weekend review

It wasn't a perfect weekend.  A perfect weekend would've involved a tidy clean sweep of Florida State, and the lacrosse team's win would've earned a trophy instead of a small shred of bragging rights.

I'll take it, though.  I will always take it.  Especially when two more ACC trophies are added to the case; the tennis teams brought home the hardware this weekend.  I was honestly surprised to learn the women's tennis team had never won an ACC title before.  I'd have guessed they had a few by now, if you'd asked.  On the plus side, getting a first-time ACC title means there are only four teams at UVA that have never won an ACC title: volleyball, field hockey, and mens' and womens' golf.

That brings our title count to four (men's basketball, women's swimming & diving, and the two tennis team) this season, with a fully-expected rowing title yet to come and obvious contention for a baseball title still in the works.  We won't catch Florida State this year, as they have seven championships, but c'mon - three of them are basically the same damn team (women's cross country and indoor and outdoor track.)  No fair that we don't ever get to count indoor tennis.

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And hey, at least we scored bragging rights over the Noles in baseball this weekend.  Nick Howard is the star of the weekend as far as I'm concerned.  Seven batters faced, seven strikeouts.  That's just rude.  Howard turned some perfectly good hitters totally upside-down; the Noles didn't even look remotely good against him.  One of the better at-bats was turned in by Jameis Winston on Friday.  When Jameis Winston looks like the best hitter of the inning, the other guys did something really wrong.  And Winston got this distinction by being one of the few to actually foul off a pitch.  Then he watched dumbfounded as a waist-high, straight-line fastball zipped merrily across the middle of the plate for strike three.  The other guys brought their Swiss cheese bats to the plate.

At this point it's hard to make a case for anyone else but Howard as the top closer in the country.  15 saves - our bats have been just good enough to give him lots of chances and just bad enough to give him lots of chances.  But the really nasty stuff: 43 Ks against 6 BBs.  And he's been getting better as the season goes on.  Nate Kirby is doing a ridiculous job, too, and Brandon Waddell - who started the season by giving up 6 runs in 4 1/3 - has worked his ERA all the way down to 2.90.

The weekend finally convinced Collegiate Baseball to stop being the last holdout among the five polls/rankings, and give UVA the #1 nod.  Five rankings, five #1's for UVA.  #1 in the country - and currently sitting in the ACC's 3rd seed for the tournament.  No further proof is required for the fact that having divisions for baseball is monumentally stupid.

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I turned the lacrosse game off in disgust during the second quarter, only to be overcome by curiosity, and turned it back on at some point midway through the third.  That second period was perfectly emblematic of why this team has struggled.  The first half, really.  Matt Barrett couldn't stop a beanbag.  Mick Parks gave up yet another faceoff win so clean that UNC's R.G. Keenan had but to run straight ahead til he arrived at the doorstep.  And on one UNC goal - their second of the game, I think - a UVA defender watched the eventual scorer catch the pass, and then peeled off for parts unknown while the ballcarrier (Pat Foster, if memory serves) strode easy as you please into the vacated spot and potted the easiest goal of his life. 

This is to say nothing of the pitiful clearing game.  Awful decisions and half-assed passes turned the clearing game into a sloppy mess.  One failed clear was an inexcusable 30-second violation - probably brought about by doing too much of a 180 from recklessness to an overabundance of caution.  Fortunately, the Heels were even worse, particularly in the very crucial fourth quarter where they cleared two of six attempts.

The fourth also happened to be Barrett's time.  He saved only 45% all day, but 100% when it mattered.  Consistency is not Barrett's middle name, but there's a chance yet that we can be going into the 2018 season going "whatever will we do without that guy?"

I really think this team has a higher ceiling than it's shown this year.  And effort is not the problem.  This team has out-ground-balled everyone this year; in fact, they lead the nation in ground balls per game.  Joseph Lisicky gets a lot of well-deserved attention for sucking up ground balls but it's not just grinding long-stick guys; that was UVA's leading scorer Mark Cockerton diving into the scrum for a loose ball, in front of an empty UNC net, and coming out with the crucial two-goal lead.

No, this team's problem is between the ears; they keep shooting themselves in the foot with mental breakdowns in all facets of the game.  They shoot more with no backup behind the net than any team I've seen - and the X man will hang out blissfully by the side of the net when the shooter is winding up, instead of getting a head start on the backup.  Several times a game I'll wish I could get inside the head of a defender and find out why he didn't consider the guy with the ball worth defending.  And even when they were playing well against UNC, the passing was rather less than crisp.  Either end of a pass might be the one to screw up the next one - maybe it goes sailing over someone's head, maybe it just gets ignored by the recipient.  Eight seconds to go in a game where you have the ball and a two-goal lead, and you manage a giveaway.  Silly.

