stupidball

Dom Starsia's formula for success has never really been a secret.  Recruit the most athletic players he can find, emphasize hard work and effort, and give them copious freedom to operate.  When it works, it's dynamic and entertaining.

Alas for Starsia's less-talented squads, "play smart" isn't a top priority.

This has been eminently on display the past couple weeks.  UVA had three times as many turnovers as goals against UNC, and over twice as many against Duke.  When we got a peek into the timeout huddle during the Duke game, I thought Dom might suggest, just once, that a handy trick for winning the game might be to observe the fundamentals of passing and catching.  He didn't.  He did exhort his team to have an extended possession, which might have been a roundabout way of doing so.  They must've decided 30 seconds was extended enough, because about that much game time later Duke was merrily clearing the ball and finding a nice easy path to the goal.

Observing the fundamentals of passing and catching has been awfully damn elusive of late.  Simply put, this is some horsecrap sloppy-ass lacrosse they're playing.  I'd like to blame it on youth, but there was Owen Van Arsdale lazily reaching toward a lazy pass, and missing.  There was Tyler German with a laser focus on reaching the corner of the box to complete a clear and no plan at all upon arriving, coughing up the ball as a result.  There was Ryan Tucker dodging his way straight into a double-team and freezing, paralyzed with indecision at the gall of the defenders to be defending.

Of course this team went 0-4 in the ACC; it's unrealistic to expect any wins when the offense, supposedly the highly efficient hallmark of this team, keeps shooting itself in the head.  I could deal with it if opposing defenses were taking the ball, or their goalie was putting up a stone wall, but what's really frustrating to watch is when two former weaknesses stop being weaknesses, and the strength of the team suddenly turns into brainless mush.

This team will still make the tournament and will probably host a game.  For all its irritating foibles, it's still one of the top eight teams in the country.  That's pretty amazing after losing to the whole ACC in ugly fashion, but it's taken really good teams to expose UVA's flaws enough to beat them.  I mean, at least we're not Hopkins, which just needed two overtimes to beat 3-8 Penn State.  The angst here is rooted in not being much of a national title contender.  At least if we're gonna be angsty about lacrosse, it's the right kind of emo.

Notes and stuff:

-- Matt Barrett, man.  UVA just wasted two of the best performances by a UVA goalie in I don't even know how long.  Very often in lacrosse, good goalie play is indistinguishable from bad goalie play until after the fact.  It's not like hockey where a bad goal sticks out like a sore thumb; you just sort of start coming to the realization that your goalie has let in too many shots.  If that realization doesn't happen, you've been getting good goalie play.  That's what Adam Ghitelman was like.  That's not what Matt Barrett has been like; he's made stops goalies have no business making.  My personal favorite was having his pass intercepted from a foot and a half away - very bad - then making the save from the same distance - even better.

-- Remember how Matt White kept playing midfield when he should've been playing attack and everyone was all "WHY??" It's almost like having Greg Coholan at attack is balancing that out.  The only difference is everyone knows why Coholan is playing attack.  (No Pannell.)  Frankly, though, it's a shame the depth at attack is such that it's preferable to cannibalize the midfield.

-- Stupidball, by the way, has not been limited to these last two games.  UVA won the Hopkins game despite taking multiple pages out of the Mike London Textbook of Personnel Management.  This included but was not limited to a player entirely forgetting that he was supposed to be on the field and wasting most of an EMO as a result.  I bring this old news up to illustrate what a season-long struggle this has been.  And the announcers, by the way, made a habit of pointing out a number of bad substitutions on UVA's part against Duke.

-- At least UVA gets a moral victory by not pulling off the Duke game's worst moment.  No, that was Duke's befuddling clear attempt in the second quarter, forgetting entirely about the 30-second clock.  It was a hell of a lot of fun to watch Duke piddle the whole time limit away for absolutely no reason, spoiled only by the announcers completely ignoring it and carrying on their talk-show conversation about something totally unrelated.  You want to know why people don't watch lacrosse as much as you'd like?  It's because when little-used rules come into play, the announcers are too busy blathering to explain the odd situation on the field.

-- I said it as part of bracketology yesterday, but it bears repeating: Beat Georgetown and a tourney home game is a lock.

weekend review

OK, I guess it's safe to panic and run around screaming now.  If the coaches and players are willing to admit publicly that the hitting is a concern, then I'm pretty sure the Fan Constitution allows us to go completely apeshit.  I'm sure that's in there somewhere.  Let's commence.

