weekend review

Sort of a little different one today, in that I don't have any high school results and stuff for you this week. Part of the hard drive recovery process is going to involve re-stocking the favorites bar where all that local news stuff was, and I chose to spend this weekend reconstituting my music collection instead. Here's a summary: K.P. Parks went apeshit again, as he always does, and ran for shitloads of yards and scored beaucoup touchdowns before sitting down sometime after halftime with his team up by zillions. You know what job I want? The West Rowan H.S. offensive coordinator. It's easy. Just script the first forty plays of the game as follows: Hand off to Parks. Then eat a donut and take a nap til the half. I would worry that Parks might get hurt in his remaining games this fall, but that would require he be tackled.

I do have the recruiting board back in action, and you can find it here as always. And there's changes and stuff this week too, ain't that special? Those would be:

- Dropped OTs Khamrone Kolb and Robby Havenstein. Damn it. Kolb jumped for Penn State, and just as I predicted, Havenstein dropped not very long after that. Unfortunately he dropped for Wisconsin. It might appear that there's enough depth on the offensive line since we'll ideally be adding three to this next class what with Conner Davis joining the two prep schoolers (Moses if we're lucky, and Cody Wallace.) However, given the utterly abysmal state of the offensive line right now, I'd like one more just to have options.

- Dropped LB Dominique Guinn-Bailey to red. Someone on the CavsCorner message board said he'd committed to some I-AA school or another, but that's the only place I've seen it, so I guess I'll just leave him on there until another couple months go by and nothing happens. Yay passive-aggressive board updates.

- It's the triumphant return of the blue section! Depending on what you read and who he's talking to, we're either in a top two or top three for Louis Young. Or maybe a top twelve given his rather interesting interpretation of the term "verbal commitment." My nagging feeling we're really not going to get Young clashed with the general rule that a top four or so is good enough for the blue section. Then I realized I'm really just despairing of ever seeing a verbal commitment ever again, and bucked up, chinned up, nutted up, and re-established the blue section. So there it is, and right now Young is the only inhabitant. Hooray for recruiting no longer being totally dead in the water.

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Hoops! I have been completely blown away by Tony Bennett's efforts this summer. I give him an A++++++. If his teaching and his in-game coaching are half as good as his recruiting has been (considering that he wrapped up this #8-ranked class in six months), we'll win every game by 50. And the X's and O's were said to be his strong point. ACC, you might as well just roll over and die right now.

Apparently the media isn't as smitten as I am. Sylven Landesberg isn't happy about being left off the preseason all-ACC squad. And motivation is all well and good and I'm glad he's planning on proving folks wrong and all that, but maybe I'd prefer him to focus on something a little more team-oriented. It's not like the ACC media weekend in Greensboro was short of opportunities to be annoyed at what the media thinks about Virginia basketball. They have us 11th. In other words, they don't think a new coach and the loss of practically nobody of importance to graduation means any improvement in the standings.

This is nonsense. First off, the carnage wreaked upon ACC rosters due to graduation and departures for the draft is massive and widespread. More so than usual, I suggest to you. Nearly every team is replacing multiple huge pieces of the puzzle. Second, Tony Bennett Tony Bennett Tony Bennett. We will finish the season seeded higher than 11th in the ACC tournament. That's a rock-solid, etched-in-diamond guarantee. If that doesn't sound much like going out on a limb, then you get my point. Take out a second mortgage on the farm, withdraw every penny from your kids' college account, and hell, throw that firstborn up there for collateral. Better than 11th. I don't really know how much better. Sometimes I realize, man, we didn't score many points last year, did we? and I accept the idea that the CBI or maybe a charity NIT bid is progress and shouldn't be scoffed at. Other times I get all googly-eyed about what Bennett can do for this team - frickin' hell, he took a bunch of one-star recruits at a college way out in the hills to a 4 seed in the Dance. And that's when I start wondering if the committee will screw us with the draw like they did for baseball and make us travel out to Sacramento or something. The fun part will be finding out how it all plays out. But. Jebus damn it, better than 11th.

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Al Groh's press conference transcript, as always, is a fun read. The best Grohisms:

- "That, against a team like this that always becomes an ongoing situation-by-situation decision. That is do we want to match personnel or do we want to leave the regular in there, because there is an overlap in what we can do from a coverage standpoint between the two. Not entirely the same, but because there is an overlap, we have that option. And in the past in circumstances like this we've worked that option both ways."

- "Well, yeah, clearly when you see the numbers of their frequency, what that also clearly indicates is that there is a strong commitment and they are a dedicated passing team."

- "Nate has certainly been exceptionally stellar to the half way mark of the season. He's certainly playing himself into that position. He's probably making a similar move on that, say that Alvin Pearman utilized his senior season to do."

- "Well, they lead in receptions because they're playing in the Duke offense. If they were playing (at) Georgia Tech, they'd probably not be leading the conference in receptions."

- "Now if you win, you usually get a big return on it. But you can also result in the quarterback having to hold the ball and not be in the rhythm that he wants. Coaches are certainly this way. I'm certain some people say hold it, don't hold it, throw it, throw it. Sometimes if you have effective man-for-man coverage, there is nobody to throw it to. That would be the dilemma for the quarterback. What do you want me to do with it? There is nobody open, and you don't want me to stand there, I understand that. I don't have anybody to throw it to, either. What should I do with it? So we're going to get a good combination of both."

>- "QUESTION:What did you see of the 'phantom' personal foul called on Saturday?

