series preview: North Carolina

Date/Time: Fri.-Sat., April 18-20; 6:00, 1:00, 1:00

TV: Cavaliers Live Friday and Sunday; RSN and ESPN3 on Saturday

Record against the Heels: 100-176-4

Last meeting: UVA 2-1 over UNC (10-4. 5-8, 8-7); 5/16-5/18/13, Chapel Hill

Last game: UVA 11, W&M 2 (4/16); UNC 5, Elon 4 (4/16)

Last weekend:
UVA 2-1 over Clemson (3-2, 1-7, 1-0)
UNC 2-1 over WF (9-0, 4-3, 5-6)

National rankings:

Baseball America: UVA #1; UNC UR
Collegiate Baseball: UVA #2; UNC UR
NCBWA: UVA #1; UNC ARV
Perfect Game: UVA #1; UNC UR
Coaches: UVA #1; UNC ARV

Pitching probables:

Friday:
LHP Nathan Kirby (7-1, 1.23) vs. RHP Trent Thornton (7-1, 1.50)

Saturday:
RHP Josh Sborz (3-2, 2.91) vs. RHP Benton Moss (2-1, 3.62)

Sunday:
LHP Brandon Waddell (5-1, 2.78) vs. RHP Zac Gallen (3-3, 4.99)

The Hoos are riding higher than they have all season, a near-consensus #1 in the rankings and sporting a shiny 14-4 record in conference play.  Normally that'd mean this was one of the biggest series in the country this week, but the Heels aren't holding up their end.  UNC's low point so far this season is probably a sweep at the hands of Duke, and they've also provided lowly Boston College with one of their three conference wins.

The pressure remains on UVA, though; despite the lofty rank, they're at risk of not even leading their division at the end of the week.  There'd be no shame in a 2-1 series win over UNC, even if they are struggling, but Miami hosts Notre Dame this week, and it'd be a shock if they didn't sweep the Irish.  Even with a good showing, UVA could be looking upwards in the Coastal, and very much needs to avoid giving away two games on the weekend.

UNC scouting report:

-- First base: Adrian Chacon (.264-1-8).  Let's start this off by saying, right off the bat, that UNC's lineup has been really fluid this year.  UNC coach Mike Fox has been letting things go for two to three weeks and then shuffling the batting order, and by that pattern UNC is due for another shuffle.  First base has been a place where the shuffle is most evident; three different players started here against Wake Forest, and UNC went through another stretch where they started four different players in five games.  Joe Dudek started the first 21 games, but his .218 batting average dissuaded Fox from giving him any further regular role.  Dudek is a lefty hitter while Chacon is a righty, so if Dudek plays it'll be on Saturday; otherwise, first base tends to be a place where UNC moves someone from another position for a game so as to get an outfielder off the bench or a DH some field time.  Chacon, for his part, will occupy one of the spots in the bottom third of the order, depending on who else plays.

-- Second base: Wood Myers (.307-0-17).  On the other hand, this is the picture of stability.  Myers is a freshman that the Heels really like; he handles himself well at second, and his lefty bat gives him the ability to turn some singles into doubles.  He's second on the team in doubles despite lacking any semblance of power - he's yet to hit a triple and probably will never homer.  Myers is one of two Heels that have started every game at the same position - their double-play combo is the only thing they've kept completely intact - and typically bats second.

-- Third base: Landon Lassiter (.266-0-11).  A freshman all-American last season with a BA of .358, Lassiter has definitely hit a sophomore slump this year.  Opening the season near the top of the lineup and spending a time as the leadoff hitter, Lassiter has been bumped to fifth in the order, but without the power hitting that often implies.  Despite a propitious drop in batting average and collecting only two extra-base hits out of 34, he has a keen eye and a knack for getting on base in general - he's collected 26 walks, second on the team, and leads the Heels with 9 HBP.  His slump may be attributable in part to his move to the field on an everyday basis, as he's started all but three games at third base after being primarily the DH last year.  It's been a rocky road; Lassiter has piled up 12 errors for a fielding percentage of .852.

-- Shortstop: Michael Russell (.338-3-25).  This junior and second-year starter at shortstop is undoubtedly the Heels' top offensive threat.  Russell is tough to pitch to; he hits the ball all over the field and draws plenty of walks, and once on base, is also the top base-stealer on the team, with a 10-for-11 success rate.  He spent most of the season batting third or fourth, as you'd expect of a hitter of his caliber, but lately has been in the leadoff spot.  I read this as a sign that Mike Fox is trying anything to stop the offense from sputtering, and figures he might as well maximize the appearances for his best hitter.

-- Left field: Parks Jordan (.257-0-15).  UNC definitely has its share of guys whose first name is really more of a last name.  Seems like more of a lacrosse phenomenon, but whatever.  Jordan is a left-handed hitting senior who's never been a major offensive threat but also never been terrible; his career average is .256.  He packs very little power and has a slugging average of just .286, a mere three points below Lassiter to claim the bottom spot among regulars.  Jordan is a high-quality fielder, however; he committed his first collegiate error just this season.

-- Center field: Skye Bolt (.250-1-17).  Like Lassiter, Bolt was a freshman sensation last year - probably more well-known than Lassiter due to a combination of his name and playing in the field - and has hit a sophomore wall this year.  Bolt is a speedy player, a good fielder, and his 27 walks and 14 strikeouts indicate a good batting eye - he's just not collecting base hits.  Nevertheless, he's been batting third lately and hits in the top of the lineup most games this year.

-- Right field: Tyler Ramirez (.311-1-17).  Despite having some of the top numbers on the team, Ramirez is one of the players more likely to be bumped from the lineup, and his typical spot in the order is 8th or 9th.  One wonders if the next lineup shuffle from UNC moves him nearer the top.  Zach Daly (.258-2-5), usually used in a pinch-hitting role, gets an occasional start here, as does the very light-hitting Adam Pate (.176-0-2), whose main role is as a pinch-runner.

-- Catcher: Korey Dunbar (.248-3-25).  Early in the season this job belonged to Adrian Chacon, but Dunbar took over two weeks in, and when Chacon eventually returned to the lineup it was at first base.  Dunbar doesn't get much rest, starting all but three games since then.  He doesn't hit for a great deal of contact and he strikes out a ton, and is generally a bottom-half hitter, but he does at least have a little pop in his bat when he does make contact.

-- Designated hitter: Tom Zengel (.329-4-25).  Fox has used this spot this year to get a variety of players some time in the lineup, but that's getting harder and harder to do since Zengel is basically the second-best hitter after Michael Russell.  He's having a big breakout year as a senior after not hitting much in his first two and sitting as a junior.  Lately he's been batting cleanup, an appropriate spot for the team slugging (.565) and HR (4) leader.

-- Pitching staff:

Friday: RHP Trent Thornton (7-1, 1.50).  Thornton is a high draft pick in the making, and his matchup with Nathan Kirby promises to be a must-watch.  He's got three plus pitches, maybe four depending on his slider, and started the season as Carolina's Saturday starter but didn't need much time to show he deserved the role of Friday ace.  His average outing lasts into the 8th inning.  His numbers are eerily similar to Kirby's, and he's only allowed three extra-base hits all year.

Saturday: RHP Benton Moss (2-1, 3.62).  A veteran workhorse in his third year in the starting rotation.  He's been consistent but not spectacular his whole career; his excellent freshman-year numbers are mainly built on weekday competition.  Moss has started twice against UVA in his career; in 2012 he earned a win and in 2013 a no-decision.  He was outdueled by Scott Silverstein last year but Carolina came away with the win when Kyle Crockett inexplicably melted down.

Sunday: RHP Zac Gallen (3-3, 4.99).  Gallen comes in as a very highly-rated freshman, with stuff that the scouts really liked, but has been very hittable this year so far.  That ERA is just a shade under 5, and he's allowing a BA of .288.

Bullpen: Carolina goes very deep in the bullpen, and should be able to match UVA stride for stride here.  RHP Chris McCue (0-0, 0.77) is a tough customer as the closer, with 7 saves in as many appearances.  UNC leans very hard on righty Reilly Hovis (5-1, 2.09), allowing a .196 batting average, and righties Spencer Trayner (2-2, 2.25) and Trevor Kelley (0-1, 2.40) are trusted options as well.  There aren't many lefties; if UNC wants one they'll turn to Zach Rice (1-2, 3.52), usually for only a batter or two.

Bottom line: Carolina has good pitching, as they tend to usually do, but they're frustrating their fans with poor performance at the plate.  Sound familiar?  The difference between us and them is we were bursting at the seams with options for the rotation and they've had trouble getting consistency from Gallen and have no other options they fully trust.  Also, this is a fairly young team; usually, the backbone of a good team is your junior class, but UNC has only five, and only Michael Russell is not a pitcher.  They have a couple seniors too, but the team is mostly underclassmen, and in too many cases for the sanity of UNC fans, highly underachieving sophomores.