This team would be a legit as hell title contender if they could just deal with some of this low-hanging fruit.  They could very well find themselves in the Final Four - the draw I gave them in this week's bracketology happens to be an awfully favorable one, about as good as they could ever hope for, and set up beautifully for a potential trip to Baltimore.  But they can't beat four good teams in a row with their brains working the way they do now.

(Speaking of bracketology: I've finished a project of mine that perfectly calculates every team's RPI and all the RPI-related factors that go into bracketology too.  All I have to input is wins and losses.  Put in the results of one game and it calculates every change to every RPI in the whole system.  What does this mean?  Faster bracketology; I don't have to wait for the Internet to update itself before I can start.  Now that it's conference tournament week I plan on pushing out an update on Thursday and then every day unti Selection Sunday.

Even better: I should be able to adapt the thing for basketball and baseball and do my own bracketology for those sports, too.  Baseball won't be ready in time for this year's tourney, but next year, wait and see.)

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I guess we have to spoil things by finishing up with football.  It's attrition season, and you expect to wring your hands occasionally when someone with untapped potential transfers out or washes out, what have you, but you don't really ever expect your top passing-game weapon to say see ya later.

Jake McGee's transfer comes as a surprise to us in the outside world, but word floats around the tubes that he and Tom O'Brien got along like Tom and Jerry from day one, and that just maybe that move to "TE/WR" was mostly about having McGee get his coaching from Marques Hagans instead of TOB.  That is rumor, but it passes my smell test.

There's no way to put a positive spin on any aspect of it.  Demeitre Brim also announced his transfer this past week, to Central Florida, and that was easily explainable by the fact that he's a Sam backer and nothing even remotely like the kind of Sam backer that Jon Tenuta is using.  Is it a shame we couldn't finagle his considerable athletic potential into usefulness on the field?  Sure.  But it's also a cost of doing business.

McGee, on the other hand - they're selling his jersey FFS.  He's plastered all over all kinds of advertising and literature.  That the coaches allowed that to happen despite knowing he might leave is at a minimum a lousy grasp of PR; that McGee made it plain that he thinks Tight End U can't do a good job of preparing him for the NFL, that is just about as bad a piece of pub as we could've asked for.

The passing game is now short a terrific mid-range and red-zone option, and McGee's receiving skill set will not be easily replaced.  Perhaps more importantly, Mike London's regime just took a major blow to the solar plexus of its image.

points of view

I fully intended to write anything at all yesterday, but then what happened is I spent the evening on chat support trying to get my phone to work again.  I'm the absolute last person you'll see wigging out over being unconnected, but I do have this crazy fetish about getting the services I pay for, so it's nice that I can once again get text messages.

On the plus side, it gave me the chance to add the Maryland game to the stuff I was planning on, and things actually fall into place pretty nicely now.  Inside my head are two competing viewpoints on two different sports, so let's see if we can't resolve some of this cognitive dissonance.  Speaking in advance, before I even type this out, I am liking this idea so much that I might make it a weekly thing, if I can think of enough conflicting viewpoints on enough topics.

I said two sports, so let's start with lacrosse.

Point: ARRRRGHGHHGHGHGHGH.

We're basically screwed, right?  Even though the team is 2-0, it's certainly not a happy 2-0 when it's just seconds from being 0-2.  Choking away an eight-point lead against Loyola in just one quarter of action, and giving up 12 goals to upstart Richmond, these things do not support the preseason hypothesis that the defense would be a major strength.  This is two games in a row we've seen the opponent go on huge scoring streaks; Loyola potted nine straight and Richmond seven straight, the latter to turn a 6-2 UVA lead into a 9-6 deficit.

Need I add any more anyway, when you win by one lousy goal over a team playing its first varsity game ever?  Can you imagine the utter humiliation if the Spiders had won that game?  It would be the lacrosse team's Chaminade.  And we've seen this story as recently as last year; letting Mount St. Mary's and Vermont hang around for way longer than necessary foreshadowed the losing that took place later.

Obviously, this team has some major work to do.  Two games in and it's obvious.  Matt Barrett has debuted with a .342 save percentage, faceoffs are just a nose above .500, and opponents have gotten too many easy goals.  Just wait til Duke gets a load of this; they're gonna be merciless.

Counterpoint: Actually, things are looking up.