COACH GROH: What we had suggested is that for anybody who has ‑‑ most people Tivo the game in order to go back and take a look at it and write your stories based on what you see there. So, I just suggested that everybody look at their Tivoed version and come up with your own opinion. And if you have any questions since clearly I'm not the expert on this. If you have any questions, I'd suggest that you direct them to the ACC office and see what they might want?

QUESTION:Did you direct any questions?

COACH GROH: I have the same question you might have. I guess Halloween was one week early. You know, Ghostbusters or whatever."

In Groh-speak, that means he thinks the personal foul was straight-up blatant bullshit. And he's almost certainly right. Unfortunately nobody can take his suggestion, because replay it on Tivo is precisely what I did, and none of it was onscreen.

Oh, and the "circumstance" count for the conference: 10. Impressive.

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Around the rest of the ACC, here's what we got:

- UNC pulled off a pretty impressive and really annoying choke job against TFSU, losing 30-27. I'm convinced this is the football gods' punishment for wearing those all-navy uniforms. They've deployed the navy pants and the navy jersey at separate times in the past, which was probably testing the football gods' patience, but the all-navy look was too much. Much like the signal they sent to Oregon when Oregon broke out the throwbacks and demolished California, UNC has now been warned that navy is not one of their primary colors. If they know what's good for them they'll never do that again.

- I told you this would happen. I told you. Maryland dropped one to Duke, 17-13, which has got Testudo Times ready for the bye week and criticizing Ralphie for his propensity to whine about not getting the breaks. And you might be interested to know we're not the only ones who've seen more QB draws out of their team than they care to stomach.

- We're not the only ones who had to deal with the triple option this weekend, and frankly I wouldn't swap our circumstance for Wake Forest's. They didn't win either: Navy beat them 13-10. Blogger So Dear is just pretending it didn't happen, which is probably wise. But dude: Check out the box score. Seriously. Navy never passed. Literally. 64 run plays, zero passes. They did that once last year, too, also in the rain. Lot of teams wear throwback uniforms, but nobody does throwback like Navy. You want throwback? We're going right back to 1903. We don't need wacky shenanigans and gimmicks like this "forward pass."

- Clemson's win against Miami put two teams squarely in the driver's seat for their respective divisions. Block-C doesn't hesitate to name C.J. Spiller the best player in all of college football. Which, y'know, maybe, but if they've got the best player in all of college football, what does it say about the rest of the team that provided Maryland its only ACC win?

- Finally, the Battle of the Catholics ended disappointingly. Final score: Congregation of the Holy Cross 20, Jesuits 16.

Normal-ish schedule this week. Tomorrow I will finally get around to profiling Akil Mitchell. Wednesday I'll have another coaching candidate lined up. Somewhere in between, I'll squeeze in another ACC roundtable. Gotta keep a sense of normalcy even though the season is solidly on the line on Halloween.

weekend mishmash

I was going to write up on Conner Davis, and don't get me wrong, I'm really looking forward to, but beer got in the way and now I don't want to spend the time and it's already almost 10 at night anyway. Damn beer.

So just a few quickish things, and really not exactly good news to be honest:

- First, dispensing with the bad news right away: you may have heard, but John Brandenburg will be transferring. Speculation seems to be in the direction of some personal or family stuff; that would be pretty much confirmed if Brandenburg ends up at a school much closer to his native Missouri. Lousy news, but we wish him all the best. It leaves five open scholarships for 2010, and if I had to predict now I'd say Bennett will probably leave one open and not burn them all up in this class. There's still time to scrounge up a juco transfer or something to sit at the end of the bench and give us a little depth; this would not really hurt us going forward except to take away a 2010 scholarship in case Bennett does want to use it on a recruit. But with one now open for '09 and '10, if it wouldn't carry forward to affect the 2011 recruiting class, it's a possibility. The other possibility is maybe to give it to Will Sherrill. It'd be a classy gesture even if Sherrill isn't going to sniff the court against any opponent tougher than UMES.

What really sucks is the depth at the 5 for this year. Brandenburg was basically penciled in for 10-15 minutes a game as the backup center. It's imperative now that one of the 2010 recruits be someone that can play there all the time, and no, that someone is not Will Regan. Assane Sene is going to have to pick up major minutes and be kept in a glass box at all times so as to avoid accidents. If Sene can be good for half a game (an extra three minutes above what he played last year), we can scrape through with a combination of Meyinsse and Scott for the other half, and call it "going small" and make everyone think it's a deliberate strategy. If Sene goes down? God help us.

- That leads us to what Bennett is actually doing on the recruiting trail, and for one day at least, he's hanging with the high school coaches. Hey, why not? Meet 'em all at once and be done with it. Getting Tony out there taking the Tony Is Awesome tour and impressing that upon the folks with influence is pretty crucial to the recruiting efforts. I fully expect we'll be kicking Tech's ugly-colored keister on the basketball recruiting trail in short order.

- TheLegacyx4's Bird did something pretty cool with the media predictions of the past four years. What's depressing is the downward trend of the media's perception of UVA. Sometimes they're wrong (2007), sometimes they're right as hell (2008), but they've steadily dropped us in the rankings. And that continues this year, I guarantee it; the media will have us 6th in the divison, you watch, and certainly anything higher than 5th would be a shocker. Not because I think we suck, but because I think the media thinks we suck.