Despite all that, UNC's lineup is outperforming UVA's on the stat sheet, so the advantage we might have is not great.  Friday promises to be a terrific battle between two terrific pitchers, and could easily be won 1-0 by either team.  UVA will have the advantage on the mound from then on, though Moss is a very capable pitcher and shouldn't be discounted.

Prediction: UVA 2-1.  The Hoos aren't batting well enough that they're likely to hit both Thornton and Moss hard enough to win.  Just like last week, Sunday should set up as a rubber match which UVA should then win.

weekend review

I don't brag much - maybe like four or five times a year, tops - but when I'm right, I'm right.  The Charlottesville regional, as far as UVA was concerned, went down exactly as planned.  Except for that UNC-Wilmington was a dud and couldn't get past Elon.  UVA, on the other hand, swung some cold bats against some quality pitching performances from Army's Chris Rowley and Elon's Spencer Medick.  Fortunately the Hoos turned in even better performances on the hill and set themselves up in the winners' bracket.  Then, against the same Elon team, only with a burned-up pitching staff, UVA opened up a can.

Sunday's starter was Whit Mayberry, but the outing of the day belonged to David Rosenberger, a medium-use reliever for most of the season who came through with five scoreless innings in relief.  A terrific outing especially for a guy who usually needed four or five appearances to rack up that many innings.  Mayberry wasn't actually bad, and a more normal strike zone might've seen him go five or six terrific innings himself.  Whit was victimized by a dinky little strike zone and actually only walked one hitter, but since the umpire wouldn't give him the corners, he had to throw juiceballs in order to get strikes, and the Elon hitters took advantage.  A six-run third, though, followed by some insurance in later innings, put the Elon threat away for good.

Can't talk about great pitching performances without mentioning the shutout on Saturday, though, which Scott Silverstein (6 innings), Josh Sborz (1 inning) and Kyle Crockett (2 innings) combined their efforts on.  Or, for that matter, Brandon Waddell's three-hit, 8-K effort against Army.  When you allow four runs in three games, you'll usually advance.

It's an extremely chalky tournament so far; 14 of 16 super-regional slots have been filled (at the moment I'm writing this) and the only one of those 14 that's not a 1 seed is Oklahoma.  (Which beat the Hokies.  You can probably hear me wailing and gnashing my teeth already.)  UVA hosts Mississippi State, which slipped up against 4 seed Central Arkansas on Sunday but recovered today to move on.

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-- Solid article last week in ESPN, the summary of which is basically Brian O'Connor is awesome.

-- More shakeup in the lacrosse world, and I call it bad news.  The ACC lost out on the Johns Hopkins sweepstakes (who knows if they ever tried?) and Hopkins will join the Big Ten as an associate member for lacrosse.  Or really, Hopkins will join the CIC (the B1G's research collaboration branch) with lacrosse as their excuse - and the B1G's excuse for adding them.

That puts a powerful competitor for recruits on the landscape for 2015, when the move occurs.  (Hopkins probably has half a schedule put together for 2014 already, and there's no sense in them joining before Maryland and Rutgers get there anyway.)  Maryland badly needed Hopkins so they wouldn't have to go the fully-independent route and would have a rival they could use as a recruiting chip.  They've put together a conference of Hopkins, Maryland, Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, and Rutgers, which is a tough group, especially since it'll be televised on the BTN.  (Don't expect Michigan to stink forever.)  Meanwhile, the ACC now has to look within its own ranks if it wants to find a sixth member and create a tourney autobid.

Hopkins will have to create room on their schedule for four Big Ten games (they already play Maryland, obviously, and played Michigan this season) and it's natural to wonder if they'll keep UVA on their schedule.  They probably will.  Hopkins-UVA is one of the stronger rivalries in lacrosse and one Hopkins may need to keep their recruiting at an elite level, and besides that we're the closest ACC team they've got.  If they want to keep playing ACC teams, UVA is the way to do it.

The other big shakeup is Denver's move to the Big East as an associate lacrosse member.  This is called "the Big East saves its own ass" and preserves its autobid, as it will be losing Syracuse and Rutgers and would've dropped to five teams after 2014.  Naturally, the ECAC is in trouble, and the four teams left (Air Force, Bellarmine, Hobart, and Fairfield) need to either go raiding or find other conferences.  The latter seems more likely.  Fairfield is in the MAAC, after all, and might find this a propitious time to be a lax member too.  Bellarmine might find a fit in the A-Sun.  The NEC has a little autobid dilemma, being also left with five teams thanks to the MAAC's pillaging, and Hobart might be just the fix they need.  Air Force could, I dunno, figure something out.  If they tried to keep the ECAC on life support, Detroit would be a fit, but who else?

I would guess they'll go their separate ways - the ECAC has always been little more than a holding pen for teams waiting to find a more permanent home.  And if so, you might just see the constant lacrosse realignment - which has for some time been a fact of life rather than a cataclysm - settle down for a bit, with the only catalyst for more change being new schools adding the sport.

weekend review

Well, after all the buildup the ACC tournament turned out - for UVA, at any rate - like most other weekend series.  Go somewhere, win more than you lose, go home, and no special accolades attached, which is code for we didn't win it.

That said, I don't call it entirely unsuccessful.  UVA got dusted by the Hokies on Wednesday - bad - and dusted Georgia Tech the next day - good.  Losing the first game meant we needed three things in order to happen in order to see the Hoos in the championship game, and #'s 1 and 3 got taken care of just fine while #2 (GT needed to beat VT, and didn't) never materialized.  Some short takeaways from the weekend:

-- When FSU dropped their second game of the tourney, it assured us of one important thing: UVA has more ACC championships this year than anyone else.  No ties: we have five to everyone else's less-than-five.

-- It's kind of been a while since Nick Howard started a game, and lately when Brandon Waddell has a good game it's usually on the order of "nice job getting out of all those jams."  I'm pleased to watch Waddell battle; you can tell he's got some of that no-fear mentality that our coaches want to see out of their starters, and when you've got that, developing your stuff is the easy part.  But right now, Scott Silverstein is the starter I trust the most on the hill.

-- Which in turn sets up nicely for the upcoming regional.  The #1 seed has the luxury of the option to hold back their ace for the second game,** and the way it goes this year, we don't even have to mess with the rotation to achieve that.

** Which I maintain is the most important game regardless of seed, but typically, the 1 seed is guaranteed to have the tougher contest in the second game, while the same can't be said for the 2/3 seeds.

-- Kevin McMullan has always been the Shamel Bratton of third-base coaches.  Don't do that don't do that why did you do that YESSSSSSS

-- Florida State - the #2 seed and Atlantic Division champion - went 0-3 on the week.  If you like you may call that an indictment of the silly division system that awards pointless division championships and serves no purpose whatsoever.  Although I would temper that by pointing out that FSU would've been the #3 seed in a correct divisionless system and would've still had GT and VT on their plate.

-- Seeing Whit Mayberry go long enough to be eligible for a win is nice.  That pretty much officially gives us four starters for the NCAAs, and a fifth (Kyle Crockett) who can turn in some very long relief outings and destroy left-handed hitting besides.  (And has a fan in Mike Martin, who sounded slightly awestruck in saying Crockett has a "beautiful, beautiful arm."  There's no Danny Hultzen or even a Tyler Wilson or Branden Kline on this staff, but what it lacks in ace-quality pitching it makes up for in depth.  Long after opponents have gotten into the part of their bullpen that makes their fans sweat, we're still trotting out quality arms.

-- A school of thought said that if we knew the FSU game would be meaningless as it relates to the ACC tournament (which it was since VT had already clinched their trip to Sunday's championship game) we should empty the bench and play all the dudes who don't otherwise play.  In retrospect, I'm glad we didn't, as it gave our players one last taste of extra-innings drama - and another lesson in how to win - before the NCAAs began.

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And now for future baseball stuff instead of past baseball stuff:

-- UVA's tournament draw is pretty decent.  Nobody stands out as particularly scary in our own regional of UNC-Wilmington, Elon, and Army.  Army does have a solid pitching staff and will probably toss Chris Rowley again, the same guy UVA faced in last season's regional and managed to hit fairly well.  But no power-conference two-seeds and no sneaky mid-majors, like, say....

-- ....South Alabama, who is in our paired regional as a two-seed against host Mississippi State.  The Bulldogs actually got two such sneaky mid-majors, with Mercer tossed in there as well.  Mississippi State has a top-ten RPI but in terms of record was fifth in the SEC, behind Vandy, LSU, Arkansas, and South Carolina.  So we could've done worse in the draw.  Much worse.  UVA, by the way, is the national 6 seed.

