Specifically, today it's all about the 17 bowls that UVA has gone to in the past. We have a rich tradition of going to bowls named for car parts stores and the now-defunct MPC Computers. UVA has been to 17 bowl games, and 11 distinct ones; four New Year's Day bowls; eight different states (Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Hawaii, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Idaho.) Three games have been played against future conference rivals. Three have been played against Georgia. From bottom to top, here are the seventeen bowl games UVA has partaken of. In this ranking, consideration has been given to opponent, bowl prestige, and of course, outcome. Oh, and I still don't use corporate names, except when it amuses me to do so. So there might be a little confusion, but as usual, you're smart people and I think you'll figure it out.
#17 - 1999 MicronPC.com Bowl - Illinois 63, Virginia 21
Sponsored by a now-dead computer company. Wait, no. Sponsored by the now-dead computer company's website. Even the technology company that exists almost entirely online and sponsors what used to be known as the Copper Bowl had the good sense to take ".com" off the bowl name, because everybody mocks the idea. MicronPC was owned by a company that still exists, spun off and sold (and went on to become MPC Computers and sponsored the bowl in Boise), and died in bankruptcy court a few years ago. So now we have two separate names of a defunct computer company sitting proudly on our stadium. Woo corporate assholery. For those trying to keep score, this game was played in Miami, and it was our third trip to this bowl, but it is now the one played in Orlando that isn't the Citrus Bowl.
Even worse, we got our asses kicked. By freaking Illinois. Coached at the time by Ron Turner, who sandwiched this season in between a 5-6 one and a 3-8 one, and would eventually be fired for having his last two seasons be 1-11 and 3-8. UVA was down 42-7 at halftime, so it wasn't fun. And at the time, I was in a holding pattern with UVA because I'd been turned down for early decision and was put in with the regular crowd, and would have to wait another three months to find out the good news. So I didn't hardly even know what to think about this. Bummer, yes, but you don't want to get too into it til you know for sure, you know?
#16 - 2000 Oahu Bowl - Georgia 37, Virginia 14
This wasn't competitive either. And it was a lousy way to send off both George Welsh, and poor injury-riddled Dan Ellis, who was just back from injury and got hurt again. Thus was born the really lame quarterback play-until-you-suck platoon that lasted all through 2001, as both Bryson Spinner and Matt Schaub played in relief of Ellis.
Plus, the Oahu Bowl (which at the time was essentially the little brother to the Aloha Bowl) was in its final incarnation, and would become the Seattle Bowl the following year and play its last game ever the year after that. It was pretty minor stuff.
#15 - 2004 Humanitarian Bowl - Fresno State 37, Virginia 34
This was just plain depressing. UVA started the season 5-0 and ranked #6 before finishing 3-3. Then, the school declined a CS Bowl bid because it took place during final exams. Georgia Tech would end up in Florida. That wound us up in snowy Boise on the blue turf, against feisty Fresno State, and the game was all ours and then it wasn't, with an OT loss on Fresno's first play. And for those of us watching on TV, we got to listen to the dulcet tones of Pam Ward.
Oh, and that CS Bowl that Georgia Tech got into because of our academic standards? They won it 51-14.
#14 - 1991 Gator Bowl - Oklahoma 48, Virginia 14
Great bowl game. (The Gator Bowl held quite a bit more cachet than it does today.) Great opponent. Miserable-assed outcome. Even with ACC Player of the Year Matt Blundin, UVA was down 34-0 before they knew what hit 'em. This was even less competitive than the Illinois game that would come eight years later - at least that one was tied at 7 at one point. And yet it's still better than losing to Fresno State in Boise with Pam Ward calling the game.
#13 - 1994 Car Parts Bowl ('93 season) - Boston College 31, Virginia 13
This was a pretty good game for two quarters. UVA was up 13-10 at one point - and then never scored again. Until the 2007 season, this was the last time UVA ever played on New Year's Day.
#12 - 1996 Car Parts Bowl - Miami 31, Virginia 21
Now we're getting to the part where losing doesn't suck 110%. UVA spent most of this game behind, but you couldn't fault the defense; Miami's offense only managed 17 points in this one. The rest was the Canes' Tremain Mack, who scored a pair of defensive touchdowns to propel Miami to the victory. The Hoos had to play catch-up all day, but at least gave themselves a shot to win.
#11 - 2008 Gator Bowl - Texas Tech 31, Virginia 28
A heartbreaker no matter how you slice it. UVA forced not one, but two safeties against the high-powered Texas Tech air assault, led by Graham Harrell and Michael Crabtree, and held a 28-14 fourth-quarter lead. Mikell Simpson had a 96-yard touchdown run, which at the time was an NCAA bowl record and is still the 2nd-longest bowl-game run in history. But UVA found itself unable to escape being pinned deep in its own territory late in the fourth quarter, with starting QB Jameel Sewell out with injury and true freshman Peter Lalich running the show. Lalich fumbled to set up the tying touchdown, and TT would hit the game-winning field goal on their next drive.
#10 - 1990 Citrus Bowl ('89 season) - Illinois 31, Virginia 21
The kind of game you don't totally hate the world for losing. Someone had to. Two star quarterbacks - UVA's Shawn Moore and Illinois's Jeff George - clashed on New Year's Day in UVA's reward for sharing the ACC championship. UVA recovered three Illinois fumbles but had to try and dig out of a 24-7 third-quarter deficit and wasn't able to. George would later be the1st overall pick in that year's NFL Draft.
#9 - 1991 Sugar Bowl ('90 season) - Tennessee 23, Virginia 22
New Year's Day. Sugar Bowl. Tennessee, back when it was cool to be Tennessee. This was possibly UVA's most prime-timey of all prime-time matchups, and it followed a season in which UVA had earned, for three weeks, the #1 ranking in the country. UVA controlled the first three quarters, but didn't take full advantage and only led 16-3 going into the fourth, where the Volunteer offense came alive and rattled off three touchdowns. The Hoos got the ball back with 31 seconds needing only to get to field goal range, only about 38 yards away, but Matt Blundin was intercepted to seal the win for Tennessee.
#8 - 1998 Peach Bowl - Georgia 35, Virginia 33
Between this and the Sugar Bowl it was a very, very close one to earn the title of "best loss" in the bowl department. The Sugar is the Sugar, so there's that, but the history between these two teams, in the same stadium, tips it this direction. Georgia earned its revenge from two years prior when UVA beat the Bulldogs in Atlanta, storming back from a 21-0 halftime deficit to take a 35-27 lead late in the game. UVA scored what would have been the game-tying touchdown had the 2PC been successful, and recovered the ensuing onside kick, too. But a field goal attempt as time ran out sailed wide. Kicking woes essentially cost UVA the game, as the 2PC would've been unnecessary had another extra point not failed in the third quarter.
#7 - 1994 Independence Bowl - Virginia 20, TCU 10
The Weedeater Bowl! The Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl - the poster child for shitty corporate bowl names. The name so stupid it became legend. I didn't need an inner 12-year-old to giggle about this silliness because I was 12, and even then I knew this was record-setting stupidity. And UVA was one of the privileged few to win the Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl.
The worst win is better than the best loss, and this was the worst win. Played in a nasty rain, the game was a mud bowl with nothing especially distinguishing about the performance other than a nice defensive showing that held the Horny Frogs to 65 passing yards.
#6 - 1987 All-American Bowl - Virginia 22, Brigham Young 16
In UVA's second bowl appearance ever, it faced a formidable offense in the BYU Cougars. UVA turned the game into a run-fest in order to keep the high-powered BYU offense sidelined, and the game plan worked to perfection. A pair of fourth-down stands, one on fourth-and-goal from the two, cemented the win. A solid game, but the venue (Birmingham, Alabama) and a short-lived bowl game push it down the list a little.
#5 - 2005 Music City Bowl - Virginia 34, Minnesota 31
For just the second time in its history, UVA made its fourth consecutive bowl appearance, and it turned out to be one of the comebackier games in school history. UVA trailed 14-0 and 21-7 to start, but worked its way back and tied the game at 31 in the fourth. Then, pinned on the three-yard line after a Minnesota punt forced by a quality defensive stand, Marques Hagans drove the Hoos down the field for what would be the game-winning field goal.
#4 - 2003 Tire Bowl - Virginia 23, Pittsburgh 16
The main story going into the game was that Pitt's Larry Fitzgerald had scored at least one touchdown in every game he'd played that season, and the story going out of it was that he didn't. Virginia's defense came up with a great plan to stop Fitzgerald, forcing Pitt QB Rod Rutherford to throw elsewhere all day. But what gives this game the tiebreak over the two somewhat similar games previously listed was the goal-line stand. With the game still scoreless, UVA's defense came up with four consecutive stops on its own one-yard line, and four plays later, Matt Schaub found (fittingly) Heath Miller for a 52-yard touchdown that broke the school passing record for TDs. That gave UVA a 7-0 lead, and the Hoos would never trail in a game that never seemed as close as the seven-point final margin.
#3 - 1984 Peach Bowl - Virginia 27, Purdue 24
We have to give UVA's first-ever bowl game some love, so here it is in the top three. One, did I mention it was the Hoos' first bowl game ever? Second, it gives me braggin' rights to this very day because my brother is a Purdue grad and the Hoos have not played the Boilers since. Even though I was two when this game was played and he was a tiny newborn. And I didn't actually become a UVA fan until sixteen years later. Don't care. Woot woot. Third, it was a pretty darn good game.
UVA was down 24-14 at the half, but George Welsh must have said something fiery at halftime because the Hoos owned the rest of the game. Purdue didn't score, and UVA racked up almost 200 rushing yards in the second half alone. It was a pretty good quarterback battle, too, with two future NFL starters going at it in the Hoos' Majic Man, Don Majkowski, and Purdue's Jim Everett, futurely of the Rams and Saints.
#2 - 2002 Tire Bowl - Virginia 48, West Virginia 22
It was the Era of Good Feelings for Al Groh. Optimism was high.... and UVA was snubbed. Hoo fans were somewhat miffed that UVA slid down the bowl pecking order despite finishing with a 6-2 conference record, good for second place (and cackling with glee that 4-4 Clemson, one of the teams picked over UVA, was cornholed by 40 points.) Partly because of this season, the ACC would later institute the rule that forbids bowls from selecting a team with two fewer conference wins than a still-available one.
But we still had to go to Charlotte to play in a brand-new bowl, in front of a sold-out and highly partisan crowd cheering its mountainous lungs out for West Virginia. So naturally, it was a slaughter. Freshman running back Wali Lundy ripped off four touchdowns, the Pep Band was forever banned from the bowl for tellin' it like it is about West Virginia, and UVA left with a 26-point win. Good times.
#1 - 1995 Peach Bowl - Virginia 34, Georgia 27
Is this game #1 because of how we're going back to the Peach Bowl? No. Maybe? No. UVA never trailed, but did blow a 24-7 lead, to the delight of the hometown crowd, and UGA seemingly had the Hoos on the ropes after tying it up 27-27. The Hoos never had an answer for Georgia's Hines Ward at quarterback (yes, the Steelers' wide receiver), who threw for 413 yards. Timely interceptions and timely stops prevented Ward's incredible playmaking from becoming a killer.
The game ended on a thrilling note, with Georgia scooping and scoring a UVA fumble following a completed pass; UGA earned an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, kicked off from their 20-yard line, and Demetrius Allen returned it to the house to stake UVA to its eventual winning margin. Highlights here because you love it.
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-- And speaking of the Peach Bowl, it just got a little easier; no doubt you know by now that Auburn suspended Michael Dyer, and he'll miss the game. Dyer is a Kevin Parks-type - smallish but powerfully built, with the ability to wear down a defense. 1,200 yards won't be made up for easily. Auburn will turn to Onterio McCalebb, who is basically good-not-great and can occasionally break one but usually won't, and Tre Mason, who I don't know anything about.
-- The Mountain West is going to formally request a BCS autobid. This opens up some amusing possibilities. If they get it, do they tell C-USA to go pound sand, the merger is off? If they get it, and furthermore the Big Eastish gets the boot as a result, do Boise State and San Diego State feel stupid, really stupid, or galactically stupid? And would that be funny or uproariously funny? So many questions. Bet you the Big Eastish lobbies their asses off against the MWC - if the MWC gets that sweet sweet delicious autobid, it wouldn't surprise if that causes the latest Big Eastish expansion to collapse like the TCU attempt did. Nor would it surprise if it causes Connecticut to start calling John Swofford three times daily.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
season preview: Duke
Duke Blue Devils
Media prediction: 2nd
Last season:
Record: 32-5 (13-3); ACC 2nd seed
Postseason: NCAA Sweet 16
KenPom: 2nd of 345
Returning scoring: 50.5%
Returning rebounding: 58.8%
Returning assists: 44.0%
2010-11 All-ACC:
1st team: G Nolan Smith, F Kyle Singler
2nd team: none
3rd team: none
HM: F Mason Plumlee
Rookie: none
Defensive: G Nolan Smith
(Italics indicate departed player.)
Starting lineup:
PG: Seth Curry (Jr.)
SG: Austin Rivers (Fr.)
G: Andre Dawkins (Jr.)
F: Ryan Kelly (Jr.)
C: Mason Plumlee (Jr.)
Bench:
F Miles Plumlee (Sr.)
G Tyler Thornton (So.)
G Quinn Cook (Fr.)
F Josh Hairston (Fr.)
Coach: Mike Krzyzewski (31st season)
ACC schedule:
Twice: Florida State, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest
Once: Boston College, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Miami, NC State, Virginia
"The ACC is down in football because even though it has many good teams, it doesn't have any dominant ones."
"The ACC is down in basketball because even though it still has a couple dominant teams, it doesn't have as many good ones top-to-bottom."
Dear media: This is why you suck.
Anyway, Duke. Because they are Duke, they're still one of the league's dominant teams, and will be as long as the country's best recruits shut off their recruiting the moment they get that offer postmarked from Durham, North Carolina. They may not help the ACC's cause this year as much as usual, though.
Duke has won every one of its matchups this year but one, you see, and in that one they went to Columbus and got their ass beat by Ohio State. Their other results are lackluster relative to Duke expectations. Michigan by 7. MSU by 5. Tennessee by 10. Washington by 6. These are their margins of victory. Of course, we are splitting hairs here. 98% of teams in the country would love these results. Duke is still a Team To Beat.