Or maybe there's a corollary that says when you're the #1 team in the country, you don't get to complain.  I like that better, in fact.  But it's still likely going to be necessary to color our perceptions for a while; in fact, I believe I got a head start on that in predicting a 2-1 series win over UNC instead of a sweep, though I did think Sunday would be much less of an issue.

Brian O'Connor bemoaned lost opportunities on Sunday, such as failing to score with runners at the corners in the first inning.  Without a healthy dose of moxie from Josh Sborz, he might've been doing the same on Saturday; you probably lose 19 out of 20 games where you get outhit 10-3.  Sborz wasn't stingy in giving out hits, as every Tar Heel in the lineup got one off him.  But you talk about scattering hits, and Sborz laid them out almost perfectly so as to escape nearly unscathed..... and then Connor Jones and Nick Howard slammed the door.

It goes to show the value of a good bullpen.  That's something that fans never think about until it blows enough leads.  Well, consider it thought.  Sborz did a nice job wiggling out of his jams, but life is much easier when you don't create any in the first place.  Combine all this with Friday's performance from Nathan Kirby, who outdueled UNC's Trent Thornton by fanning 12 hitters and, most importantly and unlike Thornton, not giving up any home runs ... and you have another virtuoso weekend from the moundsmen.

Perhaps one of these days the batsmen will follow suit.  The Hoos won two games mainly on the strength of two mistake pitches from the Carolina starters; a flat Thornton fastball that ended up who knows where and a hanging curve from Moss that snuck over the fence in just about the same place.  The fun part, though, is this: UVA is the near-consensus #1 team in the country and the #120 team in batting average.  Who's going to stop UVA if the pitching stays just as good and the bats fire up?

More baseball in brief:

-- Notre Dame did UVA a big favor yesterday by beating Miami.  If it happens again I'd be awfully surprised, but for now the best Miami can do is keep the tie.  It gets harder for the Canes next week as they visit Clemson, but UVA has Florida State so it's not like it's any easier for us.

-- The reason UVA is only near-consensus as #1 is because Collegiate Baseball is of the strange opinion that Cal Poly's sweep of Cal State-Fullerton (that's "18-16 Cal State-Fullerton" to you) is more impressive than whatever UVA did.  Their previous #1, Louisiana-Lafayette, didn't sweep whatever Sun Belt cupcake they had this week, so they fell to 3rd and UVA stayed at 2nd.  Everyone else puts the Hoos up top.

-- Derek Fisher is back!  That's excellent because he was hitting .333 before he went down.  The guy who moved into the lineup on the regular when that happened, stayed in - that'd be John LaPrise, since he's also hitting over .300.

-- Florida State next week - by far the biggest three games of the remaining regular season.

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-- I opted to watch baseball over lacrosse on Saturday; they were at the same time, which is always a conundrum, and I figured I'd better get my chance to watch a halfway decent production of baseball for once.  The box score says everything I probably would've said anyway, though.  Namely, Ryan Lukacovic still should not be losing minutes to Owen Van Arsdale (1 goal, 1 assist, 1 turnover against goose eggs, 2 TOs, and a penalty... hm.)  I'm not gonna lie, when the program announced the hiring of Dom's son as an assistant coach, "Mike Groh" was one of the initial thoughts that popped into my head.  Now, Marc Van Arsdale has been a productive offensive coordinator in his time, and OVA has 24 assists so he's definitely had his moments too... but will Dad have the stones to bench his son if he continues to be outplayed?

-- I'm getting awfully fed up with Cavaliers Live.  I'm not the only one.  This was a much better production two, three years ago.  I'm not really jonesing for HD coverage, because I'm mindful that simply being able to watch UVA baseball (and lax, and soccer, and stuff) is a major upgrade from the inaccessibility of past years.  Give it time.  But I'm also mindful that I'm paying far more than I am for any cable channel and getting the most amateurish production imaginable. 