-- I'll tell you who else could've done worse: Miami.  The tournament committee practically fellated the Hurricanes.  Miami's RPI is 19th, which might help explain it, but sheesh: this was a team with a losing ACC record.  They did beat Clemson, VT, and GT in weekend series, but also lost series to Duke, BC(!), and Wake (three of the four non-entrants to the ACC tournament) as well as Florida, who is a regional 3 seed.  Which is probably what Miami should be.  Instead they're a 2 seed with a nationally unseeded regional host.  Wut?  Well, they have one of the nation's toughest 3 seeds in Oklahoma State, so it's not all craziness.  I guess either the committee likes their RPI + series wins, or else it's a measure of respect for the ACC.

-- This is the bracket that will be used next year and in the future at ACC baseball tournaments.  It's a 10-team double-elimination.  Having been morbidly fascinated by how they will pull that off, I find that the final product doesn't disappoint in all its convolusion.  Stare at it til your head hurts, then come back here for the explanation, such as it is, if you need it.  Let's see if I can interpret that:

* The teams will be divided into two pools of five: 1-4-6-7-9 and 2-3-5-8-10.
* The top two seeds will get a bye. (Presumably, they will still be, stupidly, the division winners.)
* The first set of games, on Tuesday, will be 4-9, 6-7, 3-10, and 5-8.  The losers of those games head to the loser's bracket to play Wednesday.  In each pool, the best-seeded winner gets a bye til Thursday, and the worst-seeded winner plays the 1 or 2 seed on Wednesday, the winner of which advances to Thursday.
* The winner of this Thursday winner's bracket game advances to Saturday.  The loser heads to the loser's bracket, which concludes sorting itself out on Friday and sends a team to Saturday.
* By Saturday, we only have four teams left, two from each pool, which will play a single-elimination tourney to decide a champion on Sunday.

Got all that?  On one hand, I guess it's nice that they've found a way to reward better-seeded teams.  (I'm avoiding using the term "higher-seeded" because that bracket uses that term to mean worse.)  On the other hand, that has potential to grind up pitching staffs something fierce, and plus nobody will be able to understand it.  Is the ACC baseball tournament such a cash cow that it's so vital to have 10 teams there?  (No.  It isn't.)  Better alternatives include:

* The same thing we're doing now.
* Not having a tourney at all, playing one extra week of regular season ball, and handing the banner to the team with the best record.
* This.

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Further stuff in brief:

-- Fresh off losing one Richardson, the football team picks up a future one in the form of OL Will Richardson.  Despite the limited space in the 2014 class, I think we'll probably try to get one more OL, but with Richardson and Steven Moss, the class is a paragon of quality-not-quantity on the OL.  Richardson has ratings ranging from high three stars to sitting inside the ESPN 150.  (Though admittedly, had he chosen Florida State instead, he had a much better likelihood of staying there.)

-- Paul Jesperson has settled on Northern Iowa as his landing spot.  Much closer to his home of Wisconsin than his other option, USC.  Much luck to him.

-- UVA's first two football games - BYU and Oregon - will both be 3:30 games, the former on ESPNUVA and the latter on ESPN2 or ABC depending on your location.  Win.  A strong showing in those games - which is probably to say, beat BYU and don't get embarrassed by Oregon - should set us up for decently-televised games through mid-October.  And since that's the softer part of the schedule, moving through it with aplomb might just give us some well-timed games (i.e. not at noon on Raycom) the rest of the year.

acc tourney preview

So that starts Wednesday.  It's officially the postseason, and that means obsessing over pitching staff usage and the goings-on in your little pods as the tournaments make their inexorable advance toward (hopefully) championships of some kind.  UVA's game times for the ACC are as such:

Wednesday, 3 PM: Virginia Tech
Thursday, 11 AM: Georgia Tech
Saturday, 11 AM: Florida State

Sure, don't put the conference's winningest team on in prime time or anything.  We wouldn't want anyone to see good baseball.  My whining aside, you've already seen series previews on each of these teams, so these will be just little capsules of each game.

-- Wednesday --

The Hokies haven't announced any rotation info for the tourney, but I think it's a safe bet that UVA will face their top pitcher, lefty Joe Mantiply.  Mantiply has gotten a lot better as the season went on; when I wrote the series preview a few weeks ago he was allowing a .304 batting average, which is now down to .256.  He's got good velocity for a lefty and has worked himself into being one of the ACC's legitimate top starters, though he didn't get an all-conference nod.

UVA's last outing against Mantiply didn't go all that well; Kenny Towns and Derek Fisher took him deep, but they were solo shots only and the Hoos managed three runs in seven innings.  Brandon Waddell will oppose the Hokies; he gave up six runs in 5 2/3 in the Friday game against VT, but the UVA bats bombed the Hokie pitching and handed him the win.

Tech's lineup, as before, is largely about the six or so players that make it go.  Tyler Horan finished the regular season leading VT in nearly every applicable category, including a .344 BA and 11 HR.  The bottom three aren't a major threat, but if you let the top six string things together it's a long day.

-- Thursday --

Georgia Tech will have their FSU game under their belt by game time Thursday, and UVA won't have to face Buck Farmer, who mowed down the Hoos' lineup in the first meeting.  Instead it'll be righty Dusty Isaacs facing off against Scott Silverstein.  This was also the Saturday matchup in the regular season, which UVA won 7-2 with five runs in four innings off of Isaacs.  Silverstein, meanwhile, had one of his best days of the year, allowing just one in seven innings and whiffing nine.

We need that kind of performance again, because GT's lineup as usual is built around trying to get on base in front of their gorillas; this year, said gorillas are named Zane Evans and Daniel Palka, and they combined for 31 homers and 125 RBIs in the regular season.  GT's lineup makes them dangerous, but this pitching matchup was a pretty favorable one the first time around, and should be somewhat so again.

-- Saturday --

This is the final game of pool play on our side of the bracket, so we'll know for sure going in what the story is as per trying to get to Sunday.  Obviously, the most likely thing is that we have to win to get there (if we aren't already eliminated from contention.)  O'Connor hasn't picked his pitcher yet for this game; probably, it'll be Nick Howard if we need to win or if we're already out (the latter being just for the sake of getting Howard some work, as he didn't pitch against UNC), and if somehow we've already clinched a spot in the Sunday championship, then we probably save Howard for Sunday and toss Whit Mayberry instead.

FSU, meanwhile, has already made their choice: southpaw Brandon Leibrandt, who opposed Scott Silverstein in the regular season and lost despite pitching a gem.  UVA only scratched out four hits and two runs, but it was enough because Silverstein pitched his other best game of the year: seven shutout innings.  The actual likely starter, Howard, also pitched a terrific game the next day to polish off the regular season sweep.

FSU may actually have the least scary lineup in the pool.  It's deeper than either VTs or GTs but doesn't have the top-end power and for-average hitting that the Techs bring.  The pressure will be on the Noles, given their inability back in April to break through against UVA's pitching.  If we can get through the first two games with a 2-0 record and a reasonably intact bullpen, the final hurdle will be ours for the taking.

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I would obviously be remiss if I said nothing about the tennis, which beat UCLA in a drama-filled matchup for the program's first national title in its history and the ACC's first in that sport since like the caveman days.  (If you count Notre Dame's 1959 title.  Otherwise it's the ACC's first in that sport since ever.)  UVA swept through every round up to and including the quarterfinals without losing a match; a 4-1 win over Georgia was closer than that score indicated, and a 4-3 win over UCLA was closer than that score indicated too.  #3 singles player Mitchell Frank finished off the title win with a really gutty come-from-behind win after dropping his first set 6-0.

And I've already edited the Wikipedia page, you're welcome.

Fun facts:

-- This is UVA's 20th NCAA-sanctioned national title and 27th counting other sanctioning bodies (such as pre-NCAA lacrosse action and indoor tennis.)

-- UVA has won a national title in something for five years in a row.  (This blog will complete its fifth season whenever baseball wraps up.  Hmmmm.  I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.)

-- And it hasn't been done by owning a death grip on some esoteric sport, like the way USC has won the last five (and probably six, soon enough) men's water polo titles.  Five titles, one per year, in four different sports: men's soccer, men's lacrosse, men's tennis, and two in crew.  Not too many schools, if any, can claim that kind of broad-based excellence.

So.  Many congrats to Brian Boland, who's had his team on the cusp for a long time now and finally broke through.  UVA didn't lose to a single opponent all year, and hasn't lost to a conference opponent since 2006.

Speaking of conference opponents, while we're busy collecting trophies, there's still one straggler that doesn't show up in the annals of the elite.  A moment of silence for an empty case, please.

weekend review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet more bullets from the weekend:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

weekend review

I didn't preview the Duke lacrosse game, but an astute comment on the GT post predicted it better than I would have:

I see UVa plays Duke today in lacrosse. I have no doubt we'll beat them, because I have years of experience as a Virginia fan to draw on. It's like in 2002 when the basketball team was totally sucking, then had the nerve to beat Duke just to remind you how badly they were underachieving.