It starts, I think, at the three-point line. Everyone not named Plumlee has license to shoot them, and they do it very well. Ryan Kelly is a particular matchup nightmare for teams, because he's 6'11" and shoots threes like a guard. Seth Curry is lightning-quick, and it's awfully frustrating how well he can open up shots for himself. And he's 30-for-32 from the free-throw line so far, which is over 93% - outstanding. And like Kyrie Irving last year, Austin Rivers looks like the real deal as only a freshman. (Rivers is also a nonstop talker and rapidly establishing himself as everyone's new favorite Dookie to hate. A lot.)
So not only does Duke have shooters who can hit from everywhere, they've got a plethora of tall center-types, mostly named Plumlee. Mason Plumlee is the star of the group; he's shooting a whopping .645 from the field (and an incredible .381 from the charity stripe, and no I don't have those numbers backwards) and, according to KenPom, has a 29.6 defensive rebounding percentage, meaning he snags 29.6% of the available ones when he's on the floor. That's good for 9th overall, in the country. (Duke has every fucking Plumlee brother, all of whom have trouble fitting in the family minivan, and still the nerve to complain about never getting any good post players.)
So why hasn't Duke beaten everyone by 30? Because eventually, they have to substitute. And this just isn't as deep a Duke team as usual. Outside the starting five, it's very young; the team's only senior is Miles Plumlee, who doesn't really dominate. Mason is far more talented. Tyler Thornton plays 20 minutes a game and hardly ever shoots. It would be interesting to see what happens if any of the starting five get hurt; it would take a lot of points out of the lineup. The line between the starting five and the bench is sharp and clear, and the main rotation only goes seven deep; they're pushing into Seth Greenberg territory here.
Duke also has, interestingly, an A/T ratio below 1 at the moment. This is not because they don't take care of the ball, but rather because a highish percentage of their baskets are unassisted - fewer than 50% of their field goals have an assist attached. Nevertheless, they have the 7th-best offense in the country as KenPom has it - every bit as good as their crosstown rivals in Chapel Hill, who have so far been anointed the ACC's top team.
Duke obviously will be parking themselves in the NCAA tournament, and if they're even as low as a three seed it'd be a surprise. That assumes health, however; they have national title hopes that won't survive a long-duration injury like Irving's broken foot from last year. I think eventually in the tournament they'll find a team that's more than their match, and they'll be prone as well to upsets due to their reliance on the three-ball and lack of depth. But with a starting five as talented as any you can find, so a national championship is always within the realm of possibilities, and any team that beats them can be duly proud of themselves.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
auburnscouting: the season
It was kind of fun trying to decide how to set up the run-up to the Peach Bowl. Never got to cover UVA in a bowl before so I got all tingly. I settled on a three-part series, and this is the first; on Fridays this month we will go over some aspect of the Auburn Tigers. Today, the season; the following weeks, the offense and defense. The game is on a Saturday, so that's perfect: the fourth week, I can do the game preview on Thursday like usual and then get drunk over New Year's.
Link in advance: all blog reactions are taken from the Auburn SB Nation blog, Track 'Em Tigers. There's another Auburn blog out there, but I checked it out and the second-to-latest post is a sneer at our supposed inability to sell tickets. So no linky. Let us see how the football season went down from the Auburn perspective:
(P.S. before we start, because this is an interesting tidbit: UVA will be in orange jerseys for the Peach Bowl. If it seems weird that that would be news, it's the SEC's turn to be the home team, so Auburn will be in blue. No white for anyone. I like it, as long as we're not also in orange pants. Now back to the show.)
-- Game 1: #23 Auburn 42, Utah State 38 (1-0)
The story: It took one half of football to realize that this was gonna be a very different team than last year's national championship version, and a second half of football was necessary to avert disaster. Utah State led Auburn 21-14 at halftime and 38-28 with three and a half minutes left, after a clock-chewing 65-yard touchdown drive that saw the Aggies convert a 4th-and-8 from the Auburn 10, and punch in the touchdown two plays later. But Auburn scored quickly and recovered an onside kick, leading to a game-winning drive to rescue themselves from what would've been a nasty upset. Utah State outgained Auburn 448-364 and 227-78 on the ground, and converted three of three fourth-down attempts.
Gene Chizik said: "Offensively and defensively we're a long way off of being able to win very many games right now."
Blog reaction: "By mid-afternoon Saturday, Auburn people knew what coaches surely have known for weeks: The party is over. All good times must come to an end; but this hangover is likely to require more than a few Tylenols and a long nap. ... On Saturday, Gene Chizik and company came face-to-face with a near death experience."
-- Game 2: Auburn 41, #16 Mississippi State 34 (2-0)
The story: Auburn rediscovered their rushing game, with Mike Dyer tearing the Bulldogs up to the tune of 150 yards and two touchdowns, but for the second week in a row it came right down to the wire. To the very last play, in fact; Mississippi State's Chris Relf looked like he was headed for the end zone and a potential game-winning TD (the Bulldogs would've gone for two) but was upended less than a foot from pay dirt. It was a back-and-forth game with each team recording a pick-six. Quarterback Barrett Trotter, Cam Newton's replacement, had a second straight efficient day throwing the ball.
Gene Chizik said: "Are we a great football team right now? No. Not even close. But the identity of the team is starting to form week by week because they will fight. They will not look at the scoreboard, and that's been one of the trademarks that we've really tried to instill in these guys that we are not looking for the scoreboard until it says 0:00 because everything else in-between does not matter."
Blog reaction: "What fans witnessed on this hot, humid afternoon epitomizes everything there is to love about the game and Auburn football. On a day when Miss State and its fans arrived in swarms for its coronation into the SEC elite, Auburn and its band of no-names picked up its 17th straight win."
-- Game 3: Clemson 38, #21 Auburn 24 (2-1)
Game story: Tigers vs. Tigers. Early on it looked like Auburn would notch another point for SEC superiority, holding a 14-0 lead at the end of the 1st quarter and 21-7 midway through the 2nd. But it was all Clemson after that; the ACC's Tigers tied it up by halftime, and dominated the second half to strike a blow for the Atlantic Coast. This was the Sammy Watkins debutante party - Auburn had no answer for him whatsoever, and he had his season high in catches and yards with 10 and 155 respectively, on national TV no less.
It was a second terrific game for Mike Dyer, but Barrett Trotter was only 12-for-25 against the Clemson defense. Travante Stallworth led the team in receiving for the second time in three games, but he would disappear after this game, catching just three more passes all season. And on defense, Auburn gave up 624 yards.
Gene Chizik said: "The first quarter is probably the best that we've played. After the end of the second quarter, I felt like we were a very below average football team."
Blog reaction: "It's time for some Auburn people to face reality. This team is not winning nine games. It's not defying the odds on the way to Atlanta.** Intelligent Auburn people know it. For our less intelligent brethren, we need to do a little education. Roof is not stupid and Malzahn is still among the best offensive coordinators in the country. Nothing has changed."
**note - meaning the SECCG, not the bowl game.
-- Game 4: Auburn 30, Florida Atlantic 14 (3-1)
Game story: A lackluster game against a really shitty team (FAU finished 1-11) saw a mildly disgruntled crowd at a not-full Jordan-Hare stadium. Auburn led just 10-6 at the half, could never get its running game on track, and finished with 315 yards of offense - eight more than FAU. Auburn's defense bent (a lot) but didn't break; the score of 14 was achieved with two field goals plus a late touchdown against Auburn's bench. The defense gathered a pick-six in the opening minutes of the second half to gain a little breathing room, and by the beginning of the fourth quarter, the game was mercifully in hand. Receiver Trovon Reed would miss the next month or so with a shoulder injury suffered in this game.
Gene Chizik said: "Gentlemen, what the fuck was that?"
Gene Chizik didn't say that. At least, not to the media. Chizik actually said: "We didn't play like we wanted to play the whole night, but we certainly showed a lot of improvement in my opinion."
Blog reaction: "An Auburn bowl bid seems highly unlikely at this point. On record as a defender of the Auburn coaching staff this season, Saturday was a step backwards. Who cares that the defensive stats were vastly improved. Against arguably the worst offense in college football, the Auburn defense continued to surrender way too many yards and miss easy tackles."
-- Game 5: Auburn 16, #10 South Carolina 13 (4-1)
Game story: Much-maligned thanks to the previous couple weeks, the Auburn defense stepped up to the task and helped Auburn to its best win all season. Barrett Trotter only threw for 112 yards, and Michael Dyer needed a whopping 41 carries to grind out his 141 yards, but the offense came up with a game-winning drive in the fourth-quarter, and South Carolina's two-minute offense fell short. Auburn picked off Stephen Garcia twice and held him to 9-of-23 passing, and also blocked a PAT. Trotter was also intercepted twice, and South Carolina actually came up with four interceptions overall, two of them coming when the Tigers tried to get fancypants with the play-calling. Probably the biggest thing Auburn did, though, was hold the Gamecocks' all-world running back Marcus Lattimore to 66 yards.
Gene Chizik said: "At the end of the day, you're looking at one of the Heisman Trophy leaders and we said we had to stop him; and that happened tonight."
Blog reaction**: "A little bit of swagger returned Saturday night. It's something that should serve Auburn well going forward. Suddenly a team that was hoping for a bowl bid is now playing for much more."
**At first I clicked on the headline, "A Day To Remember." That seemed like the logical place to find a narrative about a big win. Nope: amusing colonoscopy story. I think I like this blog. Seriously.
-- Game 6: #10 Arkansas 38, #15 Auburn 14 (4-2)
Game story: For the second week in a row, Auburn went on the road to face a #10 team. It didn't go so good this time. Auburn led 14-7 after one quarter and spent the rest of the time getting smoked. Barrett Trotter was a miserable 6-of-19 for 81 yards, and this game was the beginning of the end of his time as a starter. Clint Moseley and freshman Kiehl Frazier were inserted at various points.
The run game was more than effective; Frazier, Dyer, and Onterio McCalebb combined for 47 carries and 257 yards, and Auburn racked up 291 total. But the passing game was horrible, and the defense was bad; the backbreaker was a 92-yard TD run by the Hogs' Joe Adams in the third quarter to put Arkansas up by two touchdowns.
Gene Chizik said: "We did all the things tonight, all the classic things, that lead to losing. We turned the ball over on the road, dropped balls, guys who were wide open and we can't hit them, the ball going through guys' hands."
Blog reaction: "Now Auburn coaches face the inevitable fork in the road. We suspected the time was coming. The question is simple to ask, yet hard to answer. What does Auburn do about its quarterback situation? ... Things are not going to magically change in the coming weeks. Auburn caught a break in beating Miss State and South Carolina - teams that were far less than advertised in the preseason. The same may hold true when Florida comes visiting Saturday night."
-- Game 7: #24 Auburn 17, Florida 6 (5-2)
Game story: Trotter threw a touchdown pass in the first half and Auburn took a 7-6 lead to halftime, but that was one of only two Trotter completions in the entire half. When the Tigers took the field in the second half, the reins had been handed to Clint Moseley. Permanently. Moseley was not exactly awesome, but the offense moved better than it had.
Which isn't saying much, at least as far as this game was concerned. Defenses ruled the day; Auburn held the Gators to 194 total yards, and only got 278 of their own. Half of that came on six plays; Auburn averaged 2.3 yards on the others. The Tigers converted just one of 13 third-down attempts, but the defense played maybe its best game of the year, so it mattered little.
Gene Chizik said: "Dominant. I think that is the only word you could use. Probably 40 or 50 yards of their offense came on the last drive when we knew they had two scores. I couldn't be more proud."
Blog reaction: "There's been nothing pretty about the season except for the results."
-- Game 8: #1 LSU 45, #20 Auburn 10 (5-3)
Game story: Except for a few pass attempts by Kiehl Frazier, the job under center belonged to Clint Moseley; Barrett Trotter was relegated to clipboard duty and in fact has not thrown a pass since the Florida game. It didn't matter here. LSU registered about forty sacks (actually six) in a game that wasn't even as close as the final score - and the final score showed a five-TD loss for the Tigers. The Auburn ones. Man, I'm glad we have a nickname - two, actually - that nobody else has.
Gene Chizik said: "It's really difficult to really assess how [Moseley] did. Six sacks are unacceptable. You don't win any football games by allowing six sacks. That was an anemic job of protecting the quarterback. We have a lot of work to do and a lot of research to do to figure out how to stop the bleeding in that regard."
Blog reaction: "From the start, it was clear that LSU had the better team. Auburn's offensive line looked like a New Orleans levy trying to hold off Katrina. It's hard to imagine a better team in college football this season..."
-- Game 9: #23 Auburn 41, Mississippi 23 (6-3)
Game story: Moseley finally had a chance to get his feet under him, and the results were very positive: four touchdown passes. He was helped by a 177-yard performance from Dyer, too. This was a tie game at halftime, 17-17, and the Auburn defense probably needed a kick in the pants; whatever they got, it worked, because Ole Miss only racked up 38 yards in the third quarter and then threw 20 of them away on sack/IG penalty. Auburn scored 24 straight points in the second half before Ole Miss tacked on a meaningless touchdown as time expired.
Gene Chizik said: "At halftime, we made a lot of great adjustments, adjusting defensively to some of the run game that we needed to get under control that in the first half got away from us a little bit. Coach (Ted) Roof and the defensive staff did a really nice job with that. ... The great thing about our team up to this point is that we haven't lost twice in a row. We have not let one loss beat us twice in a row and for a young football team, I think that speaks highly of them."
Blog reaction: "I remember it like it was yesterday. Sitting in a hotel in Atlanta on a cold December day, the news hit me like a case of malaria. Auburn had settled on Iowa State's Gene Chizik as its new coach. It was official: Auburn was circling the drain of college football. On December 13, 2008, I wrote, 'To say this move (hiring Chizik) is shocking is an understatement. For many Auburn fans, this is a worst case scenario. There appears to be little logic in the choice.' I've never been more wrong about anything in my life. ... Gene Chizik continues to be the gift that keeps on giving."
-- Game 10: #15 Georgia 45, #20 Auburn 7 (6-4)
Game story: Coming off a win and a bye week, Auburn had some hopes for this game; the result was their worst of the season. The Bulldogs dominated every facet of the game, racking up 528 yards to Auburn's 195. After Auburn tied it at 7 in the first quarter, Georgia rolled up five touchdowns and a field goal for 38 unanswered points. Not much to say, because the game was just hideous for Auburn fans.