The scorebug looks like it was created by the freshman TV class at the local high school, has less than the bare minimum of useful info, and is sometimes not updated for a full inning, leaving the impression that the visitors are batting in the bottom half.  You've got the patented Earthquake-o-Vision from the third-base camera - surely it can be set up anywhere else, because I assume what's happening is that fans are moving around and rattling the stand.  Cutting from the side view to the plate view in the middle of the pitch is incredibly disconcerting and would probably get a producer fired at a real cable station.  (According to the explanation from the VSTV folks, we can't have a center field view because the coaches don't want the signs broadcasted, and therefore at risk of being stolen.  Fine.  You still can't see them from behind the plate, and you can still have the guy hitting the button for the switch learn when pitchers are ready to throw, and not wait for the middle of the windup.)

Then of course we have the cardinal sin: chopping off the end of games.  It happened during the Loyola game in lacrosse; I suspect because the feed was coming in slower than live, so that when the game ended, fans were watching the middle of the fourth quarter but the production people just shut off the feed and went home.  This weekend the feed just cut off before the end of the game.  If those were the only two times I'd be surprised, but they're the two I remember.  The first time, they promised that, "The error will be corrected to ensure the Cavaliers Live viewing experience meets our production expectations for future webcasts."  Uh-huh.

There's one more home baseball series, after which that subscription is coming to a merciful end.  Whether I re-subscribe next year depends on the work they put in during the offseason to unfuck the presentation.

-- There are new uniforms in the world of ACC football.  Florida State's are fine, more or less, but Syracuse's are A) godawful, B) largely a copy of Boise State's, right down to the unnecessary Trendy Gray**, and C) living proof that college football players would "get hype" about playing in a pink tutu if it was brand new and you presented it with enough I'M-A-WARRIOR flair.  Make sure the CG models hold their arms out like their lats are the size of elephants.

**The gray is funny because Syracuse fans already got up in arms over Trendy Gray basketball jerseys a couple years back - remarkably, they didn't really like having their team look just like the one they considered their biggest Big East rival.  Georgetown's school colors are gray and blue.  Let's hope Trendy Maroon is never a thing.

-- It was announced today that UVA will play a basketball home-and-home with George Washington, which is just exactly the kind of team we should be scheduling home-and-home.  You can play 28 games, so, ACC teams get 10 non-conference ones, and a tournament of up to four can count as one.  In my ideal world no more than six of these 10 would be cupcakes.  The other four would be the yearly tournament, the B1G Challenge, and two teams from conferences like the SEC, A-10, Big East, etc.

whats the matter?

For weeks now I've been making all sorts of promises about writing a lacrosse season review, so here's the time to make good on that.  We'll see if we can't unearth the secrets behind a losing, NCAA-tournament-less lacrosse season, the first in nearly ten years.

OFFENSE

-- Stick skills.  This was about the second or third thing that jumped out at me, but in retrospect, probably the actual most important.  When I can, I watch Michigan games too - the Michigan team that's gone 2-26 in its first two years of existence - and the thing that always strikes me hardest in the contrast between Michigan and UVA (and the teams of a caliber that UVA's accustomed to playing) is their stick skills.  Michigan's just aren't that good; they're often throwing balls off-target or failing to catch the good ones.  It's amazing how much harder it is to play lacrosse when passes are that much less automatic.

This year the contrast was a lot less, and Michigan's didn't get better (much).  Simply put, the offense turned the ball over far too much, without any help from the defense.  Consider the stats: UVA had 62 fewer turnovers than its opposition, but 55 more caused turnovers - which if you juggle the numbers the right way, means UVA had almost as many unforced turnovers as their opponents.  That would be fine if every opponent were a Cornell or a UNC, but there are cupcakes on the schedule too.  If UVA played its top opponents even in the unforced turnover department, the cupcakes should create the margin.  There was no margin - which means far too many unforced turnovers against teams equipped to take advantage.

Two games stick out: both OSU and UNC (the first game) committed just 1 unforced turnover apiece.  Even in games where the opponent had more than we did, we never looked quite that good.  And even against VMI we had 8.  This was part of the reason the offense sputtered.

-- Lack of midfield athleticism.  This was reason number two.  It was a rare sight this year to see anyone beat his defender off the dribble, as it were.  Shamel Bratton used to do this all the time.  In retrospect, guys like Colin Briggs and Brian Carroll could do it too.  Ryan Tucker and Rob Emery disappointed in this regard.  It limited goal-scoring chances mostly to playmaking from the X or fast breaks; generally, a midfielder was only ever able to create when he could catch his defender running at him.