- This is a little oldish, but it's worth a read if you didn't run across it already. The ACC Sports Journal sat down with former UVA AD/ACC commissioner/NCAA president Gene Corrigan for a three-part interview, the theme of which is pretty boilerplate: old guy reminisces on his day and riffs on how today is different. But that wouldn't be a boilerplate theme if it wasn't a good one. It's always good for behind-the-scenes stuff you don't get to hear about at the time - in this case, among other things, the ACC expansion to Tallahassee, which Corrigan oversaw. Here is Part I, Part II, and Part III.

lacrosse pairings

First, I'm contractually obligated (JOKE PEOPLE) to link this: Andy Katz with a nice little fluff piece (but heavy fluff, more like dryer lint than cotton candy) on Tony Bennett. I mean, it's at the Worldwide Leader and on the front page of the mens' basketball section too - pretty cool - so you probably found it already unless you live in Moldova or something. But anyway, I liked it.

Also would like you to read this and this too from Jeff White. Quality interviews. The first is a talk with Sylven Landesberg and the second is tidbits from Groh's press conference after the spring game. They're a little old, but I got some catching up to do. As for Landesberg, it's clear we are way way way lucky to have him on this team, and frankly the program owes it to him to put a quality product on the floor surrounding him. I cannot wait to see what he can do for us next year and hope we get to see what he can do for us for another two years after that.

The main item, which you also noticed if you took a peep at any (well, most) of the papers that cover UVA (or at least their websites) is the national lacrosse bracket. Woo woo #1 seed. This is really excellent as far as the first round is concerned because we don't have to get some really obnoxiously dangerous unseeded opponent like UMBC or Maryland. We get Villanova, and it's their first tournament ever. Later this week I'll make some kind of a lamesauce stab at a matchup analysis of some kind, but the short version goes like this: we should flatten them.

But the second round matchup (assuming we beat Villanova, and yes, I'm looking ahead, as a blogger I'm allowed to do that) is nasty. You've seen them before: Hopkins. If they get past Brown, and they should, they'll be waiting for us in Annapolis. Ewwww.

I really wanted to rail at the injustice of it all. Hopkins lost four games, yes, but to Princeton, UVA, UNC, and Syracuse. And you remember what happened in our game - it was damn close. (And if you don't, why how convenient, you can go check it out in the videos section.) Hopkins is a plenty talented team in their own right, and they're frickin' Hopkins, and....and - In any case, I did plan out a rant on the wack seeding, because putting Hopkins that damn low is injustice to both Hopkins and us for sure, but then I bothered to check out the rest of the bracket, and damn. I mean, who are you gonna move them ahead of? Four of the seven teams beat them, one is undefeated Notre Dame, one is Duke which obviously is pretty good, and one is Cornell which, I mean, co-champion of a three-bid league.....so, in the end I think the low seeding of Hopkins is really more reflective of the parity in the top levels of college lacrosse. Of the seven other seeded teams, chances are all of them are looking up at us as #1 and thinking, we can beat those guys. That's not to denigrate our team or our chances, but at any point in the season have we ever looked like the unstoppable machine that #1 basketball seeds typically are? Maybe for a couple periods at a time, but never for a full game unless it was, like, VMI. Too many holes in the defense. Anyway, here's hoping.

linkpile

Some people who don't watch, follow, or comprehend the existence of Virginia baseball put Matt Packer on the midseason Stopper of the Year list. Packer celebrated the achievement by pitching 8th-inning batting practice to Boston College - four runs later, his blown save total is twice his save total. I can think of a lot of things Packer's stopped, but none of them are late-inning opposition rallies. He needs to be one of those pitchers reserved for midweek games against out of conference opponents and situational relief in ACC games the outcome of which is not particularly in doubt before he does any more damage to our seeding.

The Tony Bennett hire gets a thumbs-up from Jason King at Yahoo.

The Mountain West Conference presented its playoff proposal to conference commissioners, who out of professional courtesy did not stick their fingers in their ears and go "LA LA LA LA LA." The MWC believes a playoff is the proper way to crown a true champion; in related news, the MWC will not be holding a playoff to determine the MWC champion.

Torrey Mack fluff. Heir apparent and all that. Funny passage:

"The reason for the high praise was on display Saturday during Virginia’s annual spring festival as Mack rushed six times for 18 yards..."

Wooooo three yards a carry woooooooo! No, I'm sure he looked great and all. However, 18 yards on six carries is decidedly not the reason for the high praise.

More spring practice wrapup stuff here. Fluff from the quarterbacks and a few tidbits from Groh.

And some good news on the basketball scheduling side of things. Next year's ACC/Big Ten Challenge schedule is out, minus networks and start times. Not to worry though: we're kicking things off as that one-off game the night before the Challenge really starts, which is nice because that game is typically broadcast on ESPN2 and not at some silly start time like 9:30. Further, we draw Penn State - drawing anyone at all is nice in and of itself because I was really and truly worried we'd be the odd team out this year, what with two pretty lousy seasons in a row. Georgia Tech was worse last year though, and will watch from the sidelines. Penn State loses a couple top scorers, doesn't bring in anyone remarkable, and is basically the Miami of the Big Ten. Football school, occasionally has a dangerous basketball team, shows its face in the tournament once a decade or so. They do have the '09 NIT championship going for them, which is nice. Because we suck, we'll surely be the underdog in the game unless Penn State stumbles out to a terrible start, but the bottom line here is that Tony Bennett has an excellent opportunity to get a high-profile win that's easily spun into confidence-building material, with the very real chance that he won't actually have to beat a good team to do it.

assistant coaches

Hopefully this is the coaching search wrap-up and in the future I can talk about Tony Bennett exclusively as the head coach actual and not as some guy we just hired who's going to be the head coach.