Gene Chizik said: "It was pretty evident what we couldn't do, and that was a lot. ... We didn't cover many people all night, couldn't stop the run and turned the ball over. That's why we got beat 45-7."
Blog reaction: "While basking in the glow of seven wins in nine years over Alabama, the Georgia rivalry has become a horror show for the Auburn football program. With Saturday's humiliating beat down in Athens, Auburn has now lost five of its last six games to its second biggest rival."
-- Game 11: #24 Auburn 35, Samford 16 (7-4)
Game story: It was another bad day for the Auburn defense. Some I-AA teams have the capacity to upset even quality I-A teams; Samford should not be one of them, but there they were in the third quarter, trailing the defending national champions by just 14-13. Perhaps they were simply tired of facing teams named the Bulldogs.
Fortunately for the Tigers, Auburn pulled away late, and disaster was averted. After Samford made it 21-16 with a field goal, a short kickoff and a long runback gave Auburn excellent field position in Samford territory, and they capitalized with a 22-yard TD run by the normally not-mobile Moseley; the game was essentially salted away after that. They were aided by yet another 150+ yard day from Michael Dyer.
Gene Chizik said: " I can make all kinds of excuses about how at times we didn't play well. I can pull them out of the kitchen sink now, but the reality of it is there were times where they played really well and there were times where we didn't."
Blog reaction: (whatever it's Alabama week)
-- Game 12: #2 Alabama 42, #24 Auburn 14
Game story: Last year, Auburn's title hopes looked shot at halftime of the Alabama game; they fixed that problem with a comeback that no doubt will live in semi-immortality in Auburn lore. This year, the Tigers again found themselves down 24-7 at halftime of the Iron Bowl, and an 83-yard kick return for a TD by Onterio McCalebb to start the second half got people wondering if we were in for a sequel.
It wasn't to be. Alabama responded with a field goal, and then two touchdowns in the fourth, to put away the henceforth scoreless Tigers. Auburn couldn't do anything about Heisman candidate running back Trent Richardson, who piled up 203 yards. And Clint Moseley only tallied 62 yards through the air. For the second straight year, the Iron Bowl winner went on to play for the national title, but the script got flipped on Auburn in 2011.
Gene Chizik said: "It's been a lot of ups and downs this season for 12 games, and we've had some really good things occur in our 12 game season, and we've had some disappointments. This is certainly one of the huge disappointments."
Blog reaction: "From the start things never felt right. Not since the lowly days of the Doug Barfield era has a lead up to the Iron Bowl felt so hopeless. As ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit noted on air Saturday morning, there were few believers among the Auburn faithful. Of course, it didn't take Danny Sheridan to tell Auburn fans what was ahead. The reality had set in weeks ago. Alabama's manhandling of Auburn was the most complete beating Auburn has taken at home in a generation."
******************************************
So, what lessons have we learned?
Well, Auburn fans, and probably the pundits as well, will point out that Auburn has generally faced a much better level of competition than UVA has. True; there was nothing like LSU or Alabama on our schedule, and the closest we came to a Georgia or an Arkansas was Virginia Tech. Florida State has talent approximating what UGA and Arkansas bring, but probably is not coached as well.
The counter to that is that in the games where Auburn was playing really bad competition, they mostly stunk. They won, but they stunk. Florida Atlantic racked up 20 first downs after getting one the previous week. Ole Miss was tied at halftime. Samford was behind by one in the third quarter. Utah State was up by ten with 3:38 to go. Auburn pulled out wins in all of these, but none can be said to have been inspiring. They also generally got blown out of the water by all that great competition.
In general, they appeared to have all the hallmarks of a very young team. Like duh. They graduated Cam Newton and Nick Fairley and pretty much everyone else that was any good, and started a bunch of young dudes in their places. It showed. Horrible performances at times; and then again, holding the electric Marcus Lattimore (pre-injury) to 66 yards. And a dominant performance against Florida. (Florida's offense sucks this year, but still.)
Auburn spent most of the year ranked, but largely, I think, due to a predisposition by the media to rank SEC teams. (They were never really punished for the parade of ass-beatings they received.) I don't think they deserved to be ranked, and my Blogpoll ballots showed as much. Today, neither Virginia nor Auburn is in the AP top 25, though Virginia has five votes from somewhere.
It was kind of a tumultuous season. Quarterback controversies, the firing of the defensive coordinator, and a general feeling that the offensive coordinator eventually will move on to a head coaching position. (Gus Malzahn did supposedly interview for the UNC job before they hired Larry Fedora.) Auburn never lost consecutive games all year, and after the Arkansas loss in early October, didn't win consecutive games either. Starting with that game, they alternated results. It resulted in a lot of up and down feelings.
To compare with UVA's season, the best win between the two teams is the South Carolina one for Auburn, followed by UVA's win over FSU. Both were on the road. Besides that, Auburn's only wins over winning teams were those over 6-5 Samford and 7-5 Utah State. Auburn beat four bowl-eligible teams and three with winning records; UVA beat three and two, respectively. The Tigers didn't lose any games they shouldn't have. Came close, but didn't. It's sort of an unimpressive 7-5, but you might say the same about UVA's 8-4 if you didn't take the change in QB philosophy into account. By contrast, it's much harder to say if Auburn's QB switch improved matters.
Next week, we'll tackle the Auburn offense. (Geddit? Tackle?) Gus Malzahn is a hurry-up, no-huddle, spread kinda guy, making things interesting for the UVA defense.
Link in advance: all blog reactions are taken from the Auburn SB Nation blog, Track 'Em Tigers. There's another Auburn blog out there, but I checked it out and the second-to-latest post is a sneer at our supposed inability to sell tickets. So no linky. Let us see how the football season went down from the Auburn perspective:
(P.S. before we start, because this is an interesting tidbit: UVA will be in orange jerseys for the Peach Bowl. If it seems weird that that would be news, it's the SEC's turn to be the home team, so Auburn will be in blue. No white for anyone. I like it, as long as we're not also in orange pants. Now back to the show.)
-- Game 1: #23 Auburn 42, Utah State 38 (1-0)
The story: It took one half of football to realize that this was gonna be a very different team than last year's national championship version, and a second half of football was necessary to avert disaster. Utah State led Auburn 21-14 at halftime and 38-28 with three and a half minutes left, after a clock-chewing 65-yard touchdown drive that saw the Aggies convert a 4th-and-8 from the Auburn 10, and punch in the touchdown two plays later. But Auburn scored quickly and recovered an onside kick, leading to a game-winning drive to rescue themselves from what would've been a nasty upset. Utah State outgained Auburn 448-364 and 227-78 on the ground, and converted three of three fourth-down attempts.
Gene Chizik said: "Offensively and defensively we're a long way off of being able to win very many games right now."
Blog reaction: "By mid-afternoon Saturday, Auburn people knew what coaches surely have known for weeks: The party is over. All good times must come to an end; but this hangover is likely to require more than a few Tylenols and a long nap. ... On Saturday, Gene Chizik and company came face-to-face with a near death experience."
-- Game 2: Auburn 41, #16 Mississippi State 34 (2-0)
The story: Auburn rediscovered their rushing game, with Mike Dyer tearing the Bulldogs up to the tune of 150 yards and two touchdowns, but for the second week in a row it came right down to the wire. To the very last play, in fact; Mississippi State's Chris Relf looked like he was headed for the end zone and a potential game-winning TD (the Bulldogs would've gone for two) but was upended less than a foot from pay dirt. It was a back-and-forth game with each team recording a pick-six. Quarterback Barrett Trotter, Cam Newton's replacement, had a second straight efficient day throwing the ball.
Gene Chizik said: "Are we a great football team right now? No. Not even close. But the identity of the team is starting to form week by week because they will fight. They will not look at the scoreboard, and that's been one of the trademarks that we've really tried to instill in these guys that we are not looking for the scoreboard until it says 0:00 because everything else in-between does not matter."
Blog reaction: "What fans witnessed on this hot, humid afternoon epitomizes everything there is to love about the game and Auburn football. On a day when Miss State and its fans arrived in swarms for its coronation into the SEC elite, Auburn and its band of no-names picked up its 17th straight win."
-- Game 3: Clemson 38, #21 Auburn 24 (2-1)
Game story: Tigers vs. Tigers. Early on it looked like Auburn would notch another point for SEC superiority, holding a 14-0 lead at the end of the 1st quarter and 21-7 midway through the 2nd. But it was all Clemson after that; the ACC's Tigers tied it up by halftime, and dominated the second half to strike a blow for the Atlantic Coast. This was the Sammy Watkins debutante party - Auburn had no answer for him whatsoever, and he had his season high in catches and yards with 10 and 155 respectively, on national TV no less.
It was a second terrific game for Mike Dyer, but Barrett Trotter was only 12-for-25 against the Clemson defense. Travante Stallworth led the team in receiving for the second time in three games, but he would disappear after this game, catching just three more passes all season. And on defense, Auburn gave up 624 yards.
Gene Chizik said: "The first quarter is probably the best that we've played. After the end of the second quarter, I felt like we were a very below average football team."
Blog reaction: "It's time for some Auburn people to face reality. This team is not winning nine games. It's not defying the odds on the way to Atlanta.** Intelligent Auburn people know it. For our less intelligent brethren, we need to do a little education. Roof is not stupid and Malzahn is still among the best offensive coordinators in the country. Nothing has changed."
**note - meaning the SECCG, not the bowl game.
-- Game 4: Auburn 30, Florida Atlantic 14 (3-1)
Game story: A lackluster game against a really shitty team (FAU finished 1-11) saw a mildly disgruntled crowd at a not-full Jordan-Hare stadium. Auburn led just 10-6 at the half, could never get its running game on track, and finished with 315 yards of offense - eight more than FAU. Auburn's defense bent (a lot) but didn't break; the score of 14 was achieved with two field goals plus a late touchdown against Auburn's bench. The defense gathered a pick-six in the opening minutes of the second half to gain a little breathing room, and by the beginning of the fourth quarter, the game was mercifully in hand. Receiver Trovon Reed would miss the next month or so with a shoulder injury suffered in this game.
Gene Chizik said: "Gentlemen, what the fuck was that?"
Gene Chizik didn't say that. At least, not to the media. Chizik actually said: "We didn't play like we wanted to play the whole night, but we certainly showed a lot of improvement in my opinion."
Blog reaction: "An Auburn bowl bid seems highly unlikely at this point. On record as a defender of the Auburn coaching staff this season, Saturday was a step backwards. Who cares that the defensive stats were vastly improved. Against arguably the worst offense in college football, the Auburn defense continued to surrender way too many yards and miss easy tackles."
-- Game 5: Auburn 16, #10 South Carolina 13 (4-1)
Game story: Much-maligned thanks to the previous couple weeks, the Auburn defense stepped up to the task and helped Auburn to its best win all season. Barrett Trotter only threw for 112 yards, and Michael Dyer needed a whopping 41 carries to grind out his 141 yards, but the offense came up with a game-winning drive in the fourth-quarter, and South Carolina's two-minute offense fell short. Auburn picked off Stephen Garcia twice and held him to 9-of-23 passing, and also blocked a PAT. Trotter was also intercepted twice, and South Carolina actually came up with four interceptions overall, two of them coming when the Tigers tried to get fancypants with the play-calling. Probably the biggest thing Auburn did, though, was hold the Gamecocks' all-world running back Marcus Lattimore to 66 yards.
Gene Chizik said: "At the end of the day, you're looking at one of the Heisman Trophy leaders and we said we had to stop him; and that happened tonight."
Blog reaction**: "A little bit of swagger returned Saturday night. It's something that should serve Auburn well going forward. Suddenly a team that was hoping for a bowl bid is now playing for much more."
**At first I clicked on the headline, "A Day To Remember." That seemed like the logical place to find a narrative about a big win. Nope: amusing colonoscopy story. I think I like this blog. Seriously.
-- Game 6: #10 Arkansas 38, #15 Auburn 14 (4-2)
Game story: For the second week in a row, Auburn went on the road to face a #10 team. It didn't go so good this time. Auburn led 14-7 after one quarter and spent the rest of the time getting smoked. Barrett Trotter was a miserable 6-of-19 for 81 yards, and this game was the beginning of the end of his time as a starter. Clint Moseley and freshman Kiehl Frazier were inserted at various points.
The run game was more than effective; Frazier, Dyer, and Onterio McCalebb combined for 47 carries and 257 yards, and Auburn racked up 291 total. But the passing game was horrible, and the defense was bad; the backbreaker was a 92-yard TD run by the Hogs' Joe Adams in the third quarter to put Arkansas up by two touchdowns.
Gene Chizik said: "We did all the things tonight, all the classic things, that lead to losing. We turned the ball over on the road, dropped balls, guys who were wide open and we can't hit them, the ball going through guys' hands."
Blog reaction: "Now Auburn coaches face the inevitable fork in the road. We suspected the time was coming. The question is simple to ask, yet hard to answer. What does Auburn do about its quarterback situation? ... Things are not going to magically change in the coming weeks. Auburn caught a break in beating Miss State and South Carolina - teams that were far less than advertised in the preseason. The same may hold true when Florida comes visiting Saturday night."
-- Game 7: #24 Auburn 17, Florida 6 (5-2)
Game story: Trotter threw a touchdown pass in the first half and Auburn took a 7-6 lead to halftime, but that was one of only two Trotter completions in the entire half. When the Tigers took the field in the second half, the reins had been handed to Clint Moseley. Permanently. Moseley was not exactly awesome, but the offense moved better than it had.
Which isn't saying much, at least as far as this game was concerned. Defenses ruled the day; Auburn held the Gators to 194 total yards, and only got 278 of their own. Half of that came on six plays; Auburn averaged 2.3 yards on the others. The Tigers converted just one of 13 third-down attempts, but the defense played maybe its best game of the year, so it mattered little.
Gene Chizik said: "Dominant. I think that is the only word you could use. Probably 40 or 50 yards of their offense came on the last drive when we knew they had two scores. I couldn't be more proud."
Blog reaction: "There's been nothing pretty about the season except for the results."
-- Game 8: #1 LSU 45, #20 Auburn 10 (5-3)
Game story: Except for a few pass attempts by Kiehl Frazier, the job under center belonged to Clint Moseley; Barrett Trotter was relegated to clipboard duty and in fact has not thrown a pass since the Florida game. It didn't matter here. LSU registered about forty sacks (actually six) in a game that wasn't even as close as the final score - and the final score showed a five-TD loss for the Tigers. The Auburn ones. Man, I'm glad we have a nickname - two, actually - that nobody else has.