That's the sort of thing that it really does take years of watching UVA sports to think of.  There was only one problem with it: the laxing Hoos found an even more ridiculously Virginia way to let the game play out.  Fail at scoring goals all season, then wait until we play the one team we can't beat to score an enormous flood of them, and still lose by three.  Absolutely fascinating.  Insert the appropriate Anchorman quote here, you know the one.  I really think that has to stand close to "beat top-five Florida State and then score five points at North Carolina" in the Stupid Losses Zone.

This was a game of runs, with the pendulum making several swings between delivering and receiving the ass-beating.  UVA's 13-9 lead ended up being a rather false hope, as Duke scored 10 of the next 11 goals.  Truthfully, the game wasn't as close as the score: UVA was beaten in the shots-on-goal category 35-24, at faceoffs 23-15, total shots 55-40, and cleared only 75% of their opportunities.  I'm beginning to think the only way to find out why Duke always brings out the worst in our defense is to kidnap an assistant coach and torture the answers out of him, but then again I've been reading Game of Thrones lately so my ideas might be a little darker than normal.

UVA has now left itself only one thread of hope for making the NCAA tournament: win all of the next three games.  That's the only way to earn the.500-or-better record the NCAA requires for at-large teams.  And I don't even think that would do it, really.  Of course, at this point if you're still thinking NCAA tournament, there's nothing I can say to shoot down your very misplaced optimism except that your efforts might be better spent finding a team with a golden horseshoe jammed up its ass, like Ohio State football.

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That golden horseshoe team certainly isn't UVA baseball, at least not this weekend.  UVA dominated the Saturday game behind some ridiculously good pitching from Scott Silverstein, who gave up two hits - one of them of the extremely cheap variety - in seven innings, and struck out nine.  I don't trust Silverstein's reconstructed shoulder enough to think that we can always get that kind of performance, but that was one of the better lineups UVA will face or has faced in ACC play.  If he can dominate them he can certainly work some magic on the rest of the conference too.  Given the reputation Silverstein had coming out of high school, file that one under "what could've been" and repeat the UVA mantra, which as always is: "we can't have nice things."

This is not to say that the rest of the pitching was poor, of course: that GT lineup only scored seven runs in the three games.  Brandon Waddell had a nervous-looking start on Friday but then settled down beautifully, and UVA lost 2-1.  Truthfully, I think third-base coach Kevin McMullen ran us right out of that one by sending Derek Fisher home from second on a single to left, whereupon he was cut down at the plate. 

My usual philosophy on sending runners is that coaches should be hyper-aggressive with two outs, and send all 50/50 or even 40/60 chances (because your chances of scoring if you hold the runner are essentially equal to the batting average of the next hitter) but exercise a great deal of caution with less than two outs.  Which was the case with Fisher.  Holding a runner on a grounder (which is what the single was) isn't even cautious, it's just smart: a grounder can and will be charged and the outfielder can come up firing.  It's different if the OF has to go side-to-side to get the ball, and if he's going glove side then you send him without hesitation, but a grounder straight at him is going to get you nailed.  With one out and runners at the corners you have a lot of tools in your toolbox to get that runner home, and Reed Gragnani (the next hitter) is a senior who can be counted on to know the value of a fly ball.  Since the score was 2-1 at that time and the rest of the game saw mostly quiet bats, it turned out to be one of the key plays in the loss.

On Sunday....well, GT basically tossed the dice and won, letting the rain finish up their 3-2 win.  Not a bad strategy when you know your bullpen is just about cashed.  Everyone knew going in that UVA had the deeper pen than GT, which I'm sure played no part whatsoever in the decision not to fit in a doubleheader on Saturday.  The point that UVA certainly had the chance not to let in three runs and the chance to score more than two is stipulated to.  That said, sometimes you lose a series and you're glad to have pulled one win out of it and you hope that team ends up in the opposite bracket of the ACC tournament.  This series left no reason to fear the Jackets should we see them again sometime.

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-- UVA says goodbye today to Paul Jesperson, who made known his intent to transfer out.  Flash back to a couple weeks ago when I projected that Malcolm Brogdon's return to the rotation would almost certainly take a huge chunk out of Jesperson's minutes; a transfer is not all that surprising.  And Jesperson surely has a better idea than you or I about Brogdon's readiness.  We were set to have a full complement of 13 scholarship players next year, but being one short won't kill us until "we can't have nice things" starts to take hold.

The real scholarship logjam is next year's sophomore contingent, which runs seven deep and which Jesperson was not part of.  This is kind of a problem.  It's one that'll probably sort itself out in some fashion, since there's three seasons before they all graduate, but it's still worth keeping an eye on.  There are now three open spots for the year when that group will be seniors (2015-2016) which, if you fill them all up, means you only return six players the next year, plus your recruiting class.  As it would be unwise (not to mention awfully damn tough) to take a seven-man class and repeat the cycle, you see the issue.  I usually scoff at the idea of a mid-career redshirt for a non-injured, non-just-transferred player, because it's exceedingly rare in football and even more so in hoops, but you can see where such a thing would be useful if we could pull it off.  A transfer is the more likely result of that logjam.

At any rate, we do wish Jesperson the best.  Dude made some sacrifices and did everything the right way, and the silver lining for him is that the redshirt year he couldn't take will now come in handy.

-- Very interesting potential development today in the suggestion of an ACC Network that would be announced before next football season.  Whether that means it would actually start right up broadcasting ACC football in 2013, I'm not sure, and I rather doubt it because it takes a while to get it onto all of the potential carriers.  Presumably also they mean a real ACC Network patterned after the BTN and other copycats, and not just a Raycom-like entity calling itself the ACC Network only when it's broadcasting an ACC contest.

The potential benefit to the ACC covers a wide range of possibilities.  I doubt that the foreseeable future would see such a network turn into the money tree that the BTN has been.  For one thing, Big Ten schools are ginormous and have a much larger potential viewership base.  For another, this appears to be in concert with ESPN, which owns ACC broadcast rights from top to bottom.  The BTN is in concert with Fox instead, which means the B1G can play the two entities off against each other.  Having ESPN running the show simply means having the same entity stretching its own reach, and potentially monopolizing content.  How much money would actually flow into ACC coffers is anyone's guess.

However.  Consider Florida State and Clemson, which some people seem to think have half a foot in either the Big 12 or SEC.  The SEC is out of the question for now and the foreseeable future thanks to the blockading efforts of UF, UGA, and USCe, and the only network in the Big 12 is the Longhorn Network.  Which doesn't send a dime anywhere but Austin, Texas.  Say what you will but when one conference has a conference network and one has nothing but a special arrangement for the most arrogant school in the conference, the appeal of one vs. the other is plain to see.

Plus, as one of the posters in that thread points out, an ACC Network might not match the BTN but is likely to be considerably better than any SEC Network.  An SEC network would never get the premier football matchups, and the SEC, relative to the other power conferences, is a basketball wasteland.  And doesn't play lacrosse.  An SEC network could broadcast baseball and have some success there....but outside of that and Mississippi State/Kentucky football games, wouldn't have a lot of interesting programming.  The ACC network would have ten times the appeal in the winter season, and lacrosse in the spring.

I can't vouch one bit for the past veracity of the Syracuse message board poster that that links to, but the folks there seem to take what he says at face value and the Sabre poster who put it there (which is where I found it) swears the guy's legit.  It has very believable vibes, and I'm nothing if not a sucker for believable people telling me everything will be ok in re: the ACC.  It'll be interesting to see the reaction when (or, I suppose, if) it becomes official.

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A recruiting board update is necessary.

-- Added DE J.J. Jackson to blue.  Not highly recruited at the moment but it seems the UVA coaches are dead serious.

-- Added S Kiy Hester to yellow.  Even within the various strata on the recruiting board there are layers of optimism (Connor Strachan, for example, is more of a bluish-green while Bentley Spain is more of a yellowish-green) and Hester is sort of a reddish-yellow.  Still, taking the time to visit Charlottesville is a notable indicator of interest.

-- Moved CB Christopher Murphy from yellow to red.  Getting too much interest to be higher until he does something like visit UVA.

-- Removed QB Caleb Henderson (UNC) and OT Sam Mustipher (ND) from red.

weekend review

Apologies for there being nothing to read yesterday.  The next two weeks might be a little bit sporadic and spotty as it's more or less crunch time on the road to the old MBA.  In fact at the moment I'm procrastinating on about 20 pages' worth of papers to do this instead.  So it'll be a tad short as well.

Plus, if you're reasonably familiar with stuff I've mentioned in the past, you can probably put two and two together and come up with another reason I wrote nothing yesterday.

Reason #2 why this will be short: nothing happened in the lacrosse game that hasn't happened in the past.  I've got lots of material for an end-of-year post, which will be much sooner than we're accustomed to, that may shed some light on why the wheels came off so badly.  I don't know whether it's a psychological bias on my part or what, but it seems like most of the time, winning generates a lot more analyzable results than losing.  Despite the joke that a really bad team can always find new ways to lose, usually what happens is that the team can't do X, Y, or Z, and as long as they can't, they lose.