First, check out the coaching search cliff notes at the ACC Sports Journal, where they give you the rundown of about four weeks' worth of insanity in one easy page.

Next, have a look at the apparent list of assistant coaches. "Apparent" because Ritchie McKay is the only one named officially by the University, but there's no reason not to believe Jeff White here.

There are three names to take a look at. I'm not going to worry about Brad Soucie here because as director of basketball operations, he's really more of a Man Friday to Coach Bennett and literally not allowed to get involved with actual coaching. Besides Bennett, the three guys that will be doing the coaching and recruiting and all that are Ritchie McKay, Ron Sanchez, and Jason Williford. One by one, here's what I think:

Ritchie McKay

McKay hasn't been an assistant coach since 1995 - his extensive head coaching experience is the main asset he brings to this job. Also anyone who can recruit a talent like Seth Curry to come to a school where there's a curfew and a ban on R-rated movies is a plus recruiter in my book. Also he's probably one of the top five reasons Dave Leitao was fired, since at UVA you're not supposed to lose to Liberty. The least he could do to make up for that blemish on our record was to come here to coach, right? Anyway, aside from that, McKay's coaching career is a depressing pyramid of undistinguished tenures at lousy programs. There's a certain symmetry to it, actually, if you look. And none of it's even remotely impressive, to be honest. The one season he had any real success at all - his New Mexico team earning a 12 seed to the tournament - he had Danny Granger, a future first-round pick of the Indiana Pacers, leading the way. Still, McKay's not the head coach. He's the associate head coach. And I figure the man knows a little something about recruiting if he can bring Seth Curry onboard, and the experience of having been a head coach will be a big plus for Bennett.

Ron Sanchez

Sanchez comes to Charlottesville as a package deal with Bennett. His WSU bio is here, for however long it manages to stay before it's taken down, and no, I'm not getting excited over his ties to New York, going to school there and coaching D-III ball doesn't qualify. Eight years ago, Sanchez was an associate head coach at a JUCO; he is now a highly paid ACC assistant. That qualifies as a meteoric rise through the coaching ranks, and that suggests either a highly motivated, Type-A go-getter or a shameless self-promoter, depending on whether or not you were the guy he stepped on to get what he wants. Either way, Bennett has been leaning on Sanchez for some time now in the recruiting domain, and it's going to be that way here too, and that kind of personality is a plus - almost a requirement - in the world of basketball recruiting. Also, according to his bio, he is a killer scheduler of schedules. For what that's worth.

Jason Williford

Did you know Williford played for Jeff Jones at UVA? OK, you probably did. Did you know he played professional ball too? Yup. Not being quite the caliber player the NBA is looking for, Williford headed overseas and played professionally in Iceland(!!) and Korea. Now, let's be honest: Williford's US coaching career, aside from volunteer work and high school, is five years at Boston U. and four at American. Williford was able to use his UVA connections first to land the American job (it being under the coach he played for here) and then to land this one. And that's not a bad thing. First off it's nice to have someone who's got recent connections in a place where UVA absolutely must recruit in order to be viable: the DC area. Second, we finally have someone involved with the program who knows what the program was like when it produced Sweet Sixteen-caliber teams. And third, speaking of the NCAA tournament, Williford has more tournament experience than the whole rest of the staff combined. His three appearances as a player and three appearances as an assistant coach, including a total of 12 games, have got everyone else beat, including Bennett. You can't beat tournament experience.

Lastly, a little bit of a late Easter egg for you. It's not the big big news we've been waiting for but it's close. You won't be able to read this if you're not a Rivals subscriber, but the news will be out sooner rather than later anyway so I don't feel bad about posting it: Jontel Evans reaffirmed his commitment tonight. Evans' reputation as a tough, tough defender makes him something of a more talented version of the players Bennett liked to work with at WSU, so that combined with the fact that he'll be one of only two true PGs on the roster make him a big keep and likely to see time off the bench right away next year. One down, one to go.

EDIT of a happy nature: Easter egg, part two - if you believe Facebook statuses, Spurlock is also staying put, and the '09 class remains intact. Hopefully there'll be confirmation of a more official nature tomorrow, but Spurlock's Facebook postings have actually been reasonably reliable, and he has never come across as the type to mess with people on a mass scale. So: YAY! Tony Bennett has now achieved pretty much everything UVA fans could reasonably demand from him. He's put all the checks in all the right boxes, and no, he can't go back in time and also give himself a national title at Kentucky, so stop it. Focus can now turn 100% to the '09-'10 season and all it entails.

linkpile

There's only so much to ramble on about in the offseasons, so I'm going to turn it over to The InterWebs today:

First, some CDP fluff about the lacrosse-playin' Gill family: eldest Conor, the spectacularly-named Brendan, and current senior Gavin. Walk into a fourth-grade classroom. Try to do it without being a creepy stalker who hangs around elementary schools. Those li'l monsters have not even been alive at any point in time in which a Gill was not playing lacrosse at Virginia. End of an era, my friends.

Don't be fooled by Groh's attempts at watering down the praise he hands out to Rodney McLeod for his play this spring at safety. Scarcely a report comes out of spring practice that doesn't include Groh raving about McLeod's play out there. The secondary will be the deepest part of the team this year, likely with three players at both safety and corner with the ability to roll in and out of the lineup. Four at corner, depending on how much defense Vic Hall plays.