Gene Chizik said: "It's really difficult to really assess how [Moseley] did. Six sacks are unacceptable. You don't win any football games by allowing six sacks. That was an anemic job of protecting the quarterback. We have a lot of work to do and a lot of research to do to figure out how to stop the bleeding in that regard."
Blog reaction: "From the start, it was clear that LSU had the better team. Auburn's offensive line looked like a New Orleans levy trying to hold off Katrina. It's hard to imagine a better team in college football this season..."
-- Game 9: #23 Auburn 41, Mississippi 23 (6-3)
Game story: Moseley finally had a chance to get his feet under him, and the results were very positive: four touchdown passes. He was helped by a 177-yard performance from Dyer, too. This was a tie game at halftime, 17-17, and the Auburn defense probably needed a kick in the pants; whatever they got, it worked, because Ole Miss only racked up 38 yards in the third quarter and then threw 20 of them away on sack/IG penalty. Auburn scored 24 straight points in the second half before Ole Miss tacked on a meaningless touchdown as time expired.
Gene Chizik said: "At halftime, we made a lot of great adjustments, adjusting defensively to some of the run game that we needed to get under control that in the first half got away from us a little bit. Coach (Ted) Roof and the defensive staff did a really nice job with that. ... The great thing about our team up to this point is that we haven't lost twice in a row. We have not let one loss beat us twice in a row and for a young football team, I think that speaks highly of them."
Blog reaction: "I remember it like it was yesterday. Sitting in a hotel in Atlanta on a cold December day, the news hit me like a case of malaria. Auburn had settled on Iowa State's Gene Chizik as its new coach. It was official: Auburn was circling the drain of college football. On December 13, 2008, I wrote, 'To say this move (hiring Chizik) is shocking is an understatement. For many Auburn fans, this is a worst case scenario. There appears to be little logic in the choice.' I've never been more wrong about anything in my life. ... Gene Chizik continues to be the gift that keeps on giving."
-- Game 10: #15 Georgia 45, #20 Auburn 7 (6-4)
Game story: Coming off a win and a bye week, Auburn had some hopes for this game; the result was their worst of the season. The Bulldogs dominated every facet of the game, racking up 528 yards to Auburn's 195. After Auburn tied it at 7 in the first quarter, Georgia rolled up five touchdowns and a field goal for 38 unanswered points. Not much to say, because the game was just hideous for Auburn fans.
Gene Chizik said: "It was pretty evident what we couldn't do, and that was a lot. ... We didn't cover many people all night, couldn't stop the run and turned the ball over. That's why we got beat 45-7."
Blog reaction: "While basking in the glow of seven wins in nine years over Alabama, the Georgia rivalry has become a horror show for the Auburn football program. With Saturday's humiliating beat down in Athens, Auburn has now lost five of its last six games to its second biggest rival."
-- Game 11: #24 Auburn 35, Samford 16 (7-4)
Game story: It was another bad day for the Auburn defense. Some I-AA teams have the capacity to upset even quality I-A teams; Samford should not be one of them, but there they were in the third quarter, trailing the defending national champions by just 14-13. Perhaps they were simply tired of facing teams named the Bulldogs.
Fortunately for the Tigers, Auburn pulled away late, and disaster was averted. After Samford made it 21-16 with a field goal, a short kickoff and a long runback gave Auburn excellent field position in Samford territory, and they capitalized with a 22-yard TD run by the normally not-mobile Moseley; the game was essentially salted away after that. They were aided by yet another 150+ yard day from Michael Dyer.
Gene Chizik said: " I can make all kinds of excuses about how at times we didn't play well. I can pull them out of the kitchen sink now, but the reality of it is there were times where they played really well and there were times where we didn't."
Blog reaction: (whatever it's Alabama week)
-- Game 12: #2 Alabama 42, #24 Auburn 14
Game story: Last year, Auburn's title hopes looked shot at halftime of the Alabama game; they fixed that problem with a comeback that no doubt will live in semi-immortality in Auburn lore. This year, the Tigers again found themselves down 24-7 at halftime of the Iron Bowl, and an 83-yard kick return for a TD by Onterio McCalebb to start the second half got people wondering if we were in for a sequel.
It wasn't to be. Alabama responded with a field goal, and then two touchdowns in the fourth, to put away the henceforth scoreless Tigers. Auburn couldn't do anything about Heisman candidate running back Trent Richardson, who piled up 203 yards. And Clint Moseley only tallied 62 yards through the air. For the second straight year, the Iron Bowl winner went on to play for the national title, but the script got flipped on Auburn in 2011.
Gene Chizik said: "It's been a lot of ups and downs this season for 12 games, and we've had some really good things occur in our 12 game season, and we've had some disappointments. This is certainly one of the huge disappointments."
Blog reaction: "From the start things never felt right. Not since the lowly days of the Doug Barfield era has a lead up to the Iron Bowl felt so hopeless. As ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit noted on air Saturday morning, there were few believers among the Auburn faithful. Of course, it didn't take Danny Sheridan to tell Auburn fans what was ahead. The reality had set in weeks ago. Alabama's manhandling of Auburn was the most complete beating Auburn has taken at home in a generation."
******************************************
So, what lessons have we learned?
Well, Auburn fans, and probably the pundits as well, will point out that Auburn has generally faced a much better level of competition than UVA has. True; there was nothing like LSU or Alabama on our schedule, and the closest we came to a Georgia or an Arkansas was Virginia Tech. Florida State has talent approximating what UGA and Arkansas bring, but probably is not coached as well.
The counter to that is that in the games where Auburn was playing really bad competition, they mostly stunk. They won, but they stunk. Florida Atlantic racked up 20 first downs after getting one the previous week. Ole Miss was tied at halftime. Samford was behind by one in the third quarter. Utah State was up by ten with 3:38 to go. Auburn pulled out wins in all of these, but none can be said to have been inspiring. They also generally got blown out of the water by all that great competition.
In general, they appeared to have all the hallmarks of a very young team. Like duh. They graduated Cam Newton and Nick Fairley and pretty much everyone else that was any good, and started a bunch of young dudes in their places. It showed. Horrible performances at times; and then again, holding the electric Marcus Lattimore (pre-injury) to 66 yards. And a dominant performance against Florida. (Florida's offense sucks this year, but still.)
Auburn spent most of the year ranked, but largely, I think, due to a predisposition by the media to rank SEC teams. (They were never really punished for the parade of ass-beatings they received.) I don't think they deserved to be ranked, and my Blogpoll ballots showed as much. Today, neither Virginia nor Auburn is in the AP top 25, though Virginia has five votes from somewhere.
It was kind of a tumultuous season. Quarterback controversies, the firing of the defensive coordinator, and a general feeling that the offensive coordinator eventually will move on to a head coaching position. (Gus Malzahn did supposedly interview for the UNC job before they hired Larry Fedora.) Auburn never lost consecutive games all year, and after the Arkansas loss in early October, didn't win consecutive games either. Starting with that game, they alternated results. It resulted in a lot of up and down feelings.
To compare with UVA's season, the best win between the two teams is the South Carolina one for Auburn, followed by UVA's win over FSU. Both were on the road. Besides that, Auburn's only wins over winning teams were those over 6-5 Samford and 7-5 Utah State. Auburn beat four bowl-eligible teams and three with winning records; UVA beat three and two, respectively. The Tigers didn't lose any games they shouldn't have. Came close, but didn't. It's sort of an unimpressive 7-5, but you might say the same about UVA's 8-4 if you didn't take the change in QB philosophy into account. By contrast, it's much harder to say if Auburn's QB switch improved matters.
Next week, we'll tackle the Auburn offense. (Geddit? Tackle?) Gus Malzahn is a hurry-up, no-huddle, spread kinda guy, making things interesting for the UVA defense.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
the recruit: Greyson Lambert
Name: Greyson Lambert
Position: QB
Hometown: Jesup, GA
School: Wayne County
Height: 6'5"
Weight: 208
24/7: 91; four stars; #9 pro-style QB; GA #25
ESPN: 78; three stars; #38 QB; GA #53; Southeast #224
Rivals: 5.7; three stars; #23 QB; GA #28
Scout: four stars; #8 QB
Other offers: Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Clemson, Miami, NC State, Purdue, Boston College, Mississippi State, Louisville
Admit it: You figured we were shutting down QB recruiting after we got one early. You figured that even without Matt Johns, we probably didn't have a real shot at Greyson Lambert because he had all those offers from way-southern schools, and he's a way-southern kid, and guys with attention from Alabama and Georgia don't pick Virginia. We all figured that.
With Lambert in the fold, and likely to enroll at UVA in January as well, a common phrase during the early part of the season was, "The quarterback of 2012 isn't on Grounds yet." Sometimes that was a comment on the state of quarterback play from the current crop, but (and I say this meaning as little disrespect as possible to Matt Johns) when people said that, they didn't have Matt Johns in mind.
The thing about Alabama offers is that you have to parse them out. Michael Strauss was listed with an Alabama offer, but it wasn't one really. Neither was Lambert's at first. Alabama likes to give out placeholder offers, and Alabama had a couple other, higher-priority choices. (They're Alabama and they think even more highly of themselves than that, so instead of recruiting a bunch of kids hoping they'll get one, they line up priorities and target them one by one. At least at quarterback.) Gunner Kiel was one, but once Kiel committed to Indiana (he has since decommitted) Lambert was squarely in Nick Saban's crosshairs. It's a testament to Mike London's recruiting chops that Lambert can be legitimately said to have picked Virginia over Alabama, and mind you UGA as well.
It was a video that did it, by the way. London wasn't there when Lambert visited, so he recorded a Dear Greyson video, which Lambert was duly impressed with. This is the difference between London and a regular coach. Remember that Eli Harold was considering Florida before his UVA commitment; I don't recall whether or not Harold ever actually made it to Gainesville for a visit, but I do recall that he had to reschedule one when he learned that Will Muschamp wasn't gonna be in town. Most coaches reschedule visits. London decided to roll differently. That's our boy.
For a guy whose visibility is no problem, the scouting services are awfully rangy on Lambert. Scout thinks he's the #8 quarterback in the country. Not just pro-style; overall. ESPN gives him an awfully middling review. To Scout, technique is a minus and arm strength is a plus:
ESPN's review is the bizarro-Scout:
So that's certainly confusing. Lambert's highlights are too choppy and blurry to see for oneself. He definitely has the size, though; at 6'5" and probably pushing 210, maybe 215 by the time next season starts, he's already got prototypical NFL size and projectability in that department. With that size it's little wonder that the scouting reports do consistently suggest good field vision and good skills at reading a defense. Between Scout (rocket-armed granite statue) and ESPN (semi-mobile technique artist) are the two rankings that are probably closer to reality.
Because let's be honest, expectations are almost always a bad thing when it comes to quarterbacks. Everyone is always enamored of the idea of the true freshman who can step in immediately and set every school passing record in four years. Mostly that's an unattainable ideal. The last quarterback to come in with Greyson Lambert's pedigree was Peter Lalich, and he was ready for neither the on-field nor off-field demands of the job when it was handed to him. What you really want is a nice, steady parade of quarterbacks who are game-ready when it's their turn, and give you little to no dropoff from one to the next.
Fortunately for both the present and the future, Mike Rocco put a lot of that "2012 QB isn't here yet" talk to rest this year. Rocco has his weaknesses, but he's a sophomore for crying out loud. If he has to defend his job in spring camp it'll be an injustice and a half. And that's great news for our quarterback progression. If Lambert had to jump in with both feet and be The Man from 2012 on out, I think 2012 would be awfully rough. Lambert is good, but not, like, otherworldly. And QBs can be ruined if they're handed the job too early. Both incoming quarterbacks can be safely redshirted in 2012, and also watch from the sidelines during 2013. And then, as redshirt sophomores in 2014, it's game on. (The wild card being - how will David Watford develop? And what happens in 2013 recruiting?) Matt Johns put up some really gaudy numbers this year and won't give up the QB competition without a fight, but I suspect by 2014 the coaches will have a pretty good idea of who they want to succeed Rocco. Right now I'd put the best odds on Lambert.
Position: QB
Hometown: Jesup, GA
School: Wayne County
Height: 6'5"
Weight: 208
24/7: 91; four stars; #9 pro-style QB; GA #25
ESPN: 78; three stars; #38 QB; GA #53; Southeast #224
Rivals: 5.7; three stars; #23 QB; GA #28
Scout: four stars; #8 QB
Other offers: Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Clemson, Miami, NC State, Purdue, Boston College, Mississippi State, Louisville
Admit it: You figured we were shutting down QB recruiting after we got one early. You figured that even without Matt Johns, we probably didn't have a real shot at Greyson Lambert because he had all those offers from way-southern schools, and he's a way-southern kid, and guys with attention from Alabama and Georgia don't pick Virginia. We all figured that.
With Lambert in the fold, and likely to enroll at UVA in January as well, a common phrase during the early part of the season was, "The quarterback of 2012 isn't on Grounds yet." Sometimes that was a comment on the state of quarterback play from the current crop, but (and I say this meaning as little disrespect as possible to Matt Johns) when people said that, they didn't have Matt Johns in mind.
The thing about Alabama offers is that you have to parse them out. Michael Strauss was listed with an Alabama offer, but it wasn't one really. Neither was Lambert's at first. Alabama likes to give out placeholder offers, and Alabama had a couple other, higher-priority choices. (They're Alabama and they think even more highly of themselves than that, so instead of recruiting a bunch of kids hoping they'll get one, they line up priorities and target them one by one. At least at quarterback.) Gunner Kiel was one, but once Kiel committed to Indiana (he has since decommitted) Lambert was squarely in Nick Saban's crosshairs. It's a testament to Mike London's recruiting chops that Lambert can be legitimately said to have picked Virginia over Alabama, and mind you UGA as well.
It was a video that did it, by the way. London wasn't there when Lambert visited, so he recorded a Dear Greyson video, which Lambert was duly impressed with. This is the difference between London and a regular coach. Remember that Eli Harold was considering Florida before his UVA commitment; I don't recall whether or not Harold ever actually made it to Gainesville for a visit, but I do recall that he had to reschedule one when he learned that Will Muschamp wasn't gonna be in town. Most coaches reschedule visits. London decided to roll differently. That's our boy.