By contrast, the baseball team has been finding all sorts of interesting ways to win, including three more this weekend.  All involved the long ball and high-scoring games in some fashion, which itself is kind of a new thing for a program that has tended toward station-to-station offense and shutdown pitching to rack up its victories.  Only about halfway through the season, UVA is only six homers shy of the 25 that they've accrued in each of the past two seasons.  (The year before that, 2010, was the final year for the ping-bats, so the comparisons cease to be valid.)  And this latest series was on the road at Wake Forest, so for this weekend at least, the closer fences at Davenport aren't a factor.

It's usually worthy of a headline when a major leaguer homers twice in a game, and it's awfully rare for a UVA player to do it.  Maybe it happens once or twice a season, if that.  So I call it astonishing that Joe McCarthy did exactly that and it was only the third-most interesting home run story of the weekend.  Reed Gragnani's first UVA career home run is an even bigger deal, if you ask me, and it's still only second.  It's Mike Papi taking home the weekend crown with a two-out, two-strike, ninth-inning grand slam to turn a three-run deficit into a one-run lead.  Exactly like you draw it up in your head when you're ten years old.  Put that game on a bigger stage than just a regular-season series against a low-level conference team and it would rival the RALLY TO OMAHA for drama.

This is UVA and we can't have nice things and when we do we can't enjoy them, so we have to talk a bit about the pitching, which I think is in range of reason to worry.  Of the starting pitchers, only Nick Howard had a good outing.  Brandon Waddell gave up six runs and Brian O'Connor had to use up Whit Mayberry in the first game.  Scott Silverstein and Josh Sborz combined for four innings of horror before the bullpen settled it down long enough for Gragnani's eighth-inning tiebreaker.  With Artie Lewicki still a little ways away from returning and a long ways away from being ready to start (think 2014) and Mayberry probably still not yet ready for six innings either, and Trey Oest coming up shaky against VMI during the week, options are very limited if the rotation collapses.  Sborz is still learning his way around a lineup and Nathan Kirby is not happening right now.

So let's just hope there is no collapse.  It's basically sink or swim with what we got.  The solution, if it comes to needing a solution, is probably to keep the starters the way they are and lean on the pen for some long-run innings, and then have the bats do what they have to do.  BOC may be loath to bring Austin Young, Kyle Crockett, or Mayberry forward to take the ball as a starter, but all three are worth three or four good innings a series.  It's not crazy to prefer those be the 6th, 7th, and 8th, instead of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

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Events of the day necessitate a recruiting board update.

-- Moved K Gary Wunderlich from blue to orange.  That would be the event of the day.  Is it a little crazy using a scholarship on a kicker in one of our most limited years yet?  Not when he might be the best rising senior kicker in the country and multiple family members hold UVA degrees.  That he earned three stars on Rivals says something, because kickers don't usually get stars.

-- Moved ATHs M.J. Stewart and Travon McMillian from yellow to green.  I think UVA has a deal of work to do if they want to reel in either of these guys, but they're at least seriously in the conversation.

-- Removed TE Chris Laye (Auburn) and CB D'Andre Payne (Tennessee) from yellow.

-- Added RB Joe Mixon to red.  Would I bet any money on UVA pulling Mixon away from the other coast?  No.  Especially with like 40 other schools trying to do the same.  But there is at least a flicker, and Mixon is talking about waiting all year, which means if the coaches work hard on it they can give themselves a little staying power.

Yes, it remains a much smaller board than it was at this time last year.  Probably had ten more names on it back then.  I don't exactly expect to see a flood of new offers, either.  Slow and steady is the key here, which is why these updates have only been once every two weeks.  The coaches are probably doing almost as much work on the 2015 class as the 2014 one.

weekend review

Who says February sucks?  Well, I do.  I hate February.  One of its few redeeming qualities is that it's the shortest month, so we get out of the misery quicker and into what is supposed to be spring.  But another redeeming quality is that it's the beginning of the spring sports season and so we get to witness a lot of wins.  Especially if the hoops team is playing well.

Which it so happens they are.  At some point as the Hoos were busy pulling away from Georgia Tech I thought to myself, "man, this would be a blowout if we'd ever hit a damn three pointer."  Not long afterwards, Taylor Barnette dropped in two three-pointers easy as you please and it was a blowout.

I've been beating the drum that UVA's suddenly dynamic offense is not dependent on the three-pointer, and there couldn't have been a better example than this Georgia Tech game.  UVA's game plan took GT's shot-blocking maestro Daniel Miller totally out of the shot-blocking business - in fact, Tech only had one blocked shot all day.  Akil Mitchell was astoundingly wide open underneath the rim; sometimes so much so that Jontel Evans realized it before Mitchell did.  And GT lived in deathly fear of leaving three-point shooters open, allowing Evans a lot of clear and easy lanes to the rim, which he took well full advantage of.

Toss in a few bad-idea defensive switches that left Joe Harris guarded in the post by GT's rail-thin backcourt (their guards are all awfully skinny and Harris's time in the weight room has borne fruit) and UVA just had its way inside the three-point line.  That the Hoos could effect such a blowout while shooting a measly .316 from three (and getting the first 0-fer from Harris in that regard since the Mississippi Valley State game) is one of the biggest reasons to be excited about this team's chances in their remaining games.  And really, they were already up 14 when Barnette popped those two three-buckets, and two more came even after that point.  (Mike Tobey's was the best.  It's not the first he's shot this year, so we knew he could do it, but basketball is the kind of messed-up game where your center comes back from mono and is maddeningly short on all his shots so of course his longest one is nothing but net.)  We've always said "man when Tony Bennett's teams learn to play offense, watch the hell out" and it's starting to come true.

If you want to start giggling like a schoolgirl during a UVA basketball game this year, wait til they have a 20-point-and-widening lead on an ACC team and then say to yourself "and next year we get Malcolm Brogdon and Anthony Gill."

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I didn't get to watch the lacrosse game, so I only have two observations: holding Stony Brook to two second-half goals is impressive work by the defense (not that Stony Brook is a great offensive team, but they ain't VMI either) and second, end-of-quarter goals are going to kill us one day if that trend doesn't stop.  Both Drexel and Stony Brook scored two goals with ten seconds or less left in a quarter.

Other than that, I got nothin'.  Which leaves baseball, where every starting pitcher is apparently trying to one-up the other.  Scott Silverstein rebounded nicely from last Saturday's performance to turn in over six shutout innings, and Whit Mayberry finished his game and his shutout by giving up one hit and four strikeouts in two and two-thirds.

They couldn't touch Brandon Waddell, though.  Holy piss.  Or Holy Toledo, I guess, since that's the official overused har-har-get-it phrase you're supposed to use when the Rockets come to town.  Waddell struck out 15 batters in six innings.  That is to say, only three hitters got themselves out some other way.  Needless to say, Toledo did not score on him either.  It is mentioned that Danny Hultzen was the last UVA pitcher to strike out 15 hitters, and I would love to go to the box score and look to see if that was done in only six innings also, but the website redesigned stripped it of most of its functionality and broke all the links.  So I will check the ECU website, and learn that Hultzen did his work in seven innings.  But Waddell walked a batter and Hultzen didn't.  So.

Anyway, when you're comparing your freshman pitcher with two games under his belt to Danny Hultzen, you might have something special on your hands.  Then again, only one UVA pitcher allowed any runs at all to Toledo, and that was (sigh) Nathan Kirby, who's going to have to get this straightened out.  Actually, the folks at the game are suggesting being straightened out, as in a total lack of movement on his pitches, is why he's being knocked around.  Fortunately, our other pitchers don't seem to be giving up any runs, so there's time to work on this.

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The results of this week's season sim are below:

They are starting to reflect reality now; for example the only two teams in real life with a chance at the ACC's #1 seed are Miami and Duke - and Miami can't fall below #2 - and so the sim is duly aware of this. I've been telling you that UVA is in the driver's seat for third seed, and the sim backs me up, giving us almost a 70% chance at winning it.  What surprised me most is how apparently locked in Maryland is to the 6th seed, with very little hope of moving up and not much more chance than that of moving down.  FSU, Clemson, and Wake are locked in a major struggle for the 7th seed, which earns you the likely right to play Georgia Tech.

Finally, the release of the ACC schedule (do you suppose part of the reason the confernce is supposedly in trouble is because they can't get their shit together in this regard til almost March?) and the announcement of the 2015-17 home-and-home with Boise State made me realize I haven't touched the future schedules page for quite some time.  So I updated that as best as I could without having any kind of a new schedule model in hand.

weekend review

With spring season upon us, I get to have a lot more fun on Mondays with three sports to look back on instead of just one.  Let's start with the one everyone's most pissed off about.  On the face of it, I can't find much reason to be too surprised or disappointed or upset or whatever about losing on the road at North Carolina.  I mean, that's not exactly a bad team.

