weekend review

Welp.  That's that; another lacrosse season is in the books too early, after a mostly uninspiring performance on Sunday.  It looked so promising to start, with the Hoos giving up faceoff wins but then quickly making Hopkins look like a disjointed JV squad.  And then....

I mean, just... look, I've always considered that rationality is one of my writing strengths, and I know there was like 45+ minutes worth of reasons why we lost, but I just keep on going back to the bad clear that led to Hop's first goal, essentially an empty-netter.  UVA has a reputation as an outstanding clearing team and totally failed to live up to that this year; in some cases they've just completely lost sight of the 30-second time limit, and that's what killed them here.

Matt Barrett was the visible scapegoat because it was his pass that was intercepted, but, feeling compelled to go back to the Tivo for a closer look, I found out exactly how much time he had to clear the ball when he threw that pass: four seconds.  Even if he had channeled Adam Ghitelman and run it there himself, he'd never have made it.  26 seconds had elapsed already thanks mainly to sheer unadulterated laziness, and the real culprit on that clear is Scott McWilliams.  McWilliams floated around the field for nine seconds before tossing the ball (backwards) to Tanner Scales.  Scales returned the ball a few seconds later.... and "half-assed" would be far too generous a term for McWilliams's attempt at catching it.  That's why Barrett had the ball in the first place; he had to retrieve it as it rolled the wrong way.

If some people are saying there's a senior leadership problem on the team, well, that's why.  And this is by no means to pin the loss on McWilliams, whose play these four years has been unequivocally an asset.  You don't lose by six without everyone pitching in.  But there's still the irrational fan in me that wonders how that game might've gone if the Hoos hadn't offered a sportsmanlike hand back to the already punch-drunk Jays.

As a season, it certainly wasn't a total loss.  You expect Virginia lacrosse to accomplish certain things, and beating Syracuse, Hopkins, and UNC (1 outta 2 in the latter instances, anyway) do qualify.  However, after a stretch of four consecutive Final Fours, and missing only two from 2002 to 2011, the natives are rightfully getting restless now that we've missed three in a row.  Folks are talking succession plans.  If Dom Starsia weren't the winningest D-I coach ever, the words being used might be a little more forceful.

As it is, UVA stands in about the same delicate spot that Florida State football did in about 2008 or so.  (And that Penn State managed to botch pretty spectacularly.)  FSU succeeded in dislodging Bobby Bowden after the boosters got antsy and it became clear that 1) they weren't going to get much farther with him and 2) he had no plans to leave.  They had a couple factors helping that process: the academics scandal greased his skids out of town, and they didn't have his son on staff.  FSU is how you want the replacing-a-legend process to go; Penn State is not.  And Tennessee exists as the antithesis of Penn State - the fans managed to get Phil Fulmer replaced and the Vols promptly entered the crapper, from which they have yet to emerge.

I doubt there's any talk of succession in the UVA offices, but it's something that should be quietly going through the heads of the decision makers - not because immediate action is needed, but they still have to be working on a contingency plan.  And that plan can't just be Joe Starsia.  This is too much of a signature program to allow to go stale.  If we're playing for a national title next year - hey, cancel the war.  If we miss out on the quarters again, let alone Memorial Day, well.... it certainly won't stop people wondering how Mike Pressler or Charley Toomey might look on the Klockner sidelines.  Me, I'm nowhere near officially adding my voice to the (still quite small) chorus calling for a change.  I don't want to be Penn State but I definitely don't want to be Tennessee.**  Just considering it something to keep an eye on. 

**A statement made, with that particular emphasis, with consideration only for the on-field aspect of PSU's football succession.

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-- Lots of other UVA teams are still running around scooping up Director's Cup points, though:

* Men's and women's tennis are both in the round of 16, about to face Notre Dame and Baylor, respectively.

* Ladies' golf was top-8 at their regional, earning one of 24 spots at the national championship tournament in Tulsa.

* Women's lax faces 3-seeded UNC in the quarterfinals after knocking off Princeton.

This is to say nothing of crew, which still has an ACC title to earn before heading to nationals.

-- Maryland transfer Seth Allen was really digging on UVA, until he took a trip to Blacksburg and found playing time in abundance.  That Buzz Williams is apparently a hell of a recruiter.  Say what you will but he's definitely injected some talent into a moribund program.  Enough to be a real factor in the ACC race?  No, not yet, but they seem to be working hard at leaving the laughingstock label behind.

Williams probably made the case to Allen that UVA wanted him but VT needed him, which is pretty much exactly how things stood.  Allen would've been a luxury, albeit one that would've helped smooth out the roster makeup.  There are plenty of worthy backcourt options already on the roster, though.  Any addition this offseason who would hit the roster this fall is icing on the icing.

-- The ACC is having its annual junketeering trip serious meeting week on Fancy Tropical Resort Island, Florida, during which they usually produce something worth talking about.  This year it's the fact that they'll stick with an eight-game football schedule and follow the SEC's lead in requiring every team to play at least one OOC Power Five conference team, starting in 2017.  That should make the "schedule for success" crowd happy, by which I mean not happy.**  Cue the calls for an annual rivalry game with Indiana from now til forever.

The eight-game schedule vote was surprisingly close, with an 8-6 tally as the margin in favor of staying at eight games instead of nine.  This is acceptable if they also abolish divisions, as will reportedly be discussed.  (It's also reasonable in light of having Notre Dame sorta-kinda on the schedule all the time.)