For a guy whose visibility is no problem, the scouting services are awfully rangy on Lambert. Scout thinks he's the #8 quarterback in the country. Not just pro-style; overall. ESPN gives him an awfully middling review. To Scout, technique is a minus and arm strength is a plus:
"....his arm strength speaks for itself. His arm and size are his biggest strengths, but he really needs to work on his footwork and mobility."
ESPN's review is the bizarro-Scout:
"....consistent, quick feet.....a good enough athlete to move around and buy time for a second passing chance. ... However, the question with Lambert is does he have a great arm? He lacks great power, zip and ability to drive the ball vertically and into tight spots in our opinion for the next level."
So that's certainly confusing. Lambert's highlights are too choppy and blurry to see for oneself. He definitely has the size, though; at 6'5" and probably pushing 210, maybe 215 by the time next season starts, he's already got prototypical NFL size and projectability in that department. With that size it's little wonder that the scouting reports do consistently suggest good field vision and good skills at reading a defense. Between Scout (rocket-armed granite statue) and ESPN (semi-mobile technique artist) are the two rankings that are probably closer to reality.
Because let's be honest, expectations are almost always a bad thing when it comes to quarterbacks. Everyone is always enamored of the idea of the true freshman who can step in immediately and set every school passing record in four years. Mostly that's an unattainable ideal. The last quarterback to come in with Greyson Lambert's pedigree was Peter Lalich, and he was ready for neither the on-field nor off-field demands of the job when it was handed to him. What you really want is a nice, steady parade of quarterbacks who are game-ready when it's their turn, and give you little to no dropoff from one to the next.
Fortunately for both the present and the future, Mike Rocco put a lot of that "2012 QB isn't here yet" talk to rest this year. Rocco has his weaknesses, but he's a sophomore for crying out loud. If he has to defend his job in spring camp it'll be an injustice and a half. And that's great news for our quarterback progression. If Lambert had to jump in with both feet and be The Man from 2012 on out, I think 2012 would be awfully rough. Lambert is good, but not, like, otherworldly. And QBs can be ruined if they're handed the job too early. Both incoming quarterbacks can be safely redshirted in 2012, and also watch from the sidelines during 2013. And then, as redshirt sophomores in 2014, it's game on. (The wild card being - how will David Watford develop? And what happens in 2013 recruiting?) Matt Johns put up some really gaudy numbers this year and won't give up the QB competition without a fight, but I suspect by 2014 the coaches will have a pretty good idea of who they want to succeed Rocco. Right now I'd put the best odds on Lambert.
season preview: Clemson
Clemson Tigers
Media prediction: 7th
Last season:
Record: 22-12 (9-7) - ACC 4th seed
Postseason: NCAA tournament 1st round
KenPom: 22nd of 345
Returning scoring: 56.1%
Returning rebounding: 54.5%
Returning assists: 55.2%
2010-11 All-ACC:
1st team: none
2nd team: none
3rd team: G Demontez Stitt
HM: F Jerai Grant
Rookie:
Defensive: F Jerai Grant
(Italics indicate departed player.)
Starting lineup:
PG: Andre Young (Sr.)
SG: Rod Hall (Fr.)
SF: Tanner Smith (Sr.)
PF: Milton Jennings (Jr.)
C: Devin Booker (Jr.)
Bench:
G T.J. Sapp (Fr.)
F Bryan Narcisse (Sr.)
C Catalin Baciu (Sr.)
F K.J. McDaniels (Fr.)
Coach: Brad Brownell (2nd year)
ACC schedule:
Twice: Florida State, Georgia Tech, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest
Once: Boston College, Duke, Maryland, Miami, North Carolina, NC State
Jokes and bugs on Rivals aside, Clemson is kind of picking itself up from the floor a little bit after the unexpected departure of Oliver Purnell to DePaul. (There has got to be something we don't know about that whole thing.) The coaching changed caused a little upheaval, and like Boston College only with about one-thousandth the magnitude, Clemson had a good season last year but needs to rebuild a little bit now.
The reason is that their top two scorers graduated and haven't been adequately replaced. Clemson lost one each from the frontcourt and backcourt and guys who are best used as third or fourth options are now being asked to be go-to guys. Andre Young is a weapon and the exception to this statement; Young has really stepped up his shot this year and does an excellent job of taking care of the ball. He's a very efficient offensive player, and it might be in his team's best interest if he got a little more selfish. However, Young is 5'9, 170, and obviously has quicks but no size, and can be posted up.
Clemson does rebound well and plays solid defense; despite a slow, Bennett-esque tempo to their games, both Tanner Smith and Devin Booker average better than 7 boards a game, and each is currently also averaging 9.7 points. With those three plus Milton Jennings, there is a solid frontcourt here.
However, that's only in the starting lineup. Take any one of them out of the game and Clemson has little better than replacement-level talent. Romanian-born Catalin Baciu is a whopping 7-foot-2, but has never been able to translate that into gaudy stats. The other hole in the lineup is at shooting guard; the one place where you ought to be able to find scoring, there is none. Clemson brought in a five-man freshman class this year and they seem to be getting playing time in reverse order of recruiting ratings. Rod Hall stepped into the starting lineup to replace T.J. Sapp; both were the lightly-recruited side of the class and they account for most of the minutes played by freshmen. Neither is an integral part of the offense, though Sapp has shown a three-point touch. Meanwhile, one-time UVA offeree Bernard Sullivan has not cracked the rotation.
So there are some pieces of a good team, most notably Young and a solid if not dominant starting frontcourt. But it's been a rough go so far. Other than Iowa in the Challenge (whom they beat), Clemson has yet to play an opponent outside the state of South Carolina, and they're not acquitting themselves well; they are just 3-3 in those games, with losses to College of Charleston, Coastal Carolina, and the very middling South Carolina. And even though it's only the supposedly easy nonconference schedule so far, Clemson is averaging five fewer PPG than in all of last year. Clemson will be a team that's difficult to score against, but not particularly hard to stop, once teams figure out how to keep Andre Young under wraps. Playing FSU, UVA, and VT twice each could earn them six losses right there, and we haven't even gotten to Duke and UNC yet, so I don't see either a winning ACC season or a tournament berth in the cards for Clemson. I think the most this year has to offer for the Tigers is a CBI invite or a first-round loss in the NIT.
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Speaking of hooptyball, last night saw the final UVA contest of the preliminary section of the regular season; we now enter the dreaded finals week doldrums. UVA finished up with a very strong homestand, with a win of course over Challenge opponent Michigan and three more of exactly the type you want to have over mid-majors; that is, bench-emptying. And even though they struggled a bit early on, George Mason still looks like a decent bet to end up at or near the top of the CAA - though that may well be a one-bid league this year.
KenPomwise, UVA's performance in the first nine games have moved them as high as the third-best team in the ACC. And sixth-best defense in the country. After the Michigan game, MGoBlog employed the sentence "Tony Bennett is a war crime," which I take as high praise. It is extremely frustrating to watch a suffocating defense at work if you are rooting for the team trying to score on it. This defense caused U-M bloggers to use phrases to describe the U-M offense like "degraded to glorified isolations on far too many plays," "lackluster two point shooting was accompanied by first half turnover woes and little to no production on the offensive glass," "generated basically nothing," and "glarg glarg glarg glarg." I made up none of those. When the other team is reduced to gurgling in frustration - and here is the point we are building to: that is the team that has had the best offensive production against UVA all year! - you are playing some nice defense.
So we got that going for us. I expect it to continue. It is an evil, field-leveling system played by athletes who don't need the field leveled for them, and who are obviously very comfortable and instinctive in it. You can see it running like clockwork every time. Teams like UNC will find ways to score on it, but in general when we lose games this year it'll because the offense got stopped, not because the defense got beat.
After finals break, there is a two-game West Coast swing to Oregon and Seattle. The former should be the toughest remaining test in the OOC, and a win there means UVA likely heads to the ACC schedule with a 13-1 record. Is that good enough for the tournament, assuming business is reasonably well taken care of in the conference? Probably. If the teams we beat cooperate. I'm still going to spend the next three months hoping we don't get Greenberged out.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
annual playoff gripe
If you know me at all, you know I don't want a college football playoff. Believe it or not I'm actually happy with the BCS. I don't like the BCS, at least, not enough to be some kind of staunch defender of it, as if it were the best possible system, but I think it's got its positives. And truth is, college football's three-month regular season is too great to be spoiled by a playoff. How much do you care about basketball's regular season? The only people for whom it really matters are the bubble teams, and even then only in retrospect (oh, if only we'd beaten so-and-so.)
I'm in the minority, of course, so in order to be in the majority I have my own idea for a playoff, since everyone does. You can read that here, and you probably should, or some of this might not make sense. (One thing: if you've read it in the past, you might notice a few changes this time. Normally I keep changes so it doesn't look like I'm covering up mistakes, but that's an important page and I don't want it to have a thousand words struck out, it would get cluttered. You'll get the gist.) Anyway, I don't want a playoff, no - but if we must, that'd be the one I'd want. Why is it better than everyone else's?
One, because of the way I went about constructing it. When people say, "gee, I'd really like to see this idea," they start with their own happyland wishes and go from there. Then when you point out problems and why it couldn't occur, they say, "well, we could change this and this and then it would work." These decisions are made by actual stakeholders with stuff at stake. Which they lose if they do it wrong. You have to try and get in their heads and figure out what they want, and go from there. This is what I've tried to do. To put this in quick and dirty terms, most people pick up their favorite-shaped square peg and try to change the hole. I have analyzed the hole and tried to find the best peg to fit it.
Two, because with my idea you can have your cake and eat it too. Right now football is like a five-year old's birthday party with delicious chocolate cake. Everyone likes cake. Some people like a different kind of cake, and complain that they want a different flavor, but they're gonna eat the cake anyway because it's irresistible. (Except for the one five-year old, screaming and throwing a huge temper tantrum in the corner.**)
Well, the FOV playoff lets you playoff lovers have your delicious cake of whatever flavor, and us bowl and regular season lovers have ours. Let me give you the very basics:
-- 16 teams, arranged in what we'll call the Big East Style (Biggie Style if you say it fast) because it's how the Big East arranges its basketball tournament. Double byes for the top four teams, single byes for 5 through 8.
-- Play the first three rounds in the first three weekends of December so that the losers can play in bowls. And play them at home sites.
-- Eight conference champions are autobidded, based on some kind of RPI-esque ranking system. Eight more teams are chosen by a competition committee from an at-large pool that consists of the three non-autobidded champions plus the top X number of teams in the RPI-esque system. Whatever you want X to be, I don't care.
It's that simple. Well, there are other details, but please click through to the playoff proposal post since I've already typed 'em up and I don't want to duplicate the effort. Since there's already the equivalent of a two-team playoff, it would only require one bowl's worth of teams extra - 12 playoff losers can go to a bowl, and only the Football Final Four would be held out of the bowl process. Bowl invites could get interesting. Clemson might well be ticketed again for the Orange Bowl, but what if they win out? Maybe the Orange Bowl then contracts to take the team they beat. Or - also intriguing - perhaps playoff performance helps determine bowl eligibility; bowls such as the Sugar and Orange might agree to take only those teams which got past the first round of the playoffs. Lots of possibilities.
If I were made king of college football, of course, there'd be other changes besides. No bowls after the first weekend in January, or January 3rd, whichever is earlier. No "Capital One Bowl." Fuck you and put your real name back on the game. Bowls will be played in ascending order of importance, except that the Rose Bowl will always be on New Year's Day. None of this Weedeater.com Bowl stuff on January 8. But don't confuse these for problems with the system. This is the fault of the idiots in charge of it.
Anyway, this post largely exists to give you a taste of what this could look like this year. I'm not going to list out all the bowls, either, but you'd still get them, of course. And because the first three rounds are all played at home, instead of traveling to, like, Colorado Springs or something like in the NCAA tournament, it feels more like an extension of the regular season than a postseason. Twelve teams get to host a game. That's good stuff that will make ADs feel happy. I am a competition committee of one for this exercise, so here is your 2011 FOV playoff:
Is beautiful, no? In this way, regular season protectionists (like myself) can be satisfied, because it separates the teams into four distinct tiers: host a third-round game, host a second-round game, host a first-round game, get your ass on the road. Here we have eight conference winners and eight at-large choices, and you can quibble with my choices all you want but if you do, that's kind of the point - playoffs don't really make any controversy disappear.
I don't hold any illusions about the powers-that-be being this creative, though. If the choice were between the current system and this, give me this. But that doesn't make me pro-playoff - if the choice were between the current system and some of the crap being peddled these days, give me the BCS all day. Sadly, I think the playoff debate is skewed by people who confuse "I want MY playoff" with "I want A playoff." Let's be honest with ourselves: the people in charge of this are the ones who brought you the BCS in the first place and are about to place San Diego State in a conference called the "Big East." If you've been telling yourself "anything but the BCS" do you really trust them to come up with something you'll like? Join my miniscule army and let's get this bad boy approved instead.
**Seriously: Dan Wetzel is no longer a credible or objective reporter when it comes to the BCS. He has written uncountable scathing attack pieces and a scathing attack book called "Death to the BCS" - this removes any shred of objectivity when he reports on it. He has an agenda. Period. As an opinion columnist, he is perfectly entitled to one, but when he tweets made-up bullshit like this, you are required to remember that he has an agenda. He wrote a book based on that agenda. That agenda involves making the BCS look as bad as possible. Objectivity: zero.
I'm in the minority, of course, so in order to be in the majority I have my own idea for a playoff, since everyone does. You can read that here, and you probably should, or some of this might not make sense. (One thing: if you've read it in the past, you might notice a few changes this time. Normally I keep changes so it doesn't look like I'm covering up mistakes, but that's an important page and I don't want it to have a thousand words struck out, it would get cluttered. You'll get the gist.) Anyway, I don't want a playoff, no - but if we must, that'd be the one I'd want. Why is it better than everyone else's?
One, because of the way I went about constructing it. When people say, "gee, I'd really like to see this idea," they start with their own happyland wishes and go from there. Then when you point out problems and why it couldn't occur, they say, "well, we could change this and this and then it would work." These decisions are made by actual stakeholders with stuff at stake. Which they lose if they do it wrong. You have to try and get in their heads and figure out what they want, and go from there. This is what I've tried to do. To put this in quick and dirty terms, most people pick up their favorite-shaped square peg and try to change the hole. I have analyzed the hole and tried to find the best peg to fit it.