This being the ACC, though, you don't come away from a loss at Carolina without having something to say about the refereeing.  Which was the usual debacle.  I have three instances on the top of my head of obvious bullshit that went UNC's way:

-- Brice Johnson pulling up his dribble at the free-throw line, landing with both feet, long-jumping past a defender, landing again, and ending with an easy dunk.

-- Joe Harris deflecting a pass, running after it, being clipped at the waist by the guy he deflected it from (I think Strickland) and being called for a foul.

-- McAdoo shoving Akil Mitchell halfway out of bounds while jostling for position and somehow getting Mitchell to be called for the foul.

It wasn't caught on TV, but those at the game - and the radio guys - described Tony Bennett's heated confrontation with a ref during a TV timeout.  Like, actually heated, with voice raised and everything.  I know it's standard to complain about the reffing when playing a team from the state of North Carolina, but Tony thus far has usually limited his expression of distaste for the reffing to subtle body language cues and the occasional glare.  This is a guy who's earned the right to be taken seriously when he's pissed about the officiating.  Although frankly, Coach K is well-known for being just this side of the line between "proactive" and obnoxious in dealing with the referees; it probably wouldn't hurt if Tony moved his zebra interactions a little closer in that direction.

As usual, UNC fans will say that the gap in fouls and free throws - in this case, 11 to 21 and 30 to 11, respectively - is due to superior athleticism and other teams having to hack to keep up.  And as usual, bullshit: Akil Mitchell can match anyone in Heel blue for athleticism.  Also as usual, the pinnacle of irony is when a dissatisfied wail goes up in either Cameron or the Dean Dome when the home fans feel hard done by the refs.

As for the non-ref portions of the game, it was an odd one.  UVA hit 58.5% percent of its shots and 57.1% of three-pointers.  That's pretty awesome.  Scoring 1.17 points per possession wins you most games.  Unless your point guard turns the ball over 6 times and you give up 1.35 PPP on defense.  Both numbers are almost totally foreign to a Bennett-coached UVA team.  If UVA hadn't shot so well I'd hate to see what the score would look like, because UNC wasn't exactly cold from the floor and got a 15-point advantage from the stripe besides.  (Dammit there I go again with the reffing.)

What we're really starting to see is the effect of a thin lineup.  Many times during this game UVA was simply unequipped to play defense against a Carolina team that could not shoot wrong.  No Mike Tobey means no center, and eight minutes out of Darion Atkins isn't what we envisioned either.  (Atkins is clearly a shell of the player he was at the start of the season, so his eight minutes barely count.)  It leaves Evan Nolte to defend players he simply can't defend, especially when our lone actual post player is in foul trouble because the zebras are stupid.  (Dammit there I go again with the reffing.)

Not to fear, however.  Yes, it would've been nice to have that one to help cement a tourney bid.  However, the mainest goal this regular season is to finish no worse than third in the ACC standings and then win a game in the ACC tourney.  Our one-game lead on NC State is really a two-game lead because we beat them for the tiebreaker.  If we have to tiebreak against UNC - over whom we still have a one-game lead - it'll fall to the how-did-you-do-against-#1 rule.  UNC is 0-2 against Miami and has lost to Duke and NC State this year; we'll finish 1-0 against NC State.  That means one of the following must happen for UNC to win the tiebreaker over UVA:

-- Beat Duke and hope we lose to both Duke and Miami.
or
-- Hope NC State falls behind FSU and/or Maryland, then polish off a season sweep against whichever one does (they have two left against FSU and one against Maryland, whom they've already beaten) and hope we don't do the same.

In a nutshell, UNC has to work so that the tiebreaker doesn't drop to how we did against NC State because they've already lost that one.  So things look good.  UVA still has to not screw this up, but the Hoos still sit in the drivers' seat, and ohbytheway can still get in position for 2nd with a win over Duke.

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The baseball team, on the other hand, also went one state south and had a much better time of it.  They're now 3-0 after two wins over East Carolina and one over St. Peter's - the latter game being a surprise bonus after Sunday's game got washed out and St. Peter's had their entire Longwood series cancelled as well.  Only Saturday's ECU game was especially close, and that partly because Nathan Kirby, brought on in relief to put a nice easy end to the contest, got bombed instead.  So he's going to be climbing out of an ERA hole for a little while.

The bats looked nice.  Nice enough that I don't think it's out of line to say we probably won't have too many worries about them this year.  Maybe here and there, but you know, when you start off the year getting two grand salamis in the same game from one player (Kenny Towns, who had no other hits all weekend) you're in good shape.

Saturday was more or less a breeze, thanks to nearly five very good innings from Brandon Waddell.  If Waddell can keep that up all season it'll be huge.  Towns gave the Hoos a 4-0 lead in the top of the first and then helped cement the win as part of an eight-run seventh.  Josh Sborz and David Rosenberger made it an all-freshman day on the mound and combined for 4 1/3 innings of solid ball.

Sunday was the only difficult game.  Scott Silverstein struggled through five innings and gave up four runs; the fifth was really the best.  Then the roof fell on ECU, and good thing too because Kirby allowing five runs in the ninth wouldn't have been conducive to heart rates in Charlottesville if he hadn't been handed a nine-run cushion.  The best part of the day though: a surprise appearance by Whit Mayberry, who ended up with the win.

It'll be interesting to see what Nick Howard does tomorrow against Bill 'n' Mary, because Trey Oest made a strong case for the regular rotation with six shutout innings against St. Peter's this afternoon.  OK, yes, St. Peter's.  But with the rotation as in flux as it's likely to be over the next month, Oest is going to be one to keep an eye on as well.

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Then there's lacrosse, which almost ruined my weekend and needed about eleven seconds of overtime to rescue it.  Oh, what the heck though, I can't be mad at the lacrosse team for doing the same thing they do every year, which is play a close game against Drexel.

The main story is probably the mad-scientist experimentation we got out of Dom Starsia.  Oh, sure, he tinkers with his midfield lines as much as any coach and doesn't always have them perfectly set up by the first game.  And sure, there've been years where we have three faceoff guys, any one of whom might be sent out for the next one.  That was more desperation than experimentation, though.  As expected, Mick Parks took most faceoffs and Tanner Ottenbreit took a couple; as not expected, Tyler German and Ryan Tucker also tried their hand.

And as might have been expected, by and large the faceoffs were a wreck.  During the game I thought to myself "we're not winning any of these, and what's going to happen is I'm going to look at the box score later and be surprised by winning a hell of a lot more than you'd guess."  I think winning half counts as surprising given how bad it looked.  Keeping in mind also that three of the 14 "wins" were Drexel violations, so really our guys won 11.  And the win to start OT wouldn't have been one if Drexel's wing guy, who consistently beat ours to the play, had made the scoop like he should've.  Just as the bats at Davenport announced that we won't have a ton of hitting-related concerns this year, the faceoff guys put up a flashing neon sign that said this is going to be a problem.  Or didn't put up a new sign so much as polish up the old one that's been there every year.

The other glaring problem seems to have been defending the front of the crease.  Dan Marino made 15 saves and looked good doing it, with only one Drexel goal being one I thought he really should've had.  He wouldn't have so many goals blemishing his record if there wasn't constantly a Drexel Dragon showing up unannounced on his front porch and leaving a bag of flaming poop.  It was hard to tell the extent of this problem during the game because the guy operating the live feed was having a grand ol' time switching between camera angles and seemed to especially love the ones that provided no information at all about the play;** the highlights did a better job of showing just how often an opponent was allowed to cut to the front of the net.

As for the tinkering with the offense, really it wasn't limited to just the midfield lines, as we got a look at James Pannell at attack and Matt White got time at both attack and midfield.  And with Mark Cockerton on a 1-game suspension, we haven't seen the last of playing around with the attack.  But man I would be surprised if any particular permutation of midfielders was out there more than three, maybe four possessions tops.  Technically the starting combo was White, Rob Emery, and Chris LaPierre, playing with a knee brace.  Dom also ran like five or six other guys out there in various combinations; there was a fairly surprising amount of Greg Coholan and Pat Harbeson (who played a very solid game aside from his dipshit conduct penalty) plus plenty of Charlie Streep, Ryan Tucker, and a smattering of Matt Florence as well, whom along with Coholan I didn't even mention in the season preview.

If the rules tweaks this season do in fact lead to more transition game as the writers hope, then it will also mean less futzing around with getting your matchups perfect and more emphasis on putting fresh legs out there.  Which means interesting combinations will show up, and not by design.  I like that and I don't.  Transition is fun.  Midfielders who can play two ways, like Tucker, ought to still be relevant, if not highly important.  But I also like the idea of me getting my best guys out there and you getting your best guys out there, all fresh, and let's see who wins.  One thing I'm sure I don't like: long-sticks in transition.  I mean, OK, it's a lot of fun when a long-pole guy races down the field and nobody thinks he's a threat and suddenly he's dropping one past the goalie.  What I don't like is watching two long-poles passing to each other trying to set up an obviously doomed fast break, especially since one by definition has to be a close-in defender and should never be 70 yards from his net.  That's just wasteful.  Like if Mike Tobey got a semi-long rebound and tried to celebrate by dribbling the length of the court.