Those hoping for a UVA alum with Virginia connections to be hired as an assistant to Tony Bennett should be guardedly optimistic about this Jason Williford blurb.

The ACC Sports Journal sat down with Taylor Rochestie for an interview. The subject? Rochestie is the departing senior point guard at Washington State, so, not cheeseburgers.

Also from the ACCSJ is a pre-pre-preseason (their word) and probably premature (my words) ACC basketball power rankings. We are - how shall I put a positive spin on this - behind only 11 teams! The rationale:

"Bennett has inherited a genuine rebuilding project and unlike Washington State, where he was a previous assistant, the players will need some time to buy into his defensive-minded style."

Fair point from the above: At Wazzu, the instant turnaround was partially possible because Bennett had already been an assistant there for three years, so anyone not brand-new to the program anyway had already gotten used to Bennett's style. Counterpoint: It's not like "defensive-minded" wasn't a hallmark of Leitao's style. We're not making any sudden philosophical changes around here. Really, it's Bennett's offense that the players will have to get used to. One criticism leveled at Leitao was the perception of a do-it-yourself offense - John Brandenburg's words, not mine. So in a perverse way maybe that'll only help. Maybe when the players find themselves having a tough time with the Bennett offense, which actually has a system to it, they can just revert to what they know - do-it-yourself. No, that's probably just me bullshitting you.

But, I take issue with the 12th place ranking regardless. 10 ACC players averaged more points than Sylven Landesberg this year. Five are seniors, two have declared for the draft (sans agent though) and one more probably will. That leaves two. Maybe as many as five, though I think Gerald Henderson is probably going to leave, Jeff Teague is 50/50, and Greivis Vazquez will probably return and be a stone-cold lock to lead the league in cocky douchebaggery.

Point is, there are six teams losing their leading scorer to expired eligibility and three more whose might also leave. And we're the ones with a rebuilding project?

best and worst case scenarios

So naturally, everyone wants to know what sort of results we're going to get from our basketball team now that we've had our requisite dose of drama, wailing and gnashing of teeth, black helicopters, and plagues of locusts that generally accompany a coaching search. Tony Bennett's Job 1 is to keep the signed recruits signed, and unfortunately the timing is lousy because just as an entire fanbase was all set to hold their collective breath once again over this, we hit a recruiting dead period. This started about two hours after Bennett's home visit with Tristan Spurlock and lasts until Friday. Pfeh. We want news dammit.

Well, here's some about both Evans and Spurlock. Evans sounds solid. Really. He wants a meeting with Coach Bennett - which he'll no doubt get very soon - and unless Bennett walks into the house and wipes his muddy feet on the dog or something, Evans will report his satisfaction with the meeting and all will be well.

The news is actually also pretty positive on the Spurlock front. This very weekend, Spurlock will be in Charlottesville. (Sabre $) He's never taken his official visit, see, and this is great stuff because the wining and dining you're allowed to do on an official visit is really tremendous. Spurlock is talking a lot of the talk you'd expect - 50/50, wants to spend more time with the players, meet the new assistant coaches, etc. etc., but I get the impression Landesberg and Zeglinski will hogtie him to a locker and leave him there til practice starts if that's what it takes to make sure he stays a Cavalier. The players will put on the hard sell and Spurlock will find it hard to say no. Not to say he for surely sure won't back out in the end, but official visits have a way of impressing people.

Until then, though, we're in pure wait mode, interrupted only by yet another heart attack of a lacrosse game and some baseball. So I thought I'd try and paint a picture of what to maybe expect both this year and beyond. Reasonable assumptions are made. First, the worst-case scenario that I could realistically see happening:

- Bennett is able to convince Evans, but not Spurlock, to come to UVA next year. Worse, a player or two expected to be a significant contributor next year - maybe it's top defender Assane Sene, maybe it's a presumed scoring option like Jeff Jones or Jamil Tucker - decides to transfer. Because of this, the team's depth is totally shot, a JUCO or two is brought in, and Bennett is forced to play a grind-it-out style similar to his Washington State teams. The team's record improves, but only by one or two games. Sylven Landesberg is once again the only truly dependable scorer on the team, and with that likely to be the case in '10-'11 as well, he decides he's done all he can at UVA and departs for the NBA draft. Highly-rated recruits that Bennett tries to land are repeatedly reminded by opposing coaches that Bennett hasn't changed his stripes at all from his WSU days, and that his teams are doomed to score in the 50's and 60's every game. The proof is in the '09-'10 pudding. Bennett can't overcome the negative recruiting or his lack of ties in the mid-Atlantic and gives up on the blue chips for the most part. He focuses on recruiting the overlooked "system" players, with the occasional Klay Thompson type coming aboard. With two or three years of the system in place, Bennett's X's and O's are good enough to scrape enough ACC wins to make us a fairly regularly NIT participant, but we never go the NCAAs.