Let's face it, Loyola is no shit team - there are still players there with a ring - and for three quarters there, plus overtime, UVA was absolutely serving notice.  I had that team as the 10th-best offense in the country last year and the defense held them 100% scoreless for two straight quarters.  That absolutely counts for something.

And remember, I had Loyola pegged as Ohio State's replacement on the schedule - they're roughly at the same level of quality - and we lost to Ohio State last year.  So, replace a loss with a win, and we're already ahead of schedule.

The offense is finding its groove, too.  The other ACC teams that played all demolished their opponents, none of them playing a team even remotely close to Loyola's quality and scoring either 16 or 19 goals depending on which ACC team we're talking about, and it was still James Pannell getting player of the week honors from the conference.  For one, that's a totally new contributor from last year; Pannell definitely got a head start on living up to the tremendous praise he got from Dom.

UVA's midfield game, at least in the goal-scoring department, looks sharp, too.  Greg Coholan and Tyler German made their mark, and overall five different midfielders have scored.  And then finally, the defense has actually been all over the turnover map, and you have to give a nod to Joseph Lisicky, who leads the team in caused turnovers and ground balls** despite not even starting.  Looks like a terrific find.

**Except for Mick Parks, which isn't fair since Parks is the faceoff dude.

Verdict: Punt.

In the end, neither side of the debate can be ignored.  There's no reason to beat Richmond by any less than 10 goals, unless it somehow turns out Richmond is a surprise powerhouse.  Motivation level may have come into play in that game, and that's still no excuse.

Besides, for every bad point I made there's a silver lining, and vice versa, too; for example, yay Pannell, but he did play two full games while the other teams' stars probably played three quarters at most.  This team is full of new names and new combinations, and still gelling; it's too early to draw any conclusions beyond eliminating the most extreme expectations in either direction.

We've seen domination in both directions, and a team that's capable of dominating and being dominated usually moves in the dominating direction.  Lacrosse is a very short, small-sample-size season, though, so it all depends on how much time they need.  With Drexel on deck, there's another very good chance to get some more data points on this team; til then, and maybe for a couple more weeks, we'll have to sit with slightly bated breath.

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Point: The basketball team is slowly running out of steam.

It was probably inevitable, but 20-point blowouts have given way to a fair amount of drama during basketball games.  Boston College - the same Eagles that are 6-17 and only ever beat Virginia Tech in conference play - took advantage of sloppy defense and forced Tony Bennett to leave his regulars in, when he was probably contemplating when to let the walk-ons get some time.  And we were losing both the GT and Maryland games at halftime.

Really, it's the natural consequence of math, as well as simply being later in the season and having already expended a bunch of energy.  UVA is regressing to the mean, that's all - it's no surprise that teams, having oodles of tape on UVA's systems and tendencies, have figured out a way or two to deal with them.  Remember, this team was picked fourth in the conference, not first, so anything above sliding into the last double-bye spot in the tournament is overachieving.

Counterpoint: Pish-posh and fiddle-faddle.

In case you haven't noticed, most of those blowouts came against suckhole teams in the bottom of the standings with no hope of making the NCAA tournament (the lone exception being UNC, which was in a major rough patch at the time) - and by the way, BC and GT count as blowouts.  I warned you that BC was capable of keeping it close with a run or two, and the fact that they hit a couple timely threes doesn't change that we were blowing them out of the water for 36 minutes.

GT's a similar deal.  UVA went on a 22-1 run to finish the game and held the Jackets almost completely scoreless for 12 minutes.  If that had happened at the beginning rather than the end, we'd all be talking about what a complete domination it was and how we gave ourselves the luxury of just coasting the rest of the game.

So when we finally play a halfway-semi-decent team like Maryland, and that team goes on a hot jump-shooting streak to start the game, there's no reason to panic.  Everyone goes cold eventually, and if a team beats us because they shot 12-18 from three or something, you just tip your hat.  Til then, this team is still playing its calling-card awesome defense, and that's going to make even Syracuse sweat.

Verdict: Quit whining.

That is, if there's anyone out there doing so.  This one goes squarely to the counterpoint; if you'd said in November that in February I'd be complaining about no longer winning games by 20 points, I'm sure we'd all be a little bit happy about that.  Fun fact: even with a full one-third of the ACC season left, UVA can finish no worse than the 9th seed, and if Wake Forest loses tonight to NC State, you can make it the 8th seed.  In other words, we've literally already secured a single bye in the ACC tourney.

One more week of this winning stuff and you can write us into the Dance, too; I don't think we've quite reached the point where we could lose everything the rest of the way and still get invited, but we're on the cusp at worst.

Besides, is it really so bad to have to scrap for one every so often?