It's this last point which should be making all the waves.  The fact that the ACC is even bothering to discuss this is a giant flag, pointing in the direction of the August autonomy conference.  (At which the NCAA is widely expected to hand over various powers to the ACC, SEC, B1G, Big 12, and Pac-12 that they didn't have before.)  John Swofford publically lobbied for more flexibility in scheduling; that is, not having to have two divisions in order to play a CCG.  If the ACC is discussing the abolition of divisions, it's likely they have the advance go-ahead from the NCAA to do so and will get it formally in August.  For this reason, they may not necessarily announce anything coming out of Amelia Island, but there's hope yet.

I've already put forth my preferred scheduling model for a 14-team, 8-game league: three protected games and five rotating ones.  You would play teams A, B, C, D, and E in year one and F, G, H, I, and J in year two.  The pitfall, which UVA would have to lobby heavily to avoid, would be the temptation to make all the NC teams each others' protected games - we have to have UNC every year.

**I can't remember whether I've ever expressly made my feelings known on these pages about the "schedule for success" theory, which I despise as both wimpy and totally unworkable, but I'm sure it's worth a full post somewhere along the line.

weekend review, which is mostly tourney talk

UVA's lacrosse team didn't play any games this weekend, but they won anyway - on Sunday night when the bracket selection was revealed.  Oh, we could've had a better seed by winning some of these close games (or not so close ones) but this is a bracket that shakes out about as good as you could have ever hoped.

Princeton is the opponent, and they're no slouch of a team.  I'd still rather face them than Syracuse, which finally woke up in the Big East tournament and obliterated its opposition.  Princeton struggled to put away Brown and then was totally outclassed by Yale(!).  They're headed in the opposite direction.  And perhaps I'm being too optimistic in thinking of Notre Dame and their nation-best defense as a potential second-round opponent - it may be that I just feel better about our chances of beating a team that hasn't beaten us yet.

But it's the opposite side of the bracket that's loaded.  We could've been handed Colgate, you know.  Instead, the other side of the bracket has the following:

-- Duke playing a red-hot Syracuse.

-- UMass's Will Manny and Colgate's Peter Baum in the same game.  Exciting game for the neutral observer, but you can hear the whining out of Massachusetts from here.**  The effect on UVA is that one of Steele Stanwick's two major challengers to the Tewaaraton crown will be booted in the first round, probably sinking that particular bid.

-- Lehigh and Maryland, two more dangerous contenders, in the first round.

To win the national title, we'd have to eventually play (most likely) either Duke or Hopkins, but not both, and that is a plus.  Loyola is the biggest roadblock on this side.  But if we get that far, we wouldn't have to face them until the Final Four in Foxboro.  You know if you get that far you're playing someone damn good, but I'd much rather take my chances with a team that's never been on that stage before.

Now, if I might be allowed to toot my own horn for a minute.  Actually it's less of a "toot" and more of a blast from the mountaintops.  I don't do it often so deal with it.  If you read yesterday's final lax bracketology, and then compared it to the NCAA's bracket, you might've noticed two things:

1) I was 16 for 16 in picking the teams in the tournament.
2) I was 8 for 8 in picking the first round hosts.

I pretty heftily underrated Hopkins and overrated UMass - I didn't think the committee would let UMass slide all the way to 6th with that RPI.  I did hit three seeds on the nose (although Loyola was way too easy to take any credit for) and called two exact matchups (Loyola caveat again.)  Probably nobody will ever predict all eight games exactly, but 16 for 16 and 8 for 8 is better than last year - and nobody else can make both claims.

This might not be the right year to be boasting of accuracy, as the tourney selections are being widely panned.  One common criticism is that the committee applied different metrics at different times: SOS was used to drop UMass to the 6th seed and to justify Denver's inclusion, while RPI is what put Princeton in.  One example.  My answer: of course they did.  If they just only used one criterion to rank the teams, there wouldn't be a point to having the others, plus everyone would hate that.  It's not like RPI is a perfect top-to-bottom ranking of the teams.

Anyway, the committee's thinking is like this: yes, they used SOS to justify Denver's bid, but only because Denver had a good enough RPI.  (And because they beat Duke.  Beating a seeded team always helps.)  The committee likes those extremes, which is why they couldn't leave out Princeton.  And they didn't exactly leapfrog Denver over a lot of teams in the RPI - their RPI is just one point lower than Fairfield's and Cornell's.  When I'm comparing bubble teams like Denver, Ohio State, Fairfield, etc. one of the first things I do is look for those extremes and, usually, drop teams with extremes on the wrong end (like OSU's low RPI) and keep the ones with extremes on the high end (like Princeton's RPI.)

This is why it doesn't surprise me one bit to see Denver and Princeton over Cornell and Penn State, the two teams most often considered snubbed.  The committee didn't selectively apply criteria because if they had, Ohio State would be in based on SOS as well - theirs is one-ten-thousandth lower than Denver's.  .5848 to .5847.

**Ah, UMass.  They're now fully convinced there's a massive anti-them conspiracy organized by the "lax mafia" (that's the ACC plus Cuse and Hopkins) to keep the upstarts and little guys out of contention wherever possible.  This obviously is how Loyola got the #1 seed.  (Except they're in Maryland, therefore, in on the conspiracy.)  The case goes like this: Hopkins lost to a team the caliber of Navy, and UMass never did, therefore they should be the #2 seed instead.  This is stupid because it presumes that losing to Navy should cancel out wins over Loyola, UVA, and Princeton.

Because, see, the next game UMass plays will be the first against any of the other 15 teams in the tournament.  When it gets down to brass tacks, nobody really cares about one loss if you've proven you can beat tournament-quality teams.  In order to win the tournament, after all, you have to beat at least three and usually four really good, tournament-quality teams.  It's hardly unfair of the committee to want to see you do that before you deserve a real shot at the crown.