Yikes. That was depressing, and the worst part is I started to really believe it as I typed. You can really see that coming to fruition. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be that way. There is an alternate future:

- Spurlock is thrilled by his official visit and stays on board. Recruiting for 2010 continues to remain up in the air, but a blistering start to the 2009-'10 season begins to convince some of the recruits UVA already has ties with that Bennett knows how to unleash a star player on unsuspecting opponents. We enter the ACC season unranked but with a good record that sports no losses to teams that shouldn't beat us. Landesberg leads the charge and gets the support he never could get in '08-'09 from his teammates on the offensive end. A decent, approximately .500 showing in the ACC coupled with a win or two in the conference tournament keeps us on the bubble all year. Selection Sunday for once is interesting and we're rewarded for our patience with a double-digit 10 or 11 seed against an upsettable opponent in the NCAAs. Bennett proves not only able to use the team's success as an effective recruiting tool for high-schoolers, but for his own team as well, as Sylven Landesberg hearkens back to the memorable night when Sean Singletary's number was retired and resists the call of the NBA to become a four-year starter. Within two or three years of Bennett's hiring, Virginia is a regular in top-25 rankings, and shows up in bracketology circles as a 3-to-5 seed with legitimate Sweet Sixteen expectations.

Much better, isn't it? And again, the best part is that I actually started to believe that, too. Either way is possible; in fact, either way seems likely. Somewhere in the middle ground is our fate, but I really think these are plausible enough that you don't have to assume the truth will be some kind of compromise between them. Anything on the outside of these paths, consider either a miracle or really rotten luck. I tried to think of some literary reference to illustrate the crossroads we're at here, but I blanked, so no clever metaphor for you - we'll just have to wait. The first real step on the journey comes when we find out what Tristan Spurlock wants to do. I hate to sound like the whims and decisions of just one 18-year-old kid are going to set in motion the wheels that take us either across the Styx or to Valhalla, but honestly, without overblowing the importance of it, it's important. Very. Spurlock's decision will have a real, actual effect on the quality of our season next year. The quality of our season next year will have a real, actual effect on the kind of player we can recruit in the future. And so on. This is barring any freak unfortunate crap like someone blowing out a knee in a pickup game over the summer. If the basketball program is going to get better, though, it starts this very weekend.

j'accuse? non. je fais seulement un conjecture

'Cause I got another post left about it. Yes, I'm talking about basketball coaches; no, I'm not talking about the assistant coach speculation. I honestly can't bring myself to care very much. Would it be nice if a UVA alum was hired? Sure, that'd be cool. I trust Bennett to know what he wants in an assistant coach though and I'm not interested in bringing the hammer of criticism that he "doesn't get" UVA, Virginia, and/or the mid-Atlantic if his last hire or two aren't regional enough. And I certainly don't care whether he's in Detroit, Pullman, Charlottesville, or Sri Lanka on any given day. Somehow I can muster up the patience to wait for a third assistant coach to be hired. And given the fact that 100% of people following UVA basketball failed to accurately predict the head coach, I'm not going to get sucked into the speculation business this time around. If you can't get enough of the guessing game, have a gander at Jeff White who's better at turning up the nuggets of sweet sweet rumoronium than I am.

Now, this isn't the first time that directly contradictory information has come out about this whole search (remember the spooky midnight tour?) and it won't be the last time directly contradictory information comes out about any coaching search. On the one hand you have the party line from the executive associate athletic director: "There were no other offers on the table. Ever." On the other, you have Adam Gottschalk. There was an offer, Gottschalk says, and he's backed up by the St. Paul Pioneer Press which says Tubby "could have had" the job.

The sum and gist of Gottschalk's story is that Tubby was basically one step from coming on down until the offer was torpedoed by President Casteen. Naturally, he and Oliver can't both be telling the truth. Even if you read "offer" to mean as official and legal as possible, in writing and in triplicate and all that, Oliver very clearly says "This (meaning Bennett) was the first choice." He even acknowledged the Tubby rumors and dismissed them out of hand. It's as unequivocal a statement as you can get.

It's tempting to believe Gottschalk, because Casteen has been the target of fans' ire before. And what you read in the newspaper is never ever ever ever ever the whole story, ever. The problem with Gottschalk's argument, though, is the way he frames it: "Still, it’s just a strong rumor, based on fact, mixed with conjecture, so take it for what it’s worth."

Then he proceeds to tell the story, without bothering to tell us what's fact and what's conjecture. Which is annoying. How seriously am I supposed to take this? Should I read it and get all lathered up and fire off invectives at Casteen? How seriously does Gottschalk believe it? I think he probably believes it pretty strongly, which is about as strong a statement I can say about it because in giving himself an out (in order to keep the University from drying up his sources) he waters down his message. And in the end I can't take it seriously. There's a reason Émile Zola wrote "J'accuse" (I accuse) and not "Je devine" (I guess). If Gottschalk has an accusation, he needs to make the accusation, stick by it, and not mix his fact with his conjecture so that nobody can tell the difference and so he can weasel out of it if taken to task. Accuse or don't. If he's afraid of losing his job or his "ins" at the University, he should shut up and stop aiming spitballs at the institution. Because it's not fair to Casteen, even if he did sink a Tubby offer, to have people who read Gottschalk's blog coming up with their own ideas of what happened because Gottschalk doesn't have the cojones to stick by a story or the good common sense to keep his mouth shut when there isn't one. Sometimes good journalism isn't about what you print, it's what you don't.

As for me, I can only wonder why Casteen would agree to build a gleaming, nine-figure, professional-quality arena in a very prominent place on Grounds and then cheap out on a coach costing 2.4% of that. If Casteen and the academic eggheads "were not comfortable with UVa (a school that fashions itself after the Ivy leagues) being a school that would pay any coach 3.2 million dollars per season" why would they be comfortable building a huge new arena with a big videoboard and ohbytheway speaking of videoboards, adding a new one to the football stadium? It doesn't make sense and for that reason (as well as those reasons already stated), I take Gottschalk's story with a grain of salt. A really huge, extra-salty grain of salt.