Two, because with my idea you can have your cake and eat it too. Right now football is like a five-year old's birthday party with delicious chocolate cake. Everyone likes cake. Some people like a different kind of cake, and complain that they want a different flavor, but they're gonna eat the cake anyway because it's irresistible. (Except for the one five-year old, screaming and throwing a huge temper tantrum in the corner.**)
Well, the FOV playoff lets you playoff lovers have your delicious cake of whatever flavor, and us bowl and regular season lovers have ours. Let me give you the very basics:
-- 16 teams, arranged in what we'll call the Big East Style (Biggie Style if you say it fast) because it's how the Big East arranges its basketball tournament. Double byes for the top four teams, single byes for 5 through 8.
-- Play the first three rounds in the first three weekends of December so that the losers can play in bowls. And play them at home sites.
-- Eight conference champions are autobidded, based on some kind of RPI-esque ranking system. Eight more teams are chosen by a competition committee from an at-large pool that consists of the three non-autobidded champions plus the top X number of teams in the RPI-esque system. Whatever you want X to be, I don't care.
It's that simple. Well, there are other details, but please click through to the playoff proposal post since I've already typed 'em up and I don't want to duplicate the effort. Since there's already the equivalent of a two-team playoff, it would only require one bowl's worth of teams extra - 12 playoff losers can go to a bowl, and only the Football Final Four would be held out of the bowl process. Bowl invites could get interesting. Clemson might well be ticketed again for the Orange Bowl, but what if they win out? Maybe the Orange Bowl then contracts to take the team they beat. Or - also intriguing - perhaps playoff performance helps determine bowl eligibility; bowls such as the Sugar and Orange might agree to take only those teams which got past the first round of the playoffs. Lots of possibilities.
If I were made king of college football, of course, there'd be other changes besides. No bowls after the first weekend in January, or January 3rd, whichever is earlier. No "Capital One Bowl." Fuck you and put your real name back on the game. Bowls will be played in ascending order of importance, except that the Rose Bowl will always be on New Year's Day. None of this Weedeater.com Bowl stuff on January 8. But don't confuse these for problems with the system. This is the fault of the idiots in charge of it.
Anyway, this post largely exists to give you a taste of what this could look like this year. I'm not going to list out all the bowls, either, but you'd still get them, of course. And because the first three rounds are all played at home, instead of traveling to, like, Colorado Springs or something like in the NCAA tournament, it feels more like an extension of the regular season than a postseason. Twelve teams get to host a game. That's good stuff that will make ADs feel happy. I am a competition committee of one for this exercise, so here is your 2011 FOV playoff:
I don't hold any illusions about the powers-that-be being this creative, though. If the choice were between the current system and this, give me this. But that doesn't make me pro-playoff - if the choice were between the current system and some of the crap being peddled these days, give me the BCS all day. Sadly, I think the playoff debate is skewed by people who confuse "I want MY playoff" with "I want A playoff." Let's be honest with ourselves: the people in charge of this are the ones who brought you the BCS in the first place and are about to place San Diego State in a conference called the "Big East." If you've been telling yourself "anything but the BCS" do you really trust them to come up with something you'll like? Join my miniscule army and let's get this bad boy approved instead.
**Seriously: Dan Wetzel is no longer a credible or objective reporter when it comes to the BCS. He has written uncountable scathing attack pieces and a scathing attack book called "Death to the BCS" - this removes any shred of objectivity when he reports on it. He has an agenda. Period. As an opinion columnist, he is perfectly entitled to one, but when he tweets made-up bullshit like this, you are required to remember that he has an agenda. He wrote a book based on that agenda. That agenda involves making the BCS look as bad as possible. Objectivity: zero.
Monday, December 5, 2011
weekend review, bowling edition
Caution - Less of a standard weekend review and more of a bowl weekend manifesto.
In most years I'd be silently gnashing my teeth and stewing over VT's selection to the Sugar Bowl. Of course I am not doing this. I am serene and happy. Obviously this is because we're going Peach Bowling on New Year's Eve because of it, and now I can look at the bright side of everything. The ACC gets extra BCS moolah, VT will probably get killed on the field and already got killed in the realm of public opinion, and on the chance they win (heaven forbid because that's my other team they're playing) the ACC will probably have two BCS wins under its belt. Which would be a step or two closer to restoring the ACC's football rep.
Speaking of the BCS, it is Hate the BCS Day in blog circles, and if you don't say something criticizing it, the blog police come and take your license. So here's my criticism: it is too bad the BCS didn't nut up a couple years ago and kick the Big East out. Since that's totally irrelevant to this year's lineup, here's another one. It is a conspiracy theory, so get your tinfoil hats ready. The problem, as I see it through Zapruder's movie camera, is that having the SEC in the title game has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. How so? Pollsters think, "The SEC is the best conference." The next logical step is to look at whichever SEC team has beaten all the other ones, and think, "Since they have beaten all these SEC teams, they have the best resume," and rank accordingly. Lo and behold, the SEC shows up at the top. Evidence for this? The fact that people think teams like Arkansas are really, really good. Objective, records-and-rankings-based lineups of their resume against, say, Big Ten teams like Michigan, don't hold up. They just don't. Take Arkansas - they squeaked past 6-6 Texas A&M, beat 2-10 Ole Miss by five, beat Troy by 10....and so on. But their only losses are LSU and Alabama, so pollsters think that makes them really good.
The obvious and highly destructive counterargument to my conspiracy theory is that the SEC keeps beating other teams in the championship game. Until they start losing consistently in it, people won't care that the middle of the conference is little better than the Big Ten's. We will see how Kansas State and Nebraska and Michigan State fare against their SEC counterparts.
Surprisingly, though, the SEC-rematch championship game bothers me less than it bothers some people. Wait - no. It bothers me differently. Even though I just spent a whole bunch time railing against the SEC-opoly, honest assessment compels me to say that I actually do think LSU and Alabama have the two best resumes in the country. I haven't updated my blogpoll ballot with the full system to see if the Okla-stomping changes that, but it's at best 50/50. Oklahoma State was below Oklahoma before that, though, so it's iffy. As much as I wanted to punch Nick Saban's smug, classless face on TV yesterday, he's right - Alabama has more or less proven itself.
What bothers me is that the SEC hype machine spent all of 2006's final weekend screaming that there should be no title game rematch between Michigan and Ohio State. Remember this? #1 vs #2, Michigan lost, and "they had their chance. They lost. It's someone else's turn." They lost by three (on the road instead of at home), which sounds familiar. Now you have the SEC hype machine telling us that "this is the system, and it worked. It gave us the two best teams." Bah. I wanted Oklahoma State because I like when a middle-class team gets a shot, but the slobbershow yesterday was nauseating.
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Anyway, enough bitching. People are saying that the BCS produced some terrible matchups this year and the bowl season in general looks flat. I say, they're fucking crazy. What is there to bitch about in these matchups beyond anything you might want to say about OkSt vs. Alabama? Oregon-Wisconsin? That's a great matchup! Stanford-Oklahoma State? That's a fantastic matchup! Michigan-Virginia Tech? That's a great matchup! People who want Kansas State are completely splitting hairs. Is K-State the better team? Yes. Kind of. By a lot? No. Before this weekend I had VT nine spots higher on my ballot anyway. Don't even get me started on Boise State - they beat Georgia, which 15+ other teams in the country can do, and their conference schedule includes Colorado State, UNLV, and New Mexico. When the third-best team in your conference is Wyoming, you do not have a strength of schedule argument. The only semi-dud is Clemson-West Virginia, which admittedly looks more like a Gator Bowl kind of matchup than anything, but shit, they're bowl-eligible - they gotta play somewhere.
By the way, on Boise State, if anyone tells you the Mountain West is an underrated conference and Boise and TCU are deserving of consideration based on past results, ask 'em why the conference can't get any bowl affiliation better than the Las Vegas Bowl against a weak, middling Pac-12 team? These bowl affiilations were not negotiated that long ago, and if the MWC was a really attractive deal, you'd think its champion - usually TCU, possibly Utah back when the affiliations were set - would be in high demand.
Oh, and anyone who says Michigan should be removed in favor of someone - even someone ineligible because of conference restrictions, if you like - should try me. Gimme a someone and I'll tell you why you're wrong.
Lot of other really interesting matchups, too. That's what bowl season does. My own favorites:
- The aforementioned SEC games: MSU-Georgia, Nebraska-South Carolina, KSU-Arkansas. Do you know, I think there's a real chance the SEC could lose all of them - not to mention the possibility that Ohio State will beat Florida and UVA will beat Auburn. All those SEC teams - except for Auburn, admittedly - are matched up against comparable-level teams from other conferences. Time to see what the SEC is made of - I say it is less dominant than believed, and that will play out.
- Penn State-Houston. This is fascinating. Penn State is probably the best defense Houston will see all season, so that's exciting; on the other side of the ball, Houston has got no defense whatsoever which matches up great with Penn State's useless offense. The TicketScalper Bowl lucked into a good one.
P.S. - the party line is that Penn State fell so far because the Sandusky scandal made them poisonous. I don't buy it. Not that there aren't some grains of truth to that, but the fact is, and always was, that Michigan, Nebraska, and both B1GCG participants were going to be ahead of Penn State in the pecking order. All it took to know that was to watch Penn State ugly their way through the conference schedule. The logical landing spot would've been the Gator Bowl, but the Gator Bowl was never gonna pass on Florida, and that's who PSU played last year. It's not at all illogical they wouldn't want to rematch 'em. So they took Ohio State. It's even possible Iowa wasn't available for the Gator, since they and the ex-Copper share a 4/5 pick. At most, Penn State fell one slot below where you'd expect - I don't think their placement is entirely a side effect of Sandusky. At any rate, it should be a very good game.
- I'm also diggin' on BYU-Tulsa, two teams which quietly put together winning seasons.
- And hey, how about the Hunger Bowl. Illinois and UCLA bring a pair of interim coaches to the game because both of them choked away games like it was their job.
- And finally, the CS Bowl had their eye on this matchup for a long time and you knew they weren't gonna let it go: FSU/Notre Dame. FSU is a very talented and underachieving team (uh-oh Jimbo?) and ND has got a lot of talent of its own. That's a great pairing.
I'll leave the bowl stuff behind with this final thought: It's easy to tell that the media types only want to bitch and moan, and have no interest whatsoever in when things actually turn out right. They profess to want things to "turn out right," but never care when they actually do. You might even say it's an anti-BCS agenda, although I wouldn't go that far because when they get what they want and a playoff is eventually instituted, they will continue writing stories about who got screwed and why the system is bullshit. How is it "easy to tell?" Because once VT was placed in the Sugar, even if that was "wrong," the absolute correct team was placed in the Peach, and nobody gives a flying fuck. On pure merit, who-beat-who, Virginia is the right team for the Peach, period, exclamation point. And the closest thing I've seen to a comment on it from the ESPN-types is Heather Dinich sniveling that "this is sort of like being the boss for a day because the boss is sick." Well, guess what: Nick thinks he can do everything from the golf course, Liz is too busy rocking out to Pandora, Mayor Dennis spends all his time at the water cooler, and Matt ignores the boss whenever he's speaking. Maybe we're only in charge because the boss is out today, but guess who's getting the promotion come eval time. There's still something to be said for outperforming one's peers.
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I said I'd try and get to the last remnants of the high school season, and so I will:
- Max Valles is a state champion on one of the most dominating teams that state has ever seen. They outscored opponents 474-19 and haven't allowed a touchdown in seven games. The final score of their state final: 51-0.
- Andre Miles-Redmond and Hermitage suffered what I'd call a slight upset loss to Centreville in the state semis. Not an earthshaking result, but a little bit surprising.
- C.J. Moore and Buford slipped, but didn't fall, and will play for the state title in Georgia next week.
And speaking of recruiting, I wonder when the last time was that I updated the recruiting board. I'm guessing October. London and co. got 2012 done in a hurry, so there hasn't been much to speak of. But it's time to create a little movement:
- Removed FB Nathan Staub from blue, who committed to UNC.
- Removed LB Quanzell Lambert from red; by now I'm sure he and UVA have gone their separate ways, probably quite some time ago.
- Moved RB Wes Brown from red to yellow.
- Moved OT Kyle Fuller, ATH Cyrus Jones, and S Mike Tyson from green to yellow.
- Moved WR Stefon Diggs from yellow to green. I'm not sure the chances of us landing him are really at green levels, but at this stage of the recruiting game I use the colors more as "who you should watch" anyway.
Tune in tomorrow as it will be part two of required football blogging: I present this year's version of my playoff proposal.
In most years I'd be silently gnashing my teeth and stewing over VT's selection to the Sugar Bowl. Of course I am not doing this. I am serene and happy. Obviously this is because we're going Peach Bowling on New Year's Eve because of it, and now I can look at the bright side of everything. The ACC gets extra BCS moolah, VT will probably get killed on the field and already got killed in the realm of public opinion, and on the chance they win (heaven forbid because that's my other team they're playing) the ACC will probably have two BCS wins under its belt. Which would be a step or two closer to restoring the ACC's football rep.
Speaking of the BCS, it is Hate the BCS Day in blog circles, and if you don't say something criticizing it, the blog police come and take your license. So here's my criticism: it is too bad the BCS didn't nut up a couple years ago and kick the Big East out. Since that's totally irrelevant to this year's lineup, here's another one. It is a conspiracy theory, so get your tinfoil hats ready. The problem, as I see it through Zapruder's movie camera, is that having the SEC in the title game has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. How so? Pollsters think, "The SEC is the best conference." The next logical step is to look at whichever SEC team has beaten all the other ones, and think, "Since they have beaten all these SEC teams, they have the best resume," and rank accordingly. Lo and behold, the SEC shows up at the top. Evidence for this? The fact that people think teams like Arkansas are really, really good. Objective, records-and-rankings-based lineups of their resume against, say, Big Ten teams like Michigan, don't hold up. They just don't. Take Arkansas - they squeaked past 6-6 Texas A&M, beat 2-10 Ole Miss by five, beat Troy by 10....and so on. But their only losses are LSU and Alabama, so pollsters think that makes them really good.
The obvious and highly destructive counterargument to my conspiracy theory is that the SEC keeps beating other teams in the championship game. Until they start losing consistently in it, people won't care that the middle of the conference is little better than the Big Ten's. We will see how Kansas State and Nebraska and Michigan State fare against their SEC counterparts.