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-- Speaking of all that lacrosse, don't forget to also watch the UVA documentary, tomorrow and Wednesday at 6:30 on "this is why I call it" ESPNUVA.  It's got a pretty sweet trailer, too.  The documentary is called "There and Back" so if you're a giant dork like me you automatically want to call it "There and Back Again: A Wahoo's Holiday."

-- Just so nobody thinks I'm glossing over this kind of stuff, here is the article detailing the lawsuit filed by the parents of Yeardley Love against Dom Starsia and the UVA lacrosse coaches, Craig Littlepage, and the state of Virginia.  It's separate from the one that was filed against the actual killer, George Huguely.  Out of respect for the dead I'm not going to editorialize much, but let's just say that Starsia's character and off-the-field coaching abilities have only ever been previously called into question by the uneducated.  The lawsuit claims that Huguely was a star on the team and therefore got special treatment which led to the killing, which would be the first time George Huguely has ever been described as one of the team's stars.

-- Tony Bennett pretty much wrapped up recruiting of transfers and anything more imminent than the 2013 recruiting class by signing shooting guard Taylor Barnette, a (very) late addition to the 2012 class.  As usual I have a great deal to say about this and will say it tomorrow.

-- Alex Anzalone, former recruiting board denizen and also former Ohio State commit, just became the strangest decommitment story ever.  People make jokes about the creepy double entendres of football recruiting, and coaches sometimes don't help with their comments (you should've seen what the OSU coaches said in our local community paper about the recruit they pulled out of the local high school, or more specifically, that recruit's body) but this has got to be the first time an actual child molester has ever been publically involved and identified.  So Anzalone's back on the market because he was unsurprisingly weirded out by a sex offender who drove up from Kentucky to see him and the other 17-year-old recruits.  No, he's not going back on the recruiting board, that ship is good and sailed.

-- David Teel has an excellent take on Old Dominion's conundrum: stay in the CAA or make the jump to I-A football and Conference USA?  My guess is it depends on whether VCU and George Mason stay in the CAA or head to the Atlantic-10 along with Butler.  The effect on UVA is this: it would be incrementally more difficult to recruit the 757 with a third FBS team in the state and it sitting right in the center of the happy hunting ground.  But as long as we don't have any more William & Mary disasters it won't be a thing.  If ODU does make the jump, they'll still want to be more of a recruiting rival of ours - no more practices at their stadium - and my initial thought is we should offer them a road game at their place in exchange for two at ours, play that road game in their first year of I-A ball, and fill their stadium with orange.  This is from the same section of my brain that says we should take our spring ball roadshow next year across the Potomac to DeMatha or Good Counsel, just to cheese off the Terps.

seriously the best weekend review ever

That was awesome and nobody can tell me different.  The best way to respond to an ACC championship by the baseball team is to one-up that sucker the next day and win a national title.  I doubted it could happen even up to the day before the Denver game.  You doubted it could happen.  Don't lie, you did.  19 goals to Duke will do that to you.

There's so much to be said about the fifth national title in UVA lacrosse history that it's hard to know which should come first.  How about we start with Dom Starsia, since his is the evaluation I seem to have screwed up the most?  Contrary to the idea that his career is tailing off, Coach Starsia pulled off what might well be his best season of coaching ever.  He changed up his whole philosophy.  This year he couldn't out-athlete the competition like he likes to do, so he shuffled players around, implemented a zone defense, and he and his crew of assistants got together and figured out how to change the offense from a one-man-at-a-time show to a working machine.  This season I've harped on the unsustainability of having more than half your goals be unassisted; Inside Lacrosse points out that in the four tournament games, 74% of UVA's goals had an assist attached to them.  This is more fun to watch by far, more successful, and ultimately the result of a focus by the coaching staff to make a concerted change in the way the offense attacks the net.  You could brush that off and claim it was forced upon them by the removal of the Brattons from the equation, but you and I both know that not every coach is savvy enough to know he needs to radically switch gears and talented enough to make it work.

And on top of it, Starsia, as evidenced by his interviews and the things the mike caught him saying to his team ("now go shake their hands, they deserve it") is as classy an individual as any that we have coaching here.

So there's one kind of leadership for you.  Then you have the players, especially captain Bray Malphrus, that got their teammates together and demanded accountability.  Malphrus is one of the team's captains, along with John Haldy, Adam Ghitelman, and Steele Stanwick.  Would this team be here without the leadership they brought?  I'd venture to say no.  The season would've ended early, probably in the first round, the team would have an unheard of six losses, and the only narrative would be about how the whole thing fell apart after last year's drama.  The laid-back Haldy is the perfect foil for the fiery and hyper-competitive Malphrus, and the combination was precisely the medicine this team needed after last year's troubles and another heartbreaking loss to nemesis Duke.  Malphrus plans to kick terrorist ass in the military after graduation and I'd say he'll do very, very well in the military environs.  Next year's team will have little trouble filling in the gaps on the field left when these seniors depart (and that's meant as a compliment to the rest of the team, not a knock on the seniors) but they'll need to make a very concerted effort to fill the leadership gaps.

If there's one on-field hole to fill next year, it'll be in net.  It seems like Ghitelman's been in there forever, and he took some real lumps early on from disapproving fans.  But he leaves UVA as the NCAA's third-winningest goalie of all time with 50 victories.  In a way I'm especially happy to see Ghitelman get this trophy because it'd be a shame to be that good for four years and come away empty-handed in the trophy department.