Edit: hey, a little something footbally, too. This was actually dug up by ESPN's Heather, and should in the slightest be taken as schadenfreude. Seriously. But it seems Peter Lalich is not having such a good spring over in Corvallis.

Tony Bennett rides into town

The moment Tony Bennett agreed to become the head coach at the University of Virginia, several items appeared on his to-do list:

- Win over the team.
- Win over the '09 signees.
- Hire assistant coaches.
- Get busy recruiting.
- Win over the fans.

Don't mistake the final item for a self-serving, what-about-us complaint. The fans can help a coach with a lot of that stuff. And more importantly as far as the AD is concerned, the fans are your revenue source. They buy tickets, they buy merchandise, and they also just hand over money because they like to, though this last stack of cash is wrapped in feel-good terms like "donation."

This post is the last one in which I'll compare Bennett to Tubby Smith. Promise. It's time to let go of that. But this needs saying: Tubby would not have had to worry about item #5 on that list. Tubby is Tubby, and his grace period would have been such that he could have blocked Tristan Spurlock's phone number and fans would shrug and say we don't need Spurlock. But the diehards have a couple years worth of emotions invested in Spurlock thanks to his rather long recruiting process, and absolutely zero emotions for Bennett other than the shock of seeing his name in the headline, and Bennett does not have the luxury, as far as fan relations go, of losing Spurlock.

(Neither Tubby nor Bennett has the luxury of losing him as far as actually playing basketball goes, by the way. If Spurlock and/or Jontel Evans, but especially Spurlock, decide not to come, the lack of any substantial talent in the graduating class of 2013 will be painful down the road.)

Bennett, for his part, is acting like the basketball coach at the University of Virginia in every aspect entailed by that title. Spurlock is important? Yes, Bennett thinks so - he was in touch less than 24 hours after the news broke of the hire. Evans, too. He's met with the players, who are saying the things you hope to hear from them after such a meeting. He's hiring his assistant coaches - the first is Liberty's former head coach Ritchie McKay. (McKay, by the way, should be a plus on the recruiting circuit. Anyone who can convince a big-time talent like Seth Curry to come to a school with a curfew and a prohibition on R-rated movies is a recruiter in my book.)

Right, so he's got the basketball coach part down. What about "at the University of Virginia"? I said the other day that Bennett has to be a Wahoo, not just be employed by the school. This is essential, and something that Dave Leitao admittedly fell a little short on. How about a guy who makes sure to wear an orange tie and knows the difference between a campus and the Grounds? This here WCAV interview displays both.

(OK, actually, I really don't care about the color of the tie. Somebody probably coached him up on that, or sent an intern down to the Fashion Square mall to pick one out for him, same way they coached him up on "Grounds" vs. "campus." I always thought people were way too fixated on the color of Coach Leitao's bloody damn tie. That doesn't help win games. I do like that he's making a clear effort to fit in. He talked about UVA being the right fit in that WCAV interview, and it's great to see him put in the effort to make sure that not only is UVA the right fit for him, but he's the right fit for UVA.)

Verdict: In just two short days, Bennett has brought UVA fans around from dismayed shock to "hey we need to give this guy a chance" to fairly well impressed. The steady stream of ringing endorsements have helped with that too.

There's a dissenting view, though - there always is. Adam Gottschalk is nitpicking the press conference. I dunno - I didn't get to watch the press conference because I have a job which requires me to do job-related things. I did watch that interview above though and I got the distinct impression Bennett is perfectly comfortable talking with the media. Others that saw the presser didn't come away with any such impression as, "forced, bereft of substance, and a little uncomfortable….he didn’t always sound like a guy with a lot of confidence in his system or philosophy." So I think we can safely file away Gottschalk as a minority opinion here.

Couple other notes: The ACC Sports Journal's Jim Young compiled the list of BCS-conference coaching hires in 2006, which would be when Bennett took over at WSU. Fourteen coaches on that list and none of them have more wins in that time at the school where they were hired than Bennett. One is tied, and you might recognize that other name if at any point you heard that Virginia was looking for a coach. Safe to say that very few if any of those schools were as happy with their choice as WSU was with Bennett.

Lastly, anyone who might look at the daily hit count for this blog would have no trouble at all guessing when UVA hired a new basketball coach. Monday set a new record for hits and page views. Tuesday laughed at Monday's puny little number. Gee, are you people interested in this coach stuff?

after sleeping on it

Yesterday was not an especially productive day at my bill-paying job. Eager for updates after a weekend of rumors, I lurked around the InterWebs at those places most likely to have news when it happened. As the day dragged on, I managed to get closer and closer to convincing myself that soon we were going to be allowed to revel in the news that that much-coveted tutor of basketball, Orlando "Tubby" Smith, would be the head basketball coach at the University of Virginia.

I suspect many of you can tell a similar story.

I left work, and no coach was named. I subjected myself to the usual ritual self-abuse at the gym, went home, fired up the web-surfing machine, and received the same unkind shock the rest of you did, and asked myself the question asked by 90% of the UVA fanbase: "Who the %&$# is Tony Bennett?" Also included in this question-but-no-answer session with myself was, Where the %&$# is Tubby Smith, What the $%&# school does Tony Bennett even coach at, and What the $%&# is Craig Littlepage doing, exactly? I felt like Jay in Dogma, enough so that I figured he could speak more aptly than I could and gave him exactly that opportunity, two posts below. I then opened up post window #2 and began a stream-of-consciousness rant before realizing, one, I still stunk from the gym and two, I'm damn hungry.