Owen Van Arsdale tends to be sort of a duly appointed scapegoat for the athleticism thing, and it's true he's not the world's most athletic guy, but he's only one of several.  And OVA had the second-most assists on the team after Nick O'Reilly, so it might be said that Dom knows what he's doing by having OVA out there.  Offense came from the attack feeding the mids, but rarely the other way round, and the lack of balance hurt.

-- Poor shooting decisions.  I got awfully frustrated at times when an opposing goalie would prove he could consistently stop a particular type of shot and we just kept on lobbing the same ones in there.  Games that stand out in my memory in this regard: Drexel, Vermont, Ohio State, Bellarmine.  Others, too, I'm sure, but that's what comes to mind.  Typically it was stick-side high - goalies like it when they don't have to move their stick much, and high-to-high stick side is going to get saved eight times out of ten - but in the case of Bellarmine, our attackers often found themselves on the doorstep and tried to toss it lazily into the net as if there wasn't anything in between, and the Bellarmine goalie kept saving them.  Duh.  It bugged me because our radio guys were gushing about the guy's skills (in fairness, he had a damn .662 save percentage this year, which is nasty good) but I wanted to go YES I KNOW IT'S EASY TO LOOK LIKE AN ALL-STAR WHEN THE SHOTS ARE THREE MILES AN HOUR.

I don't know whether the following is a symptom or a cause of the poor season, but UVA's opponents had both a better shooting percentage and SOG percentage than we did.  If you guessed that 2004 was the last time that happened, give yourself a Fig Newton.  Those numbers ended up at .264 and .565, respectively, both of which are the lowest since, yes, 2004, except for the .565, which is the lowest in God only knows how long.

Part of this admittedly may be attributed to the new stall rules, which have encouraged teams to avoid stalling, but I noticed our opponents got more accurate, not less, between last year and this.

DEFENSE

-- Goaltending.  I mean, it's hard to leave this out when the stats look so bad.  Dan Marino gave way to Rhody Heller midyear; Marino had a .455 save percentage on the season, Heller .482.  Both are awful numbers.  Marino's injury troubles in the fall might've carried over in his play to the spring.  Austin Geisler, who transferred to High Point and played there this spring, had a .512 save percentage for the Panthers; given the somewhat (not hugely, but somewhat) easier schedule they play, it's hard to tell whether he would've made a difference, but it would've been cool to find out.  You can bet the competition will be reopened in the fall, with incoming freshman Matt Barrett being given as good a shot as any.

The silver lining: Adam Ghitelman had a .497 percentage his freshman year, so Heller - though a redshirt freshman rather than a true one - isn't that far behind that number.

-- End of quarters. Oh gawd.  Talk about frustrating.  UVA played 15 games - therefore 60 quarters - and in 15 of those quarters, the opponent scored with fewer than 20 seconds left.  So on average of once a game, UVA allowed an end-of-quarter goal. 

Then, if we make the safe assumption that it's a coin flip as to whether the good guys or the bad guys have the ball at the end of the quarter, that means were 30 quarters when we were defending, which in turn means the defense allowed a goal half the time.  More than half, if we take into account that nine games were basically out of reach one way or the other by the 30-second mark of the fourth (thus, nine of 60 quarters don't count since killing clock was the concern rather than feverishly trying to score.)

Not to mention that six of these end-of-quarter goals came after UVA had already scored a goal with less than a minute to go.

The Ohio State game was especially egregious.  In the first three quarters, OSU scored with one second left, twelve seconds left, and three seconds left.  This, one week after Cornell had scored the game-winner with 13 seconds to go in the fourth - 26 seconds after UVA had tied it up.  Lesson: not learned.  And Drexel forced overtime (in which UVA fortunately won) with a ten-seconds-left goal in regulation after an eight-seconds-left one before halftime.

Goaltending is partly to blame.  In theory, you ought to be playing it pretty safe at the end of a quarter, so any shots are long ones and should be stoppable.  That happened sometimes.  In reality, the defense did an awful job of playing patient and tended to break down as the attackers got frenetic in trying to score.

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You'll notice two things that aren't on this list: faceoffs and injuries.  I'm not sure that .527 is a real accurate assessment of how actually good our faceoff men were, but them's the stats, and I don't think that's where the season's problems really were.  Also, not having Chris LaPierre wasn't the issue.  Shocker might've helped in the midfield-athleticism department, but he's awfully unpolished on offense and probably wouldn't be a major playmaker except to maybe set up some of his own stuff.