Surprisingly, though, the SEC-rematch championship game bothers me less than it bothers some people. Wait - no. It bothers me differently. Even though I just spent a whole bunch time railing against the SEC-opoly, honest assessment compels me to say that I actually do think LSU and Alabama have the two best resumes in the country. I haven't updated my blogpoll ballot with the full system to see if the Okla-stomping changes that, but it's at best 50/50. Oklahoma State was below Oklahoma before that, though, so it's iffy. As much as I wanted to punch Nick Saban's smug, classless face on TV yesterday, he's right - Alabama has more or less proven itself.
What bothers me is that the SEC hype machine spent all of 2006's final weekend screaming that there should be no title game rematch between Michigan and Ohio State. Remember this? #1 vs #2, Michigan lost, and "they had their chance. They lost. It's someone else's turn." They lost by three (on the road instead of at home), which sounds familiar. Now you have the SEC hype machine telling us that "this is the system, and it worked. It gave us the two best teams." Bah. I wanted Oklahoma State because I like when a middle-class team gets a shot, but the slobbershow yesterday was nauseating.
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Anyway, enough bitching. People are saying that the BCS produced some terrible matchups this year and the bowl season in general looks flat. I say, they're fucking crazy. What is there to bitch about in these matchups beyond anything you might want to say about OkSt vs. Alabama? Oregon-Wisconsin? That's a great matchup! Stanford-Oklahoma State? That's a fantastic matchup! Michigan-Virginia Tech? That's a great matchup! People who want Kansas State are completely splitting hairs. Is K-State the better team? Yes. Kind of. By a lot? No. Before this weekend I had VT nine spots higher on my ballot anyway. Don't even get me started on Boise State - they beat Georgia, which 15+ other teams in the country can do, and their conference schedule includes Colorado State, UNLV, and New Mexico. When the third-best team in your conference is Wyoming, you do not have a strength of schedule argument. The only semi-dud is Clemson-West Virginia, which admittedly looks more like a Gator Bowl kind of matchup than anything, but shit, they're bowl-eligible - they gotta play somewhere.
By the way, on Boise State, if anyone tells you the Mountain West is an underrated conference and Boise and TCU are deserving of consideration based on past results, ask 'em why the conference can't get any bowl affiliation better than the Las Vegas Bowl against a weak, middling Pac-12 team? These bowl affiilations were not negotiated that long ago, and if the MWC was a really attractive deal, you'd think its champion - usually TCU, possibly Utah back when the affiliations were set - would be in high demand.
Oh, and anyone who says Michigan should be removed in favor of someone - even someone ineligible because of conference restrictions, if you like - should try me. Gimme a someone and I'll tell you why you're wrong.
Lot of other really interesting matchups, too. That's what bowl season does. My own favorites:
- The aforementioned SEC games: MSU-Georgia, Nebraska-South Carolina, KSU-Arkansas. Do you know, I think there's a real chance the SEC could lose all of them - not to mention the possibility that Ohio State will beat Florida and UVA will beat Auburn. All those SEC teams - except for Auburn, admittedly - are matched up against comparable-level teams from other conferences. Time to see what the SEC is made of - I say it is less dominant than believed, and that will play out.
- Penn State-Houston. This is fascinating. Penn State is probably the best defense Houston will see all season, so that's exciting; on the other side of the ball, Houston has got no defense whatsoever which matches up great with Penn State's useless offense. The TicketScalper Bowl lucked into a good one.
P.S. - the party line is that Penn State fell so far because the Sandusky scandal made them poisonous. I don't buy it. Not that there aren't some grains of truth to that, but the fact is, and always was, that Michigan, Nebraska, and both B1GCG participants were going to be ahead of Penn State in the pecking order. All it took to know that was to watch Penn State ugly their way through the conference schedule. The logical landing spot would've been the Gator Bowl, but the Gator Bowl was never gonna pass on Florida, and that's who PSU played last year. It's not at all illogical they wouldn't want to rematch 'em. So they took Ohio State. It's even possible Iowa wasn't available for the Gator, since they and the ex-Copper share a 4/5 pick. At most, Penn State fell one slot below where you'd expect - I don't think their placement is entirely a side effect of Sandusky. At any rate, it should be a very good game.
- I'm also diggin' on BYU-Tulsa, two teams which quietly put together winning seasons.
- And hey, how about the Hunger Bowl. Illinois and UCLA bring a pair of interim coaches to the game because both of them choked away games like it was their job.
- And finally, the CS Bowl had their eye on this matchup for a long time and you knew they weren't gonna let it go: FSU/Notre Dame. FSU is a very talented and underachieving team (uh-oh Jimbo?) and ND has got a lot of talent of its own. That's a great pairing.
I'll leave the bowl stuff behind with this final thought: It's easy to tell that the media types only want to bitch and moan, and have no interest whatsoever in when things actually turn out right. They profess to want things to "turn out right," but never care when they actually do. You might even say it's an anti-BCS agenda, although I wouldn't go that far because when they get what they want and a playoff is eventually instituted, they will continue writing stories about who got screwed and why the system is bullshit. How is it "easy to tell?" Because once VT was placed in the Sugar, even if that was "wrong," the absolute correct team was placed in the Peach, and nobody gives a flying fuck. On pure merit, who-beat-who, Virginia is the right team for the Peach, period, exclamation point. And the closest thing I've seen to a comment on it from the ESPN-types is Heather Dinich sniveling that "this is sort of like being the boss for a day because the boss is sick." Well, guess what: Nick thinks he can do everything from the golf course, Liz is too busy rocking out to Pandora, Mayor Dennis spends all his time at the water cooler, and Matt ignores the boss whenever he's speaking. Maybe we're only in charge because the boss is out today, but guess who's getting the promotion come eval time. There's still something to be said for outperforming one's peers.
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I said I'd try and get to the last remnants of the high school season, and so I will:
- Max Valles is a state champion on one of the most dominating teams that state has ever seen. They outscored opponents 474-19 and haven't allowed a touchdown in seven games. The final score of their state final: 51-0.
- Andre Miles-Redmond and Hermitage suffered what I'd call a slight upset loss to Centreville in the state semis. Not an earthshaking result, but a little bit surprising.
- C.J. Moore and Buford slipped, but didn't fall, and will play for the state title in Georgia next week.
And speaking of recruiting, I wonder when the last time was that I updated the recruiting board. I'm guessing October. London and co. got 2012 done in a hurry, so there hasn't been much to speak of. But it's time to create a little movement:
- Removed FB Nathan Staub from blue, who committed to UNC.
- Removed LB Quanzell Lambert from red; by now I'm sure he and UVA have gone their separate ways, probably quite some time ago.
- Moved RB Wes Brown from red to yellow.
- Moved OT Kyle Fuller, ATH Cyrus Jones, and S Mike Tyson from green to yellow.
- Moved WR Stefon Diggs from yellow to green. I'm not sure the chances of us landing him are really at green levels, but at this stage of the recruiting game I use the colors more as "who you should watch" anyway.
Tune in tomorrow as it will be part two of required football blogging: I present this year's version of my playoff proposal.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
that's a Peach, hon
In what I'd call the surprise of the bowl season, UVA is not going to the Music City Bowl. Nor is UVA going to Charlotte. Nor even the Sun Bowl in El Paso. Get ready for prime time in Atlanta - Virginia will match up against former uni-pants sister team Auburn, one year removed from a national title game appearance.
I'll get straight to brass tacks: this is the best thing that has happened to UVA football since I don't know when. New Year's Eve. Prime time. Auburn. The Peach Bowl. UVA has a great history playing in this game. This was the first bowl Virginia ever played in. It's the site of perhaps our biggest bowl win ever. If you bought my theory that UVA needed at least a 6-6 season so that they could go to a bowl and keep the recruiting momentum going, then you have to figure this is a recruiting bonanza. Especially if we win.
If you're looking for someone to thank for this, look at two teams: Clemson, and our old amigos, Southern Miss. Clemson winning yesterday kept Virginia Tech out of the Orange Bowl. There's no chance a four-loss Clemson team would've been selected for the BCS, so UVA wouldn't have been as likely to jump this high in the pecking order. (We might still have - but the chances would be much less.) But even more so, thank our old thorn Austin Davis and the Southern Miss Golden Eagles. If they don't upset Houston, Houston gets an autobid, ends up in the Sugar Bowl, and there's no room for VT there. And just like that, VT would've been in Atlanta.
Atlanta is an SEC hotbed - it's something of a mixing bowl of SEC teams, really. You got UGA, USCe, Alabama, Auburn, UF, UT....all heavily represented. So it's a road game. Virginia also has a following in Atlanta, but we'll be outnumbered, all by people who'll likely be dismissing their opponent as a weakling from a basketball conference. The mighty Ess-Eee-Cee shall prevail.
Fortunately, Auburn is a beatable opponent. Not a cupcake by any stretch, but still a tiny shadow of last year's version. They have good wins (South Carolina) and really bad ones (Utah State.) A cursory glance at the statistics reveals a solid running game and a midseason quarterback switch that appeared to be reasonably effective. (Sound familiar?) Later on this month, I'll get into the Auburn nitty-gritty to get you up to speed.
Here's one bit to get you started; you may know already that Auburn owes its very colors to the University of Virginia, and in return, it's likely we owe some of the knowledge to the history of those orange and blue colors to Auburn research.
I would bet that some crazy behind-the-scenes horse-trading has been going on since yesterday afternoon. However it happened, it's nice that maybe, just maybe, a little luck finally shines down on the Hoos. Instead of playing below slot with other teams leapfrogging us, a la 2002, we get the tables turned and get to play above slot. Actually, scratch that - this is our slot. If you tiebreak things out so as to rank the ACC from top to bottom, we're #3, edging Wake Forest. It's just that we've been so long used to dropping down a notch or two in favor of the marquee teams with supposedly better traveling parties. Not this year. Now it's time to take advantage.
Friday, December 2, 2011
blame comcast
Apologies....Internet Difficulties are preventing me from having anything of substance for you to read. Hopefully I will be able to catch up this weekend and then you will have your Satisfaction.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
season preview: Boston College
This is an earlier start than I usually get for basketball season previews, but then, when I finish we tend to be halfway through the conference season anyway, so let's get kicking while we wait for our bowl fate to be sorted out. Besides, I've got a lot planned for when we finally learn our opponent. These will come sporadically til I'm done. As always, the goal is to make FOV readers the best-informed of any UVA fans on the ACC competition.
Boston College Eagles
Media prediction: 12th
Last season:
Record: 21-13 (9-7) - ACC 5th seed
Postseason: NIT second round
KenPom: 68th of 345
Returning scoring: 10.8%
Returning rebounding: 11.5%
Returning assists: 11.4%
2010-11 All-ACC:
1st team: G Reggie Jackson
2nd team: none
3rd team: F Joe Trapani
HM: none
Rookie: none
Defensive: none
(Italics indicate departed player.)
Starting lineup:
PG: Patrick Heckmann (Fr.)
SG: Gabe Moton (So.)
G: Matt Humphrey (Jr.)
F: Ryan Anderson (Fr.)
C: K.C. Caudill (Fr.)
Bench:
C Dennis Clifford (Fr.)
G John Cahill (Sr.)
G Jordan Daniels (Fr.)
F Eddie Odio (Fr.)
G Lonnie Jackson (Fr.)
G Danny Rubin (So.)
Coach: Steve Donahue (2nd season)
ACC schedule:
Twice: Georgia Tech, Miami, NC State, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest
Once: Clemson, Duke, Florida State, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia
Attention anyone who thinks their previous coach left the cupboard bare: He did not. Not when compared to what Al Skinner did to Boston College basketball. This ought to be a Building A Program-type show on TV; I'd watch. The storyline is bizarre and fascinating: when Steve Donahue took over, he found a roster completely loaded with mostly seniors, a few juniors - and not one single freshman or sophomore. If he had done nothing in between being hired and starting the season, that's what his roster would have been. In what has to be considered second-degree criminal negligence, Skinner did not sign anyone in the recruiting class of '09; this means that the only junior on the roster is a transfer. The only sophomores are those hastily recruited by Donahue after finding his entire '10 recruiting class also nonexistent; those that were there bolted shortly after Skinner's firing. Any seniors are either walk-ons or useless, or both.
Here is BC's regular lineup, in PPG order, by their class:
Freshman
Junior transfer from Oregon
Freshman
Freshman
Walk-on who joined last year
Freshman
Freshman
Sophomore
Freshman
Freshman
Sophomore
That is disastrous. Only two of those guys - the sophomores, Danny Rubin and Gabe Moton, played any meaningful minutes last year (they are the aforementioned hastily-recruited class of '10 members) and Rubin's minutes dwindled to near-nothing by the end. It's a wonder their game tape doesn't look like the AND1 streetball highlight tape reject clips, and a credit to their coaching that they can actually defeat Division I competition besides.
This team is a mess of epic proportions. They can barely score and cannot defend. In the KenPom standings, they are one notch above Florida-Gulf Coast and just below Troy, Charleston Southern, and Fordham. Forget the ACC; Boston College is an average America East Conference team (made up of such standouts as Maine and New Hampshire) and a perfect geographical fit, too, come to think of it. Boston College 2011-2012 is a fascinating, absurd, bizarre train wreck of an outfit, and it's the fault of nobody currently involved. (Maybe the AD.) Al Skinner has set the new standard for leaving behind bare cupboards, a feat surpassed only by SMU football circa 1988.
So, what to make of this roster that we've never seen? Small sample size caveats apply to every player evaluation from here on out, since they've played all of six games and I haven't seen any of them. The highest-rated and most-sought recruit in their freshman class was Ryan Anderson, a skinny beanpole who plays forward and who is one of just two players to start all six games so far. Anderson is the team's leading rebounder, and that seems likely to continue. He's kind of a stretch-the-floor four who shoots threes, albeit not especially well. Patrick Heckmann was also recruited by several teams, Michigan among them, out of the German semi-pro leagues. He's the team's leading scorer despite being outshot almost 2-to-1 so far by the inefficient Matt Humphrey, who transferred in from Oregon. BC is still working on a big man rotation between K.C. Caudill and Dennis Clifford; Clifford measures in at seven feet but Caudill is a whopping 280 pounds. Caudill chose BC over offers from Northwestern, Harvard, and Penn, so there's brains to go with the brawn; however, he's a more recent addition to the rotation.