Numbers I liked from the game: Scott McWilliams and his five caused turnovers, and Nick O'Reilly and his six assists.  This latter number is amazing.  People aren't talking about this enough.  Steele Stanwick had a ton of five-assist games but only one with more than that (he had seven against Vermont last year.)  The last game O'Reilly played in was the championship game against Maryland two years ago, where he had four assists, so in his last two he's got ten.  I think I really like the idea of him quarterbacking the offense.

**Seriously dude they don't give you cinematography Oscars for this.  I know the camera guys at field level like to feel important too but those cameras are for highlights.  Just show the regular whole-field camera so I don't get vertigo trying to find the ball.  And yes I realize that I ought to feel a little bit lucky that I can even watch a game like this or the VMI game when lacrosse on TV was unheard of not that long ago.  And I do.  But I also shelled out $6.95 a month, which gives me both the privilege of watching the game and a license to occasionally criticize.

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I'm going to wait til tomorrow to post up the season sim results, in conjunction with the Miami preview, instead of tonight.  I promise it'll make sense.

charlottesville regional preview

It's basically a known and indisputable fact that the best weekend of March Madness is the first.  That's when they're playing the most basketball.  The same principle applies during the baseball tournament, except it's double-elimination so even more baseball is played.  I can't wait til the Ocho becomes a reality so that the whole thing can be broadcast and I can just take it all in by osmosis.

UVA will host Oklahoma (2 seed), Appalachian State (3 seed), and Army (4 seed) at Davenport Field this weekend, with UVA vs. Army getting things started at 11 AM tomorrow.  (The early start time is because it's gon' rain.)  So you know our opponents, but do you really know them?  You will.

Oklahoma Sooners

Record: 38-22 (13-10 Big 12)
RPI: #28

Lineup:

C: Tanner Toal (.219-1-7)
1B: Evan Mistich (.269-3-32)
2B: Jack Mayfield (.286-3-26)
3B: Garrett Carey (.214-1-23)
SS: Caleb Bushyhead (.254-1-15)
LF: Erik Ross (.295-0-18)
CF: Max White (.356-2-54)
RF: Cody Reine (.268-5-27)
DH: Hunter Lockwood (.250-11-39)

Notes: Lockwood is also a catcher and has played quite a few games there, but the Sooners appear to have settled on Toal behind the plate; Toal has the superior arm.  That leaves Lockwood and Matt Oberste (.311-5-16) to platoon at DH, which is not a great situation for Oklahoma because they're two of the better hitters on the team.

Pitching:

Starters:
LHP Jordan John (8-6, 2.30, 97 Ks)
LHP Dillon Overton (5-3, 3.24, 109 Ks)
RHP Jonathan Gray (8-4, 3.47, 90 Ks)

Bullpen:
LHP Steven Okert (8-7, 2.92, 71 Ks, 4 sv.)
RHP Damien Magnifico (3-1, 3.86, 33 Ks)
RHP Kindle Ladd (0-1, 4.56, 20 Ks)

We meet again.  Probably.  Though Oklahoma has several of the same hitters they brought with them two years ago to the Charlottesville super-regional, this lineup actually bears little resemblance to the one that kept us from reaching Omaha in 2010.  Even though that was the final year for the pingbats (thus making comparisons difficult) the truth is that it's still a much weaker lineup.  Oklahoma has gotten through thus far on the strength of their starting rotation.

It's a very good one.  It has to be; the bullpen is wicked thin.  There are only six pitchers who've thrown more than 20 innings all season, and three of them are their innings-eating starters.  Jordan John will get the start for OU against App. State in the first game, which means that UVA, if we face the Sooners in game 2, will almost certainly bat against Dillon Overton.  Overton is one of those guys like GT's Buck Farmer, who on any given day will either send a parade of hitters shuffling back to the dugout or allow a parade of baserunners to merry-go-round their way around the bases.

More on this later, but OU's relatively weak lineup is a possible reason for Brian O'Connor's surprising (to me) decision to burn Branden Kline in the first game.  Max White is a very, very dangerous three-hole hitter, and Hunter Lockwood's 11 home runs playing in the pitchers' park that OU has - that's very impressive.  Outside of that, though, it's a pedestrian lineup, and OU bats a Duke-esque .269 as a team.

Appalachian State Mountaineers

Record: 39-16 (21-9 SoCon)
RPI: #40

Lineup:

C: Jeremy Dowdy (.271-3-37)
1B: Trey Holmes (.249-6-37)
2B: Hector Crespo (.317-3-23)
3B: Noah Holmes (.229-1-18)
SS: Will Callaway (.330-4-52)
LF: Preston Troutman (.280-0-24)
CF: Tyler Zupcic (.338-2-24)
RF: Tyler Tewell (.375-6-43)
DH: Daniel Kassouf (.345-17-60)

Notes: None

Pitching:

Starters:
RHP Ryan Arrowood (10-0, 4.03, 84 Ks)
RHP Seth Grant (6-3, 3.33, 65 Ks)
LHP Rob Marcello (6-4, 5.19, 45 Ks)

Bullpen:
RHP Nathan Hyatt (1-0, 3.46, 28 Ks, 15 sv.)
RHP Jamie Nunn (5-2, 3.88, 45 Ks)
RHP Tyler Moore (3-2, 5.53, 18 Ks)
RHP David Port (2-1, 5.61, 12 Ks)
LHP Jeffrey Springs (2-0, 4.07, 18 Ks)

The top seed in the Southern Conference tournament, Appy State had a poor showing and was invited to the NCAAs as an at-large.  Probably their ticket was punched way back in February, when they went to Baton Rouge and took a three-game series from LSU by holding the Tigers to just one run in the final two games.

That's the kind of thing that forbids you to take the Mountaineers lightly.  Despite the supposedly weaker competition in the SoCon, I'd take their lineup over OU's any day, not least because I'd get the best hitter in the whole regional: DH Daniel Kassouf.  Certainly his 17 home runs are to be taken seriously.  RF Tyler Tewell is also an outstanding hitter, batting .375.  In all, five of App State's starters made 1st or 2nd team all-conference.

App State also has their conference's pitcher of the year: right-hander Ryan Arrowood.  Arrowood will pitch against Oklahoma in game 1, so if UVA draws the Mountaineers in the second game, the likely moundsman is righty Seth Grant.  Grant has solid numbers, though probably isn't quite the pitcher that OU's Overton is; nevertheless, I'm not sure I wouldn't rather face the Sooners.  When teams beat UVA it's usually not because we can't hit, it's because our pitchers get knocked around.  The Mountaineers could be a worse matchup for us.

Army Black Knights

Record: 41-13 (18-2 PL)
RPI: #112

Lineup:

C: J.T. Watkins (.318-5-31)
1B: Kevin McKague (.389-5-44)
2B: Zach Price (.324-0-24)
3B: Harold Earls (.347-0-22)
SS: Alex Jensen (.259-0-23)
LF: Daniel Cortes (.274-0-23)
CF: Matthew Carter (.250-0-5)
RF: Cody Murtle (.251-4-41)
DH: Mark McCants (.241-2-28)

Notes: McKague is also used occasionally out of the bullpen.

Pitching:

Starters:
RHP Chris Rowley (11-0, 1.97, 76 Ks)
LHP Logan Lee (8-2, 3.28, 60 Ks)
LHP Nick Dignacco (7-2, 3.38, 58 Ks)

Bullpen:
RHP Gunnar Carroll (2-0, 2.45, 40 Ks, 8 sv.)
RHP Alex Robinett (3-1, 2.73, 42 Ks)
RHP Manny Fernandez (4-1, 2.22, 16 Ks)
RHP Andrew Flaherty (3-1, 3.04, 10 Ks)

Everything here comes with the caveat that the Patriot League, as a northern low-major conference, inflates statistics.  That said, those are some eye-popping numbers on Army's ace, Chris Rowley, who'll throw against UVA tomorrow.  (Or today, depending on when you read this.)  Rowley is an efficient ground-ball pitcher; he doesn't walk many batters, and when pitching against Bucknell this year, he threw a seven-inning complete game in 78 minutes and needed only 65 pitches.

That said, all those guys hitting .259 or worse, well, they did that against Patriot League pitching, mostly.  Since it's Kline who got the nod against Army, as long as the dominant version of Kline shows up, they probably won't be able to touch him.  They're a light-hitting team: only 16 dingers all season, and all hit by four players.  Only Kevin McKague has reached double-digit doubles (with 16) and Army as a team slugs only .365.  However, they're very slick with the glove, with one exception: shortstop Alex Jensen has 21 errors.

Fun fact: The Hoos haven't played the USMA since 1913, a 9-3 loss.  So it's time to get revenge for a century-old wound.  Best served cold, etc.  Plus we need to give Jim Reid (Mike London's DC, in case you put football out of your mind) braggin' rights: his son Matt is Army's coach.