Anyway, LaPierre's main strength is as an X-factor when two teams are equal.  He can tilt the balance in your direction, but he's probably not going to solve your problems if you're facing a talent deficit.  Neither can we say that not having top freshman Will McNamara would've helped, because we just don't know.  Ask again next year.

Obviously, not everything was a disaster.  I think Nick O'Reilly could have 50-some assists if he could rely more on his midfielders to be open for shots.  Mark Cockerton isn't notably big, but he plays strong.  Very strong.  Wasn't uncommon to see him bull his way around a defender to score the goal.  And Tanner Scales won the ACC Freshman of the Year award; Scales looked really good on defense and combined with Scott McWilliams to be a turnover-causing terror on the back end.  It's a fitting award, since he inherited Steele Stanwick's #6 - who was the last UVA player to win the award.  The last UVA non-offensive player to win was goalie Tillman Johnson.  Having no way of remembering what number Johnson wore, I looked it up, hoping against hope it was 6.  It was, but upside-down.  Close enough.

So I think there's every reason to believe UVA gets back to the tournament next year; most of these problems aren't chronic.  I'd like to think, for example, that the end-of-quarter issues are the sort of thing that will regress to the mean next year.  This is just one of those things, and at least we have company from Baltimore in the "blue bloods missing the tournament" category.

game preview: North Carolina

Date/Time: Saturday, April 6; 3:30

TV: ESPN3

Record against the Heels: 48-24

Last meeting: UNC 11, UVA 9; 4/20/12, Charlottesville - ACC tournament

Last game: Md. 9, UVA 7 (3/30); UNC 11, JHU 10 (3/30)

Rankings: UVA #19/#18, UNC #6/#4

Efficiency stats:

Faceoffs:
UVA: 53.6% (#17)
UNC: 52.5% (#22)

Clearing (offense):
UVA: 92.7 (#2)
UNC: 87.2 (#24)

Clearing (defense):
UVA: 83.6% (#19)
UNC: 85.4% (#33)

Scoring % (offense):
UVA: 32.8% (#28)
UNC: 37.0% (#13)

Scoring % (defense):
UVA: 32.2% (#29)
UNC: 31.0% (#22)

O-rating:
UVA: 16.25 (#17)
UNC: 18.87 (#9)

D-rating:
UVA: 13.12 (#17)
UNC: 12.77 (#14)

(Ratings are my KenPom-esque measures of efficiency for lacrosse. Numbers are schedule-adjusted. National average is about 15.1.)

Not gonna waste a lot of time blowing flowers up your ass here.  This is gut-check time for the laxers, because a loss here all but destroys UVA's tournament hopes.  I'm beginning to think this season is simply the lacrosse gods' way of devising a new way for Duke to torture UVA lacrosse, since losing to both UNC and Duke would 99.9% officially end those tourney wishes, with Duke doing the dirty work.  But first we have to lose to Carolina.

-- UVA on offense

I've already partly gone over UVA's offensive woes.  They don't have a dynamic playmaker, they have less athleticism than we're used to seeing, and they don't have the ability to break up the packed-in defenses opponents are deploying that have made settled-situation offense so damn difficult this year.  I'd like to see them turn Ryan Tucker's shot loose - Tucker has the hardest shot on the team by far and if he just indiscriminately slings it in the direction of the net, the worst that can happen is that it bounces off some defender, whose new welt makes him think twice about standing in the way next time.  (This is mostly a joke.  Tucker's shot is hard but hasn't been any more effective than anyone else's; goalies have a .613 save percentage against him, second only to Charlie Streep.)

Failing that, the coaches have got to find a working lineup combination.  I don't think having Owen Van Arsdale out there as much as they do is helping, as he doesn't make up for his small size with quickness.  It might be worse than usual against Carolina; Kieran McDonald is 6'4" and if UNC gets Jake Bailey back from injury, he's 6'5".  That makes a fairly formidable-sized back line of defense that 5-foot-not-much OVA - and the rest of the offense, really - will have trouble with.

Carolina is godawfully thin at goalie, with every netminder but freshman Kieran Burke injured in some way or another.  Burke has started every game and acquitted himself decently with a .538 save percentage.  He's playing well enough to give UVA trouble, anyway, as we have made a habit of firing some truly stoppable shots this year.