Other things I think:

- Steele Stanwick was held almost completely off the scoresheet, but with 20 points in the previous three games, he's made the Tewaaraton voting awfully interesting.  There's a school of thought that says no Final Four = no Tewaaraton for you, and Stanwick was the only candidate on the field in Baltimore.  That he got there by wildly outplaying the previous prohibitive favorite, Cornell's Rob Pannell, makes it even tougher to vote against him.  The trophy will be awarded Thursday.  If Stanwick doesn't win it won't be a travesty of justice, but if he does it won't be a shock any more.

- Crystal ball time: In February you learn that UVA will make it to the championship game in Baltimore.  (That would've saved a lot of gnashing of teeth in April.)  In that game:

• You'll see zero goals from Rhamel Bratton, Shamel Bratton, Steele Stanwick, or Chris Bocklet, and the only goal scorers at all will be Colin Briggs, Matt White, and Nick O'Reilly,
• UVA will lose the faceoff battle 12-7,
• UVA will also lose the groundballs battle and be outshot,
• Top defender Matt Lovejoy will be out from shoulder surgery,
• UVA will be shut out in the first quarter

And your prediction?  Yes, I think losing 16-4 sounds about right.  Actually winning instead is a real testament to the defense and the efficiency of the offense.

- I didn't hear any major horror stories from people in the overwhelmingly pro-Terp crowd in Baltimore.  John Tillman seems like a stand-up guy and the Maryland team doesn't seem to act too bad.  Admittedly the Terps probably had at least as good a reason for neutral fans to root for them as we did, maybe better.  And it was cool to have an all-ACC final.  Still, it never hurts to have the occasional reminder that Maryland fans can be the shittiest dickbags this earth has ever seen.

- I'll have a whole separate post on 2012 lax in the not-far-off future.  National championships have a way of brightening the future.

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It wasn't too bad a redemption story for the baseball team, either, erasing all memory of that final-week sweep by Carolina by winning the ACC title.  And not the cheap way, either: a 4-0 weekend.  Because of tiebreakers, the Hoos had locked up a spot in the title game against FSU before the Saturday rematch against Carolina, so, as predicted, Danny Hultzen was held back til Sunday and Cody Winiarski pitched against UNC.  And won anyway.

Then UVA picked up a 7-2 victory against FSU in a very decidedly non-UVA fashion: by smacking home runs.  All seven runs came that way.  This caused the FSU Rivals site to go all George Washington on us, mixed in with a little just-a-couple-plays-away Pete Hughes action: their description of the game was, "Three bad pitches."  Seminole starter Hunter Scantling echoed the "two bad pitches" line, except what he actually said was "one bad pitch" instead, which I guess means that when John Barr was hit by a pitch to put him on base ahead of Proscia's jack, that was a good pitch.

Proscia was the tournament MVP, by the way, on account of hitting that home run that would turn out to be a game-winner, and going 7-for-16 on the weekend.  Kenny Swab and Chris Taylor also made the all-tournament team, and Tyler Wilson was left off for reasons I can only assume involve it not being fair that UVA would have so many players on the team.  UNC's Patrick Johnson made it instead, for doing the exact same thing Wilson did (mow down Wake Forest) except without the part where Wilson also burned through Florida State in relief.  In the championship game.  So that makes sense.

So the Hoos get the autobid to the NCAA tournament, I guess, but the #1 seed label means they probably didn't need it.  (Y'know....probably.)  They'll see some familiar faces in the Charlottesville regional: East Carolina, an OOC opponent the last two years; St. John's, which comes to Davenport for regional play for the second year in a row; and Navy, which actually isn't all that familiar but wutever.  You might think that our old buddy Tim Weiser finally did us a solid by giving us the #1 seed, but you'd be wrong: assuming UVA makes it out of its own regional, Weiser handed the Hoos Pac-10 champ UCLA and their rotation of doom (with potential #1 pick Gerrit Cole) as a likely opponent.  THANKS DOOD

The baseball win gives UVA five ACC champeenships for the year, which ties us with Maryland for the season's most with five.  Our five: men's tennis, rowing, baseball, and men's and women's swimming and diving.  This is as good a time as any to brag about Virginia's ACC dominance.  In the years since ACC expansion (so, starting with the 2004-2005 season), here's the rundown of schools and their ACC championships:

1. Virginia - 37
2. FSU - 26
3. Duke - 25
4. UNC - 21
5. Maryland - 16
6. Ga. Tech - 14
7. Va. Tech - 11
8. Clemson - 8
9. NC State - 6
10. Miami - 5
11. Wake Forest - 5
12. Boston College - 1

UVA's 37 championships (in 7 years) break down like so:

• 6 each: Men's swimming & diving; men's tennis; rowing
• 4: Women's swimming & diving
• 3 each: Men's cross country; women's lacrosse
• 2 each: Baseball; men's lacrosse; men's soccer
• 1 each: Men's outdoor track & field; women's soccer; wrestling

Other accomplishments in this distinguished field:

- In each of the last seven years, only one of them saw another ACC school pick up more championships than Virginia.
- That year was 2006-2007, when UVA had three.  That's the lowest total in any of the seven seasons, but every other school has had at least one year of just two or fewer.
- UVA has otherwise picked up at least five in each season.
- UVA's six ACC championships in 2008-2009 and 2007-2008 would be the highest single-season total for any school in the expansion age - nobody else has ever had more than five - but....
- UVA broke that record in 2009-2010 with seven ACC titles.

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Busy week coming up, what with overdue recruiting board updates, and I also can't wait for the customary introduction to our latest basketball recruit, Justin Anderson.  Justin Anderson is the five-star we stole from Maryland, and I'll probably never get tired of using that phrase and may eventually just abbreviate it TFSWSFM because that is just so damn catchy.