Obviously that rotation is still shaking out. This time last year, Danny Rubin looked like a real find - he was in the starting lineup and hitting threes with efficiency and aplomb, but played his way completely out of the rotation by year's end and has struggled to crack it again. Steve Donahue has a lot of work to do, obviously, and settling on a rotation is priority #1 right now.
If Boston College had an average ACC schedule, I'd call 'em a contender to pull a Detroit Lions and go 0-16 in the conference. I don't even know when that last happened. Wake Forest came close and went 1-15 last year and that's as close as anyone's come in ages. If anyone can do it, it's this BC team. But they happen to have the cushiest schedule in the conference (that doesn't include themselves.) UNC, Duke, FSU, UVA, Clemson - all one-time opponents. Virginia Tech, and maybe Miami, are the only NCAA tournament contenders that they play twice. They get two shots at GT and Wake, the other two likely ACC bottom-dwellers. It's really a waste of a good schedule. BC has already been smoked by Holy Cross and needed OT to beat UC-Riverside - further ugly OOC losses are probably in their future, and then BC fans will probably concern themselves entirely with hockey once the ACC schedule begins in earnest. There is zero chance of this team playing a single postseason game past the first round of the ACC tournament, and we can only hope things start improving in later years of the Donahue era. Fortunately, nobody will ever judge him on this one.
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I have to blab for a bit about last night's Michigan game, which - well, the truth of it is that Michigan was probably dealing with a little post-Maui fatigue, and it was probably no accident that the big Virginia run came in the second half. The other truth of it is that the selection committee won't care a whit. Consider the TCU game erased when it comes down to whether or not UVA should be a tournament team. As long as Michigan takes care of business from here on out and has even a middling result in Big Ten play (likely the toughest conference top-to-bottom this year, and by the way I have no doubt they will) then this win will stand out like a nice shiny diamond.
UVA fans will be astonished to learn how much of a free-throw disparity there was; we had a 22-7 attempt advantage at the stripe. I looked it up and that hasn't happened since 1871. Chalk it up to the frontcourt advantage - UVA did an absolutely terrific job of nullifying Michigan's better guards with the pack-line defense as Michigan often resorted to playing into UVA's hands by waiting out the shot clock, and at the same time UVA also did a great job of controlling the interior on offense. Mike Scott couldn't be guarded by one person. At all. The amazing thing is that Assane Sene didn't score at all and we didn't even need him to; Scott was a one-man matchup nightmare and completely controlled everything Michigan did down low. I cannot wait to unleash this fucker on the ACC because every time I watch a UVA basketball game I have to shake my head to remind myself he's on our side. I thought Travis Watson was pretty awesome but guys like Mike Scott don't come around but once a decade if that.
I have to also mention Malcolm Brogdon for quietly having a terrific game. Very quietly. I was completely surprised to look at the box score and see he had 16 points on 5-of-7 shooting. I particularly enjoyed the sequence in the second half when Brogdon bricked a three, a teammate got the offensive board and passed to an open Brogdon and he didn't hesitate in shooting again and knocking it down on the second chance. Confidence: dude haz it.
I thoroughly enjoyed that game but I'm also surprised to be saying this: I'm glad it's over. It was so weird watching, say, Joe Harris knock down a three and going "yes!....kinda." Michigan's Jordan Morgan found a wide-open lane once for an Air Jordan slam and I said "hey, now that was cool. Wait, no it wasn't. What the shit was that kind of defense?" It's very weird. I expect the two teams will meet in lacrosse at some point in the next couple years and that'll be even stranger.
Other news bits:
-- In the least surprising attrition news ever, Michael Strauss will transfer and appears to be headed to a localish I-AA program. This fulfulls my prophecy from like last year that the third quarterback in the race between Rocco, Metheny, and Strauss will leave the program; there's not much reason to sit in fourth place (including David Watford) with even more quarterbacks set to come in next year.
In a long-overdue move, I've updated the depth chart; since Strauss has already left the team and wasn't even on the sidelines for the Tech game, I've already deleted his entry. From a roster-management standpoint, that means the 2012 recruiting class puts us either three or four spots over the limit of 85. (I'm not completely sure of the status of Drequan Hoskey - I don't know if he's on track scholarship or not and if he is, he's a counter toward 85. Someone clarify.) Anyway, between guys who'll likely prep in the recruiting class, non-invites for a fifth year, and the usual attrition, this is a "problem" that'll take care of itself. UVA is not Alabama.
-- In a decision that is entirely correct, Mike London is the ACC Coach of the Year. Clemson Clemsoning the end of the season cemented that one, because Dabo Swinney was the only other logical competitor. If UNC had done better, Everett Withers would've been in the running. I figured London would eventually win a COY award as long as he produced a winning season at some point; this is because the media was never going to expect us to do well until we actually did. Awarding him the COY is their way of saying "we weren't wrong at the beginning of the year, it's just that London is that good of a coach." Congratulations, Coach, now never win another one because if you don't it means we were continually good without dipping into the below-.500 nether regions.
-- "ACC Officiating Reaches All Levels." OH GOD NO. There's a reason I like to use a #GoodOldACCRefs hashtag on Twitster. If your local high school referee calls pass interference on someone who has two hands on the ball and none on the receiver, now you know why.
Boston College Eagles
Media prediction: 12th
Last season:
Record: 21-13 (9-7) - ACC 5th seed
Postseason: NIT second round
KenPom: 68th of 345
Returning scoring: 10.8%
Returning rebounding: 11.5%
Returning assists: 11.4%
2010-11 All-ACC:
1st team: G Reggie Jackson
2nd team: none
3rd team: F Joe Trapani
HM: none
Rookie: none
Defensive: none
(Italics indicate departed player.)
Starting lineup:
PG: Patrick Heckmann (Fr.)
SG: Gabe Moton (So.)
G: Matt Humphrey (Jr.)
F: Ryan Anderson (Fr.)
C: K.C. Caudill (Fr.)
Bench:
C Dennis Clifford (Fr.)
G John Cahill (Sr.)
G Jordan Daniels (Fr.)
F Eddie Odio (Fr.)
G Lonnie Jackson (Fr.)
G Danny Rubin (So.)
Coach: Steve Donahue (2nd season)
ACC schedule:
Twice: Georgia Tech, Miami, NC State, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest
Once: Clemson, Duke, Florida State, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia
Attention anyone who thinks their previous coach left the cupboard bare: He did not. Not when compared to what Al Skinner did to Boston College basketball. This ought to be a Building A Program-type show on TV; I'd watch. The storyline is bizarre and fascinating: when Steve Donahue took over, he found a roster completely loaded with mostly seniors, a few juniors - and not one single freshman or sophomore. If he had done nothing in between being hired and starting the season, that's what his roster would have been. In what has to be considered second-degree criminal negligence, Skinner did not sign anyone in the recruiting class of '09; this means that the only junior on the roster is a transfer. The only sophomores are those hastily recruited by Donahue after finding his entire '10 recruiting class also nonexistent; those that were there bolted shortly after Skinner's firing. Any seniors are either walk-ons or useless, or both.
Here is BC's regular lineup, in PPG order, by their class:
Freshman
Junior transfer from Oregon
Freshman
Freshman
Walk-on who joined last year
Freshman
Freshman
Sophomore
Freshman
Freshman
Sophomore
That is disastrous. Only two of those guys - the sophomores, Danny Rubin and Gabe Moton, played any meaningful minutes last year (they are the aforementioned hastily-recruited class of '10 members) and Rubin's minutes dwindled to near-nothing by the end. It's a wonder their game tape doesn't look like the AND1 streetball highlight tape reject clips, and a credit to their coaching that they can actually defeat Division I competition besides.
This team is a mess of epic proportions. They can barely score and cannot defend. In the KenPom standings, they are one notch above Florida-Gulf Coast and just below Troy, Charleston Southern, and Fordham. Forget the ACC; Boston College is an average America East Conference team (made up of such standouts as Maine and New Hampshire) and a perfect geographical fit, too, come to think of it. Boston College 2011-2012 is a fascinating, absurd, bizarre train wreck of an outfit, and it's the fault of nobody currently involved. (Maybe the AD.) Al Skinner has set the new standard for leaving behind bare cupboards, a feat surpassed only by SMU football circa 1988.
So, what to make of this roster that we've never seen? Small sample size caveats apply to every player evaluation from here on out, since they've played all of six games and I haven't seen any of them. The highest-rated and most-sought recruit in their freshman class was Ryan Anderson, a skinny beanpole who plays forward and who is one of just two players to start all six games so far. Anderson is the team's leading rebounder, and that seems likely to continue. He's kind of a stretch-the-floor four who shoots threes, albeit not especially well. Patrick Heckmann was also recruited by several teams, Michigan among them, out of the German semi-pro leagues. He's the team's leading scorer despite being outshot almost 2-to-1 so far by the inefficient Matt Humphrey, who transferred in from Oregon. BC is still working on a big man rotation between K.C. Caudill and Dennis Clifford; Clifford measures in at seven feet but Caudill is a whopping 280 pounds. Caudill chose BC over offers from Northwestern, Harvard, and Penn, so there's brains to go with the brawn; however, he's a more recent addition to the rotation.
Obviously that rotation is still shaking out. This time last year, Danny Rubin looked like a real find - he was in the starting lineup and hitting threes with efficiency and aplomb, but played his way completely out of the rotation by year's end and has struggled to crack it again. Steve Donahue has a lot of work to do, obviously, and settling on a rotation is priority #1 right now.
If Boston College had an average ACC schedule, I'd call 'em a contender to pull a Detroit Lions and go 0-16 in the conference. I don't even know when that last happened. Wake Forest came close and went 1-15 last year and that's as close as anyone's come in ages. If anyone can do it, it's this BC team. But they happen to have the cushiest schedule in the conference (that doesn't include themselves.) UNC, Duke, FSU, UVA, Clemson - all one-time opponents. Virginia Tech, and maybe Miami, are the only NCAA tournament contenders that they play twice. They get two shots at GT and Wake, the other two likely ACC bottom-dwellers. It's really a waste of a good schedule. BC has already been smoked by Holy Cross and needed OT to beat UC-Riverside - further ugly OOC losses are probably in their future, and then BC fans will probably concern themselves entirely with hockey once the ACC schedule begins in earnest. There is zero chance of this team playing a single postseason game past the first round of the ACC tournament, and we can only hope things start improving in later years of the Donahue era. Fortunately, nobody will ever judge him on this one.
**********************************************
I have to blab for a bit about last night's Michigan game, which - well, the truth of it is that Michigan was probably dealing with a little post-Maui fatigue, and it was probably no accident that the big Virginia run came in the second half. The other truth of it is that the selection committee won't care a whit. Consider the TCU game erased when it comes down to whether or not UVA should be a tournament team. As long as Michigan takes care of business from here on out and has even a middling result in Big Ten play (likely the toughest conference top-to-bottom this year, and by the way I have no doubt they will) then this win will stand out like a nice shiny diamond.
UVA fans will be astonished to learn how much of a free-throw disparity there was; we had a 22-7 attempt advantage at the stripe. I looked it up and that hasn't happened since 1871. Chalk it up to the frontcourt advantage - UVA did an absolutely terrific job of nullifying Michigan's better guards with the pack-line defense as Michigan often resorted to playing into UVA's hands by waiting out the shot clock, and at the same time UVA also did a great job of controlling the interior on offense. Mike Scott couldn't be guarded by one person. At all. The amazing thing is that Assane Sene didn't score at all and we didn't even need him to; Scott was a one-man matchup nightmare and completely controlled everything Michigan did down low. I cannot wait to unleash this fucker on the ACC because every time I watch a UVA basketball game I have to shake my head to remind myself he's on our side. I thought Travis Watson was pretty awesome but guys like Mike Scott don't come around but once a decade if that.
I have to also mention Malcolm Brogdon for quietly having a terrific game. Very quietly. I was completely surprised to look at the box score and see he had 16 points on 5-of-7 shooting. I particularly enjoyed the sequence in the second half when Brogdon bricked a three, a teammate got the offensive board and passed to an open Brogdon and he didn't hesitate in shooting again and knocking it down on the second chance. Confidence: dude haz it.
I thoroughly enjoyed that game but I'm also surprised to be saying this: I'm glad it's over. It was so weird watching, say, Joe Harris knock down a three and going "yes!....kinda." Michigan's Jordan Morgan found a wide-open lane once for an Air Jordan slam and I said "hey, now that was cool. Wait, no it wasn't. What the shit was that kind of defense?" It's very weird. I expect the two teams will meet in lacrosse at some point in the next couple years and that'll be even stranger.
Other news bits:
-- In the least surprising attrition news ever, Michael Strauss will transfer and appears to be headed to a localish I-AA program. This fulfulls my prophecy from like last year that the third quarterback in the race between Rocco, Metheny, and Strauss will leave the program; there's not much reason to sit in fourth place (including David Watford) with even more quarterbacks set to come in next year.
In a long-overdue move, I've updated the depth chart; since Strauss has already left the team and wasn't even on the sidelines for the Tech game, I've already deleted his entry. From a roster-management standpoint, that means the 2012 recruiting class puts us either three or four spots over the limit of 85. (I'm not completely sure of the status of Drequan Hoskey - I don't know if he's on track scholarship or not and if he is, he's a counter toward 85. Someone clarify.) Anyway, between guys who'll likely prep in the recruiting class, non-invites for a fifth year, and the usual attrition, this is a "problem" that'll take care of itself. UVA is not Alabama.
-- In a decision that is entirely correct, Mike London is the ACC Coach of the Year. Clemson Clemsoning the end of the season cemented that one, because Dabo Swinney was the only other logical competitor. If UNC had done better, Everett Withers would've been in the running. I figured London would eventually win a COY award as long as he produced a winning season at some point; this is because the media was never going to expect us to do well until we actually did. Awarding him the COY is their way of saying "we weren't wrong at the beginning of the year, it's just that London is that good of a coach." Congratulations, Coach, now never win another one because if you don't it means we were continually good without dipping into the below-.500 nether regions.
-- "ACC Officiating Reaches All Levels." OH GOD NO. There's a reason I like to use a #GoodOldACCRefs hashtag on Twitster. If your local high school referee calls pass interference on someone who has two hands on the ball and none on the receiver, now you know why.
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