Overall UNC is a little less stout on defense than the opposition we've seen recently, but not much.  Hopkins and Maryland have better D-ratings (12.20 and 11.50, respectively) but the difference is small enough that I don't think it'll make a major dent.  It's possible that UNC's shifting lineups may help us some; injuries have thinned out their defense a little and forced changes to their starting three.  Still, UVA's hopes, as usual, lie in transition, and the chances of scoring drop dramatically once the play settles down.

-- UVA on defense

It's kind of a shame the goalies haven't been playing well, because the defenders deserve some kudos for their play.  The long-stick guys have been more or less the team's strong point all season.  They broke down against Hopkins but did a nice job keeping Maryland in check.  We need more of that Maryland stuff and less of the Hopkins stuff, because UNC, as usual, has an excellent offense.

UNC is constructed somewhat like Hopkins (uh-oh) in that the offense is mostly generated by the attackmen, with midfielders playing only a supporting role.  Marcus Holman is a top playmaker and scorer (24 G, 23 A); Joey Sankey (26 G, 10 A) is the finisher.  This is a small group; Sankey stands a mere 5'6" and third attackman Jimmy Bitter at 5'9".  Holman towers over them both at 5'11".  Small but very quick, all of them.  The top midfield threats are Davey Emala and Chad Tutton, both decent scorers.

The matchup should be a good one for UVA, since it's the short-sticks who've been much more porous this year than the long-sticks, even accounting for the obvious.  Part of that is because we've seen a lot more cases of guys caught playing defense who shouldn't be.  It's been much harder to sub in short-stick defenders, which keeps Blake Riley and Bobby Hill on the bench more than they should be.  Perhaps Dom Starsia was onto something when he said he'd be using Chris LaPierre on offense more.  Use him on offense so you can use him on defense.  Anyway, I said "should be" good.  In theory, since guys like Scott McWilliams and Greg Danseglio are having solid years.  In practice, Maryland is a much more midfield-heavy team, and UVA did alright, whereas Hopkins is an attack-heavy team and smoked us.

Anyway, here's where I get all existential and depressing: it won't matter unless we can score.  If the offense goes like it has, the defense will only determine whether it's a close one or a blowout.

-- Outlook

Not so good, as usual.  Magic 8-ball says we don't make the tournament this year.  It's possible, given the schedule we play, that a win here could move us into the field in this week's bracketology, but even then remember the odds will be against us.  But unless something has really changed in practice this week, I don't see the offense having the ability to pull out of its malaise.

Final score: UNC 12, UVA 8

weekend review

Sunday's baseball game was a marathon producing a very disappointing result.  But never mind that.  It was a good weekend because it's always a good weekend when we beat Maryland, which doesn't lose to Virginia, except for most of the time.  So yes, lacrosse is this week's top subject of conversation.

UVA looked great at either end of the game and not so good in the middle.  And I think I know why: they didn't listen when I said "patience" and then they did.  You might've noticed by now that this team is really good at finding open guys five feet from the net, because Steele Stanwick is good at finding open guys five feet from the net and Chris Bocklet is really good at being that open guy.  Sometimes these goals they score are just, things of beauty.

But sometimes they try and force the beauty into ugly spots.  And that's where the turnovers happen.  The defense isn't always screwed-up and out of position, and when the defense is nice and tight around the net, you can't force passes in there no matter your talent level.  Regardless, they try, sometimes, and that's one reason we lost the Hopkins game and why Maryland was up two goals midway through the third on Saturday.

That said, excluded from the forcing-it category is Stanwick's twisting, falling-down, double-teamed goal in the fourth, which is the kind of play that sticks in the mind of a Tewaaraton voter when it's time to fill out the ballot.  Oh yes, he's in the running again, there's no doubt about that.  Colgate's Peter Baum already has 42 goals and could finish the season with 60-some, but Colgate has to make the tourney - as we've seen, the voters care about your postseason exploits.  Stanwick leads the country in assists with 33 and has 14 goals as well, which lands him fourth in the country in PPG.  If Stanwick won, he'd be the first men's recipient to win the award two years in a row; Cuse's Mike Powell was the first to win two but sandwiched in between was our own Chris Rotelli.