But it's even more important that you know this: June 8 is the official Blog Birthday, marking three years of service to the Wahoo community.  That's a week from tomorrow.  Around these parts we celebrate birthdays by giving out presents, not receiving them, and that means the 3rd annual Cavalier of the Year Award.  In the near future, I'll unveil the 12 nominees that I think are most deserving of recognition as the top Virginia athlete of the year.  Over the course of a couple weeks, I'll profile each and tell you why they're on the list, and then you the fans will have the privilege of voting on the winner.  There's no awards ceremony, trophy presentation, or scholarship donation in the name of the winner (yet - the 20th annual award will be a black-tie affair, you just wait and see.)  For now, just a goofy Photoshop.  But the voting is fun.

weekend review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Newsy bits:

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

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

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

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

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

the ryan phase

Next year will be an awfully strange one for the women's basketball team: the first since approximately the Civil War in which Debbie Ryan wasn't somehow involved.  The program is not that old, and when Ryan began her playing career it didn't even exist, but she was its head coach for all but four years of its existence and arrived here even before then.  Debbie Ryan was the program.  Almost literally.

Unfortunately she was the program for probably too long in the eyes of many fans.  Disclaimer before I go further: I don't follow women's basketball, and this post isn't even about women's basketball as you'll eventually see.  I'm sure Joanne Boyle is a wonderful lady, and if she's in the mold of these other coaches Craig Littlepage has hired (O'Connor, Bennett, etc.) then she'll have the fanbase wrapped around her finger in no time.  But she's following a legend, made easier by the undeniable fact that a lot of people felt the legend stuck around for too long.

Now, me, I tend to be a defender of the present coach, in all situations, for much longer than most people.  I thought Dave Leitao should have been given another year.  It took until William & Mary for me to join the Groh Must Go bandwagon, by which time it wasn't so much a bandwagon as a CSX freight train.  Hell, I still think Rich Rodriguez shouldn't have been fired at Michigan, and I liked Wayne Fontes as the Lions' head coach a lot longer than the media did.  I'm a little insane like that, but I don't believe in causing instability unless there's no other choice.  If I were a women's basketball fan, I'd probably have been campaigning for Debbie Ryan to determine the time and terms of her departure; I'm not a follower of the sport, and I still cringed at the vitriol that a lot of people had for her. 

That said, if you have semi-lofty goals for the UVA women's basketball program it was pretty evident she had become largely ineffective as a coach.  UVA's failure to have any success at all in the NCAA tournament - especially an upset loss to 12-seeded Wisconsin-Green Bay in what would be Ryan's final tourney appearance (and this is a sport and tournament where chalk reigns supreme) - was Exhibits A through P.  Having a super-superstar like Monica Wright during that lackluster performance made it worse.  Nobody knows exactly when Ryan hit the downslope, but it had to have been a while ago because in my time as a Virginia fan I've really only ever thought of her as an embattled legend, not simply a legend.  Quite a while ago.

Ryan's not alone; most coaching legends hang on for a little longer than they "should."  "Should" is in quotes because coaching legends do deserve the ability to leave on their terms; it might make sense from a cold-logic standpoint to callously fire a coach when it appears he's not finished with his usefulness, but it's such an awful thing to do that AD's never do it.  It makes me wonder this: Is Dom Starsia getting to that point?  A lot of legends get there.  Bobby Bowden sure as hell did.  Starsia clearly qualifies as a legend: barring a finish that would depress the pants off of every Cavalier lax fan, he should finish this season as the all-time winningest lacrosse coach in Division I history.  Only three more wins to get there.

It seems premature to ask that, and a little bit assholeish.  I've never seen it suggested that Dom should be let go.  In each of the last couple years UVA has found itself on the top of the lacrosse rankings; it didn't translate into a national championship, but still.

Even so: under Starsia, UVA lacrosse had gotten to the point where it could reasonably expect a national championship every four years or so.  In fact, it was almost like clockwork: 1999, 2003, 2006.  2010 would have continued the pattern nicely, but it didn't happen.  The Huguely incident may have had something to do with it, or it may not.  That may be representative of a pattern of undisciplined behavior, or it may not.  But, since the 2006 championship, there've been two seasons now that didn't live up to expectations at all: 2007, and this one, where it'd be a stretch to expect another national title for reasons other than the randomness of a 16-team tournament where the teams are so evenly matched.  It'd be one thing if the defense were the main issue, but the offense is what's been disappointing in the big games.

Really, I should be slapped for this, because I like for numbers to back up what I'm saying, and they don't.  Offense disappointing?  The rest of the country should be so lucky, since UVA tops the nation in scoring average.  We're 8-3 and smack in the middle of the hunt for the national title.  Sometimes in sports, though, you just have to go with how things feel.  Your gut, a hunch, whatever.  Sports is a little bit Bill James and a little bit Malcolm Gladwell and Blink.  And right now in UVA lacrosse, things feel off.  Maybe it's the multiple suspensions, maybe it's the brain-damaged decisions from the UNC game, or maybe the damn losses are affecting my spoiled, entitled head.  It's enough for now to make me wonder if we aren't just now entering the backslide of Dom Starsia's career.

If so, we probably won't really know it for a little while.  Even if I'm right, it doesn't mean it's time for him to go right now.  Own terms and all that, but also, whatever happens in the backslide of Dom Starsia's career isn't necessarily worse than what might happen under a new regime.  And you won't see me demanding Starsia's ouster.  He's done enough to deserve better.  I may, at some point in the future, express hope that he resigns in a timely fashion, but Littlepage shouldn't and won't ever fire the guy.  I may be wrong, and Starsia might just lead his team to a national championship this year and everything will be great again, and wouldn't that teach me a lesson.  When legends get to the end, it just sort of fades off, you're never quite sure exactly when it started, and nothing but new blood can rejuvenate things.  I can't help but suspect that the fade is beginning.

game preview: Mount St. Mary's

Moment of truth. Saturday night, under the Klockner lights, UVA fans and a curious nation get their first look at the men's lacrosse team since....well, since the Robert Morris game actually, because it wasn't even 48 hours thereafter when their world went spinning upside down. The women don't play until Sunday, so this is the first chance for the loyal, the casual, the curious, and the voyeuristic to get a peek into Virginia Lacrosse since the news cycle hit full blast.

