it's a must, whether or not you think Leitao should be given more time. (And I do.) This team is not going to be much good all year. The experience they gain, every game, is going to be nullified by the grind of the long season as the extra minutes catch up to the players not used to playing so much. Leitao has generally been able to squeeze unexpectedly good results out of patchwork teams, so when this team is fully developed a couple years from now it's going to be a joy to watch. It's just, this year, you should mentally add the word "if" to any predictions of success.

it's a fine thing you're doing, coach

Short article from the RTD on Coach Leitao's trip to Iraq:

Trip to Kuwait, Iraq helps Leitao see the big picture

I wish everyone could go to Iraq, for just a day or two, just for a little bit of badly needed perspective. Failing that, since 300 million people would put a bit of a strain on the nation's airports, we should be thankful not only for the troops that fight the bad guys over there so we don't have to fight them here, but for guys like Coach Leitao that are willing to jolt themselves out of their comfy existence for a few days to offer their support and bring back a little of that perspective.