Folks are also saying the fourth-quarter run was precipitated by inserting Matt White into the lineup and that hopefully it means White will get more playing time in favor of Owen Van Arsdale, whose hot start has cooled considerably.  And yeah they're not wrong, but then again White has started all ten games.  It's not like he's not out there.  He's just playing midfield, when his natural spot is really attack.  If you want a real suggestion: Move White to attack, OVA to the bench, and put Ryan Tucker on the first-line midfield.  Tucker's got a gun.  So does Rob Emery, and they'll be playing together in next year's midfield so might as well get them some quality time on the same field.

Next week is North Carolina, who I was rooting for last night against Hopkins so they'd be all fat, happy, and content this coming Saturday.  Two weeks from now is Duke, and then the ACC tourney, and by the way here are your tourney scenarios now that we've gotten past Maryland:

-- Beat both UNC and Duke: #1 seed (which would be appropriate and correct as we are the hosts), play either UNC or Duke, I don't know what the tiebreakers are past goal differential and those two teams would be #3 and #4 in some order.

-- Beat UNC, lose to Duke: #2 seed, play Carolina, which beat Maryland and would earn the tiebreaker over them.

-- Lose to UNC, beat Duke: #2 seed, play Maryland, who beat Duke and so would be the #3 seed.

-- Lose both games: #3 seed, play Carolina, who lost to Duke and so would be the #2 seed.

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So baseball also happened.  What else happened is that UVA fans are officially going to sweat any lead in the late innings that's smaller than seven runs.  After taking a 3-0 lead on Sunday, the Hoos gradually pissed away the whole thing until they were down 5-3; a ninth-inning comeback made it 6-5, and then, one half-inning away from finally winning a series in Raleigh, UVA did not even register one out en route to handing the game back to the Wolfpack.  (OK, technically, they did.  It was a sacrifice bunt.  It's not like the pitching actually caused that to happen.)

I think it proved me rather prophetic, actually; these two teams are so closely matched it's unreal.  It just so happens NC State has a better bullpen.  As do most teams these days, unfortunately.

The best game - and not just because we won it - was definitely Saturday's, where the teams' two actual best pitchers matched up.  Carlos Rodon is gonna be scary.  He's scary now. And Branden Kline matched up pitch for pitch, except for a couple mistakes that ended up in the trees.  It was the State bullpen that collapsed on Saturday; they were handed a tie game after a lightning delay forced out the starters, and UVA came through.

Friday was really only notable for Brian O'Connor's ejection, which was a surprise because BOC always brings his indoor voice to umpire arguments.  It started off that way on Friday, too, until a button was pushed someway, somehow, and O'Connor went all Earl Weaver on the guy, except for the dust-kicking.  If it was an effort to fire up the team, it didn't work, but I haven't gotten the impression BOC is the kind of guy to resort to that kind of trick.  I think the umpire said something he didn't like.

So I had yet to see that happen, until this weekend, and I got to see something else I hadn't yet seen with my own eyes: Keith Werman behind the plate.  He's got kind of a Peter Rowen thing going on:

He's also a pretty natural-looking catcher (except for the build), although I didn't see his basestealer-nabbing skills.  NC State didn't run on him.  (They scurred.)

Next week is a home series against Wake Forest, which is a halfway decent team.  Even so, we should be disappointed with anything less than a series win.  No moral victories there.

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In the world of basketball, it's a dead period right now until Thursday, so no contacting recruits, which also means no contacting all those potential transfers we're trying to bring in.  T.J. McConnell, formerly of Duquesne, is officially down to either Arizona or UVA, and will check out Tucson pretty soon.  The downside: McConnell's family supposedly knows Arizona's coach Sean Miller from small times.  The plus side: Arizona is located in Tucson.

McConnell would be a prize catch.  Another possibility: Rice transfer Dylan Ennis, who made the CUSA all-freshman team.  In the big-man theater, Anthony Gill will request his release** (or has done so) from South Carolina, and this is obviously a thing because of this line from his official bio at South Carolina: "Choose (sic) South Carolina over Virginia and Wake Forest."

**Pay no attention to the line about tampering; it's a throwin by a pissed-off SC fan angry that we might take one of their best players.

Edit: RRRGGHHHH DAMMMMITTT I completely forgot to even mention this, which is loooonnngg overdue.

weekend review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Small bullets:

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

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

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

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