The overarching question, obviously, is what kind of mindset the team will be in when the whistle blows. Because the players have been rightly veiled under a shroud of protection and Coach Starsia has rightly spoken very little and said even less (and with one of his charges in jail and his father passing away in the past two weeks, it's not been an easy fortnight) every fan is anxious to see what transpires.

Fortunately, though it's the NCAA tournament, UVA took care of business with a vengeance in the regular season and earned a very pedestrian first-round opponent - and one they've seen before. Mount St. Mary's hosted the Hoos in our second game of the season and their opener; not only that, but the Mount's only other trip to the NCAA tournament ended after one game, also right here in Klockner.

The game back in February was a 15-7 triumph for UVA, and other than a shot total more than twice MSM's, UVA didn't blow the Mountaineers away on the scoring sheet. They simply won the faceoff battle, won the ground ball battle, went a perfect 18-for-18 on clears, and let the scoreboard take care of itself. Starsia also took his foot off the gas in the fourth, emptying the bench and getting backup goalies Fortunato and Eimer some burn as well. Chris Bocklet officially announced his presence as a goal-scoring machine with 4 tallies, and Connor English had a hat trick too.

Any discussion of Mount St. Mary's starts with their standout goalie, T.C. DiBartolo, who leads the entire country in save percentage at .606. The difference between Mount St. Mary's, MAAC champ and Mount St. Mary's, MAAC 6th-place is DiBartolo. They get outshot fairly heavily, especially for a tournament team, and if they had an average goalie with a .540 save percentage, they'd allow more than three extra goals per game.

For scoring, MSM relies heavily on attackman Cody Lehrer, whose 48 goals and .471 shooting percentage outpace anyone on UVA's roster. Lehrer is a sophomore, and that makes him not at all unique in the Mount's lineup: their top seven scorers and entire starting attack and midfield are all freshmen or sophomores. The Mount even has their own version of the Bratton twins - they call them the Schmidts, and not only do they look identical, they score identical. Bryant is a midfielder and Brett plays on the attack, and they each scored 36 points. Big bro Justin is a reserve defenseman who's also played in all 16 games.

Overall, they have an offense to be concerned about. Very accurate shooters. When they have the ball they're dangerous, but they do a poor job of getting the ball. They cause fewer than six turnovers a game, good for just 7th of 9 in their conference, and they're a poor clearing team at just 79%. This makes them a really great matchup for UVA, a good team at taking care of the ball and one of the very best at going to get it - particularly on the ride, where opponents enjoy just a 76% success rate on clears.

The recipe for a win on Saturday, therefore, is the exact same as it was in February. Win the battles on the ground and the goal-scoring will take care of itself. A little overaggressiveness won't hurt anything - in fact, this is the time and the opponent for it. A young team, most of whom will be playing in front of the largest crowd of their lives, under the lights on the biggest stage of their lives. A team not particularly good at the gritty stuff like ground balls or clears. Minus silly penalties - probably the biggest concern of the game - this is the right team to get aggressive against. And this time it's for keeps, so there won't be any lifting off the gas pedal in the later stages. Finally, it's time for some lacrosse.

weekend (p)review

It was a pretty silent weekend, at least at the traditional venues. Because of final exams, activity at Davenport and Klockner was limited to local wildlife. The church bells rang, and the selection committee buzzed with activity, but the weekend produced very little we didn't already know would happen. (Thank God.) So this weekend review is more of a preview of the future.

The lacrosse team can expect more of the same for the next week. We haven't heard a single word out of any of the players, and for that, cheers to the coaches and admin. I don't know how you'd concentrate on finals with all of this going on, let alone with a microphone in the face. The media will be at it anyway, though, and their reactions range from the classy to the moronic.**

As for the tournament bracket itself, well, it's mostly what I expected, except that I managed to get all of two out of eight matchups exactly right, and that's only if you count me hedging my bets on Mount St. Mary's beating Siena. (I did nail the top seven seeds, though - again if you count the alternate prediction in the Ivy championship game.)

I'm surprised as hell about Georgetown being left out, though - I did have 15 of the 16 teams right and only missed Notre Dame - and frankly it's stupid. I imagine the reason Notre Dame is in is because of their marquee win over Duke. But if that's the reason, then there's no excuse for Hopkins, who didn't manage to beat anyone. You have to apply two completely different sets of criteria to leave out Georgetown in favor of both Hopkins and Notre Dame.

But that is them, and this is us. The tournament draw means that barring upsets, UVA will have already played every tournament opponent this season. Rematches tend to favor the loser, but the #1 seed has its privileges: under normal circumstances, there should be nothing preventing a return trip to the Final Four, this time in Baltimore. The MSM game earlier this season was a relatively easy win in which Adam Ghitelman gave way to his backups in the fourth quarter. Get to Baltimore and a likely rematch with Duke or UNC awaits.

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The baseball team's future is plenty bright as well. For starters, they are the lockiest of locks to finish in the RPI's top 8. Thanks to a finishing schedule that includes RPI #29 UNC and #9 Miami, all it should take is one win in the next seven to finish in the RPI top 8; that is the best outlook in the country. RPI isn't the be-all, end-all of tournament seeding - if we don't finish strong enough, Tim Weiser will probably find an excuse to ship us to Guam as a regional 3 seed - but eight is an important number because the top eight national seeds get to host both a regional and a super-regional.