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As mentioned, inclement weather in the forecast has moved the games up in the day, and UVA will play at 11 AM.  As the host, we have the option to go first or second, and this is why we go first.  We're much more likely to get our game in.

Now, as for why we're burning up our ace in the first game, against the four seed and contrary to what I consider conventional wisdom?  Possible reasons:

- The possibility that OU and App State won't get their game in til Saturday; therefore, if Kline can eat up a bunch of innings, we'll have a way fresher bullpen than whoever awaits.
- Respect for Chris Rowley; BOC may feel a need to match Army's ace with our ace.
- If we jump on Army early, Kline can be pulled and then used out of the pen as needed later on. (I don't put any stock in this theory, however; it's not likely we'll "jump on" Rowley, and BOC doesn't tend to think in terms of what will happen if the absolute best-case comes to pass.)
- Anticipation that we'll face Oklahoma in game 2, against whom we may not need our ace.

Also a mystery: who starts the second game?  This probably hinges upon the staff's opinion of Scott Silverstein: is he still dependable, or falling apart?  If the former, then they'll go with him; if the latter, they'll try Lewicki and hope to win, which would put Silverstein in a lower-pressure situation.

Our hopes also may hinge on some injury news.  Reed Gragnani may finally be ready to return, giving us some needed flexibility in the lineup.  And the status of Shane Halley, who's morphed from emergency arm to the most dependable guy in the pen, and then missed several weeks, is up in the air.  A deep bullpen is a must in tournament play, and Halley will be badly missed if he can't go.

Because they don't feel like they earned their money if they pick all #1 seeds, a lot of pundits are picking Oklahoma.  There's some logic in that, given OU's formidable starting rotation.  However, this is a regional of flawed teams, and it's also fair to say UVA is the least flawed of the four.  We have a balanced lineup, and pitchers that can shut down any of these teams - if they pitch up to their potential.  UVA will win this regional if that happens.  If not, then Oklahoma will probably claw their way to the supers, one 3-1 game at a time.

long weekend review

So did I mention I was planning to take Memorial Day off?  I don't think I did.  I took Memorial Day off.  So you know.

The long weekend didn't really produce a whole lot of extra news, though.  I wish it had, it would've meant we had a dog in the fight on Memorial Day in Foxboro, but I'll tell ya, we had a little bit of a flawed team this year and it was nice to see a non-powerhouse team win their first title.  And a deserving one, too, it's the first time since we did it in 2006 that the 1 seed won the championship.

Baseball had a good weekend, though.  We'll brush aside the 17-5 assbeating from Georgia Tech - the eventual ACC champs - and focus on the rest.  A 7-0 shutout of Florida State (who can now officially be characterized as "reeling") was the highlight of the weekend on the diamond, and the tourney draw was the highlight off of it.

The fact that it was Scott Silverstein who started the GT game and Artie Lewicki who shut out FSU has pretty much everyone figuring Lewicki is the #2 starter now.  If not in name, at least in practice.  It's really hard anymore to make an argument that's not the case; Silverstein's inability to go deep into a game is troubling and probably the #1 issue heading into the regional.

At such regional, hosted in Charlottesville for the third year in a row, we'll welcome Oklahoma, Appalachian State, and Army.  This is a tournament of familiar names: Oklahoma is the team that knocked us out of our own super-regional two years ago, and the regional across from us is South Carolina, another team to whom we owe a little payback.

That'll be for later, though.  For now, let's step back and marvel a bit.  Remember what we lost coming out of last season:

-- All of our catchers
-- Starting third baseman
-- Entire starting outfield
-- All four starting pitchers

Not to mention that a promising DH/1B candidate (Ryan Levine) left the team, and poor snakebit Reed Gragnani can't stay healthy.  And this is still one of the top 16 teams in the country.  And P.S. - without having a single player make first-team all-ACC and only three - Keith Werman, Branden Kline, and Justin Thompson - making second team.  That's Coach of the Year stuff right there.  The media gave it to Mike Martin of FSU, but it's a crying shame it didn't go to BOC because this year has been his best coaching job maybe since he got here.  Top 16 in the country.  Soak that in.  And next year is when the cavalry arrives: we got Nathan Kirby (and it's really excellent - even flattering in a way - the level of commitment he's shown to UVA), Josh Sborz - there are some big names prepped to enroll in the fall, all of which we'll profile later in June after such time as the baseball team has finished their season.

Right now the tournament is at hand, and UVA got a really good draw.  Oklahoma will be tough, of course, but there aren't many 2 seeds that roll over easy.  South Carolina - the regional across from us - is the 8 seed.  Theoretically the "worst" of the national seeds.  I know - we ought to be aiming to be a super-regional host.  Again: just being a regional host of any kind is one hell of an accomplishment for this year.  There are beatable teams in front of us.  We don't have any margin for error, and as I look out among the regional hosts I see us as maybe one of the most vulnerable regional 1 seeds.  But we also dodged some of the deadlier 2 seeds - thinking along the lines of a Kentucky, Mississippi State, or UCF.  Anyway, full preview coming on Thursday.  Maybe late Thursday, but Thursday.

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-- NATIONAL CHAMPS.  A hearty congratulations to the lady rowers, who defended their national title and ensured UVA brought home a national title of some kind for the third straight year.  The Lady Hoos won the Varsity Eight race - the grand finale, so to speak - to clinch the win in New Jersey.  And by the way, Michigan took second, so that particular sport really is how all national championship contests should go.  We could even switch up the order once in a while, I'd still be happy.

-- Making the rounds on the Googleytubes today is the report that someone's figured out that there are only 11 schools to have made a bowl game, the mens' basketball tournament, and the baseball tournament this season.  The fact I'm even saying this ought to clue you in that UVA is one of 'em.  Texas didn't make the baseball tournament this year, for the first time since 1998, so they're, surprisingly, not.  (And that helps illustrate the razor-thin margin we're on, as well as perhaps ACC baseball superiority - Texas was 30-22, we are 38-17.  Five more losses and you go from hosting a regional to outski.)

Anyway, the 10 other schools.  Some are easy to guess: Florida, Florida State, UNC.  Some are hella surprising: Baylor, Vanderbilt, Purdue, Michigan State, Louisville.  (Missouri and NC State round out the list.)

So yeah: death to ACC detractors, as four of the 11 are ACC schools.  2 Big Ten, 2 SEC, 2 Big 12, 1 Big East - and 4 ACC.  Let it also be noted that only UVA and UNC also made the lacrosse tourney, and if you twist my arm I guess I'll throw in MSU on the same level, for playing in the hockey tournament.  On a related note, I continue to warm up to the idea of inviting Louisville to the ACC if we lose FSU, or end up needing a 16th to balance Notre Dame.

-- Mike Slive has come out against the idea of a plus-one playoff.  This is important.  Mike Slive is the commissioner of the SEC.  The SEC is the conference that just signed an agreement with the Big 12 to play a Rose Bowl-like bowl game, the details of which nobody really knows yet but such lack of details did not stop media know-it-alls from saying HIDE YA WIVES HIDE YA KIDS THEY RAPIN' THE ACC UP IN HERRRRR.  Friggin' Mark Schlabach trolled for hits by tolling the bell for the ACC before it was even reported that FSU was making googly-eyes at the Big 12.  A plus-one - that is, just play the bowls and pick the two best winners - would've essentially meant "whoever wins the Rose Bowl plus whoever wins the SEC-Big 12 thing, y'all two just play another game for the title."  The fact that the SEC is not in favor of that is a bonus for the ACC.  Naturally, the ACC wants conference champions to get invites and the SEC wants to just figure out who the best four teams are, figuring that three of them are likely to be SEC.  The problem is that a four-team playoff only leaves room for four conference champions, so the ACC is kind of stuffed in that case.  Myself, I liked the idea that conference champions would be autobidded if they were in the top six in the BCS standings and in the at-large pool otherwise, but I digress.

The larger point here is that these playoff talks are going to take some very, very unforeseen turns.  We are only getting information a little bit at a time.  Also, conference commissioners are sort of a mini-fraternity, and not likely to gang up on each other in these BCS talks.  The proof is in the fact that the Big East somehow clung to a BCS bowl autobid despite being the only conference without a set-in-stone bowl affiliation and the fact that every fan in the whole world knew what a damn farce it was that they still had that.  But the commissioners were too buddy-buddy to actually kick the Big East out of the money pot.  They still are, so the ACC, despite the funeral marches being played for it, will still have its seat at the table.

It's also worth noting this: the SEC is going to a 6-1-1 scheduling model, which is to say, six divisional games, one cross-division rivalry, and one rotating game.  Which means season ticket holders at, say, Georgia, will get to watch LSU at Sanford Stadium once a decade.  Season ticket holders at, say, Auburn, will get to watch Tennessee at Jordan-Hare once a decade.  Man, fuck this conference expansion crap.