UNC scares nobody this year, and Miami's 18-6 ACC record (tied with UVA at the moment) looks nice, but they haven't played the conference's two other best teams yet. Miami's still tough, though, and I think it can only be a healthy thing to have good competition as the last matchup before the ACC tournament. Said tournament, by the way, takes place Memorial Day weekend - the same as the lacrosse finals - and the NCAA regionals will be announced that Monday, the 31st.

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Circumstances being what they were, it's been a little bit of a while since the last time the recruiting board was updated. This has now been done, and I have:

- Moved OT Kelby Johnson to the orange section. Woot.

- Added CB Dominique Noble and S Kameron Mack to yellow.

That's basically it. May is an evaluation period, which means plenty of offering and not so much committing. Players will get added to the board, and few will come off. June is the month for the latter, as prospects go to camps at the different schools and a lot of them end up committing then and there.

**I debated linking this tripe at all, but I figured it needed a rebuttal. The basic point of it is that, according to the author, UVA should shut down the men's lacrosse team and......well, that's it, really. Just shut 'er down. No suggestions on what the university ought to do after that. I tried to find any and couldn't. The University, according to the author, "should" do the following:

- "Shut Down Lacrosse Program."
- "[cancel] the rest of the team's campaign, immediately, and at least [suspend] the coach"
- "[pull] their team from consideration by the tournament selection committee."
- "stop everything until it understands what role its oversight, or lack thereof, may have played in allowing the apparent unraveling of one of its students."

It doesn't say what should come after. Starsia should be suspended, apparently, until this whole murder thing is "all sorted out," as if that's some kind of a milestone to be reached. No helpful solutions like, I dunno, alcohol counseling, improved reporting of run-ins with the law, random drug testing, curfews, heavier punishments for alcohol-related incidents, or anything at all. Just shut down the team - that is literally the only point made in the entire article outside of "Duke did it" and "George Huguely had a record." It's a plan that sounds like it was concocted by underpants gnomes:

1. SHUT DOWN TEAM
2. ???
3. ALL SORTED OUT!

Any moron can tut-tut about "the culture of lacrosse" or "the lack of oversight," but do you know who has been the only person so far to offer anything even resembling a concrete plan of action? No, not an ink-stained asshole like Kevin Blackistone - John Casteen. And the moment he proposed his fairly simple idea, the reaction was "gee, that's tough, I dunno, maybe not a good idea, it's complicated." So I guess you see why writers don't bother. Too complicated. Just shutting down the season - that's a lot easier to justify before a deadline.

Besides that, it's pretty obvious Blackistone didn't think for one minute about the ramifications of such a decision. He calls the lacrosse team "a team ready to spin out of control." (Huguely is also referred to as "out of control," which has a really nice parallelist way of making it sound like the whole team is about to commence a killing spree. Nice, Blackistone.) Even though that's the dumbest thing ever, let's play make-believe and pretend it's true: imagine a lacrosse team teetering on the brink of total meltdown. They've just learned about the death of a close friend, and that another close friend is responsible, so between all the drugs, alcohol, the pressure of finals, and the murder, they're pretty much an emotional disaster at this point, if they even have any emotion left and haven't been reduced to cold alcoholic zombies, what with all the boozing and vandalism they apparently do. Pretend that Blackistone's imagination is borne out in reality.

Now take away their adult supervision indefinitely and the last reason they had to keep up even the pretense of sobriety.

Wow. Maybe you should have thought about that one a little bit, Mr. Pretentious Writer Man.

I'd like to think that rather than being a target for gratuitous potshots, both lacrosse teams - and especially the women - should be a sentimental favorite in the upcoming tournaments. It's one thing to suggest the team should stop playing out of respect for Yeardley Love or because they just might not want to play; it's another entirely to demand it because you think the actions of one of the players means they're all a bunch of out-of-control monsters.

series preview: Virginia Tech

Consider this Installment #1 of Revenge Weekend. Last year, the VT series was the last one before the ACC tournament, and despite not having a spot in it, Tech beat UVA in the series - though it's only fair to note that Danny Hultzen got a weekend off from starting duties and didn't make an appearance on the mound until the third game, in relief of Robert Morey.

This year, Tech has a relevant baseball team that's looking to make the NCAA tournament, let alone their first ACC one. Relevant - but mightily inconsistent. They have their ways of surprising people, none bigger than their series wins over FSU and Miami. They also have their ways of delivering some major clunkers. Getting swept by Clemson put a damper on their record, and while it's not inconceivable you could lose a game to the ACC's worst teams(Maryland and Wake Forest) getting shut out by their awful pitching is not a prideful accomplishment. Neither is losing to Bryant.

Mostly, Tech's pitching is respectable but not scary. We'll probably see Justin Wright, and maybe Mathew Price if they want to give their catcher some exercise (one wild pitch every two and a half innings) but Jesse Hahn is the guy they'll likely send out to duel with Hultzen. Besides Hahn, the other pitcher to watch out for is Ben Rowen, one of the top closers in the country.

Their hitting is largely the strength of the team, although it's been known to totally disappear from various games. Austin Wates and Tim Smalling are batting .400+, and Tech overall is well in the upper echelons of power-hitting teams in the ACC. Steve Domecus leads the way there with nine home runs and a .655 slugging percentage. Tech doesn't walk much compared to the rest of the conference, which you'd expect from a power-hitting team, but they also don't strike out much compared to the rest of the conference either.

One thing Tech has a major shortage of is left-handed pitching arms. Wright is a lefty, and so is Joe Mantiply, and then there's seldom-used spot lefty Sean McDermott....and that's it. I would bet we'll face Mantiply on Sunday instead of Price for this reason, because UVA can throw more lefty hitters at a pitcher than your average team.

Maybe it's a good thing that the team laid such an egg yesterday at VMI, just to get that little memento mori out of the way before this series. Despite Tech's sudden resurgence in the rankings, our baseball team is still better than theirs, only I don't want to make any predictions because last time I said HEY WE KIN SWEEP 'EM, we didn't. Better than theirs, yes; so much better that we can sleepwalk through the series, no.

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Couple quickies:

- Billy Baron signed his LOI yesterday, so now UVA can finally acknowledge that he exists.

- Dom Starsia gets a little testy.

- Mike London ganked another Richmond recruit: DreQuan Hoskey, who'll run track as well as play football. It's still up in the air who exactly is going to pay for his UVA education, but right now it seems likely enough that he'll count against the limit of 85 for football....maybe.

weekend review: championship edition

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

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

SWIMMING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BASKETBALL

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

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

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

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

LACROSSE

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

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

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

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

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

BASEBALL

Think this says it all, no?

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

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

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

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

weekend review, spring edition

Once again, we'll take a spin around some of the non-revenue sports and football recruiting. This seems like a pretty good format for Mondays and I think I'll keep it up, at least until the spring seasons wind down.

Starting with....

Swimming

The girls are ACC champs, and it wasn't even, like, close. They scored 848 points - almost 250 more than second place. To recap some of the domination:

- There are five relay events - we won all of them, which earns you 200 points.

- There are thirteen individual events, not including the diving, which we're a little weak at. With eight swimmers in each championship heat (and a further eight in the consolation heat, which still earns points) there are 104 possible slots. In a conference of 11 teams (no Wake Forest here) evenly distributing those spots would give each team 9.5 qualifying swimmers total. We had 39 of 104.

- Finishing last in the championship heat earns you 11 points. If you give us our 200 relay points, and give all 39 of our spots last place (impossible, because we had more than one swimmer in all events) that would give us enough points to win the meet by about 30 points.

- Of the eight swimmers in the 200 IM championship heat, six were 'Hoos, earning us 89 of a possible 118 points in that heat. P.S. - Only one, Megan Evo, was a senior. Four were underclassmen - three sophomores and a freshman.

- Of the 18 event records that existed before the championships, we broke 10.

The NCAA championships are about a month away.

Lacrosse

No surprises here - the team is 3-0 after a pretty dominating performance against SUNY-Cupcake (er, Stony Brook) on Saturday. About the only complaint so far this season is letting the opponents into the game in the second half - our opponents have scored twice as much (14 goals against 7) in the second half as the first, and Dom Starsia pretty explicitly called out the second-half execution after the Bryant game. Otherwise, the results have been pretty much what you'd expect when the #2 team in the land takes on a trio of cannon fodder.

As for last season's glaring concern - faceoffs - the Stony Brook game looked pretty good, but there are zero conclusions to be drawn here, since the 19-of-32 faceoff performance was exactly the same as last year. I'll wait til Syracuse to see if we really are any better at that. In the two games against the 'Cuse last year we won only one-third of the faceoffs, which is awful, and yet we went 1-1 against them and broke even on goal differential. Just break even on faceoffs and the sky's the limit.

Baseball

Yup, it's that season too. Baseball was one of my favorite things to go see in my student days because the "security" never cared to ask why we were wearing jackets in the 70-degree weather. (Jackets have pockets, pockets hold beer. If you went to college and didn't blow off class on one of the first beautiful warm spring afternoons of the year, smuggle a six-pack into Davenport Field and enjoy a ballgame and beer while sitting on the grass, you didn't go to college.)

Anyway, the season started exactly the same as it did last year: a dominating four-game sweep of a ridiculously overmatched Patriot League opponent; in this case, Bucknell. Which, like, great, but honestly in my limited looks at the baseball season this year I don't see any evidence we can expect anything more than last year's results: a middling ACC finish and a first-round exit from the NCAA regionals. I suppose I shouldn't complain. Simply making the NCAA tournament is more than some of our higher profile sports can claim.

Basketball

Not much to say here right now except that if you haven't already, you should go read Jerry Ratcliffe's article on this season's forgotten man, Mamadi Diane. A healthy Mo this season would have saved us a lot of embarrassment; unfortunately for all involved, it wasn't to be.

A little bit of something on the recruiting front here, too. We're in good shape to land PG Eric Atkins out of Maryland for the class of 2010, and soon. Atkins and Mychal Parker would make a pretty good first half of the recruiting class, no?

Football

As promised, an update to the recruiting board.

- Moved RB Kevin Parks to orange. 43 touchdowns FTW.

- Added WR E.J. Scott, TE Blake Barker, OT Robbie Havenstein, and S Dontae Johnson to the yellow section. For the most part these are Junior Day attendees, either the one we just had two weeks ago or the one coming up this Saturday the 28th.

- Added DE Henry Anderson to the red section. (Offer.) Also added to red: RB Khalek Shepherd (Junior Day invitee) and LB Nick Forbes (Offer, though given the nationwide interest it's unlikely he'll ever leave the red section. We've got better chances with Khairi Fortt and Aramide Olaniyan.)

- Added a few schools to a few prospects' lists, most notably Auburn to Olaniyan's. This is interesting because Auburn's recruiting footprint doesn't really overlap ours much. If Auburn is wandering up to the Blue Ridge foothills to recruit Olaniyan, this sounds like a prospect I very much want to see committed to UVA.