So showering is a great place to do some thinking on things when I'm not flexing the golden pipes, and it turns out this is a pretty good way to avoid having to write an I-take-it-all-back post later on. The first realization that came from this thinking cap session actually had its roots in the now-closed poll at right, in which Fran McCaffrey received zero votes. Damn, I thought, if by some off-chance he's hired, he's going to have to start by convincing the faithful that he's the man for the job, which is a sucky way to have to start. Tubby and Capel were the clear winners of that unscientific but probably pretty accurate experiment.

So it's not exactly fair to Tony Bennett to start right off the bat by ripping the hire because I was hoping for and expecting something bigger. Thus, yesterday's post was born. Regardless of anything else, Bennett deserves a solid three years, at the very minimum - coaches can't possibly be fairly judged in any less time unless they're Jim Harrick or Kelvin Sampson. No "Fire Bennett" calls will emanate from this page regardless of how many or how few wins this team wins next year. Littlepage, on the other hand, won't be so lucky.

But therein lies the rub in trying to evaluate exactly what we've got. Bennett has been a head coach for exactly three years. It's not fair to jump to conclusions because his name isn't Tubby Smith, but by the same token there really isn't much to go off of here. But let's give it a crack.

Much is already known about Bennett's style. Defense is his calling card and any number of stathead sites can tell you about his WSU teams' defensive abilities. We'll use KenPom, which says that despite the Cougars' pedestrian record last year, they were 6th in the land in defensive efficiency - points per 100 possessions is his benchmark. That's best in the Pac-10 and better than anyone in the ACC too. They've been turning in similar numbers since before Tony Bennett was even the head coach, but he's been there since 2003 so this stuff has his fingerprints on it no matter what.

Offense, though....hmm. Eeeesh, actually. It wasn't good this year. KenPom has them 120th, and remember, KenPom's numbers are tempo-free - they have nothing to do with the slow pace of play Bennett is reputed to employ. However, comma, when Bennett had experienced players his offense was actually quite good. In 2007 his Wazzu offense was better KenPom-wise than our Singletary-and-Reynolds-led offense, and not one of those WSU guys is an NBAer. It's safe to say that, whether by luck of the draw or by following the advice of other coaches in the country, Littlepage has found a coach who's got the X's and O's side of the game licked.

But can he recruit? The conventional wisdom seems to be that he's managed to bring in quality players to the most desolate outpost in big-major D-I basketball, so yes, he can recruit. I don't buy it. I'm not saying he can't recruit. I'm saying as far as Virginia recruiting goes, he's starting entirely from scratch and has proven practically nothing at all. In his time at WSU he pulled one player from UVA recruiting territory, who liked it so much in Pullman he transferred to St. Bonaventure after two years. If you read ESPN he's done pretty well. WSU's '09 and '08 classes appear solid, the real coup being Klay Thompson from the OC, CA. ESPN's also way high on Mike Harthun, and if you believe them, he picked WSU over Arizona and UCLA. Not so much, really - his actual other offers were from Pepperdine, Montana, and Oregon State. And he's from Medford, Oregon, so Pullman really isn't much of a stretch.

When it comes down to it, Bennett's recruiting at WSU since 2003 has turned up three players that you could legitimately say he brought in against the odds. That'd be Thompson, Chris Matthews (the aforementioned St. B transfer), and David Chadwick out of Charlotte, this year. You could maybe throw in a fourth, Xavier Thames from the Sacramento area. The rest have been a mishmash of guys with offers from Portland State or Evansville, locals, and foreign players. Bennett has signed more foreign players than Americans from east of the Mississippi. He also tends to have the pick of the litter in Spokane, as you'd expect. The '08 recruiting class was solid overall but the '07 class was honestly awful. The success he's had with these sorts of players speaks even better to his in-game skills, but mostly he's been out looking for the under-the-radar types that fit the system.

That's just not going to cut it here. It just isn't, not if we want to get any further than 8-8 or 9-7 every year. It's good enough to beat the Miamis and GTs and NC States of the conference, but do we want to ride the bubble every year or do we want to knock Tobacco Road off their perch? If it's the latter, and I hope it is, then we need major-league talent. Coaching will only get you so far. Pete Gillen and Dave Leitao, for all their faults, went into places like Philly and NYC and DC and brought us major-league talent while competing for it against the likes of Kansas, Kentucky, and Georgetown. Unfortunately it took Leitao a few years to get up to speed, and Leitao had been head coach in urban schools in Boston and Chicago and an assistant at UConn as well. Leitao knew how to recruit these places. Our main recruiting base is Virginia, DC, Maryland, Philly, New Jersey, and to a lesser extent North Carolina and NYC, and sometimes a little farther afield to the Midwest. Tony Bennett is brand-new to these areas. This is the biggest concern. If we don't show well next year or in '10-'11, Bennett is going to find himself in quicksand out in the recruiting circles. If Bennett can maximize the talent he's got on the team right now, which is pretty rough around the edges and extremely young but an embarrassment of riches compared to what he's been working with in Pullman, then he'll have a shot at parlaying that into recruiting success.

The other major concern is that we ain't in Kansas anymore. Figuratively speaking. At risk of sounding like a conference elitist, this is the ACC. The arenas are bigger, the spotlights are brighter, the announcers are louder, the stakes are higher. There are five arenas in the ACC bigger than anything they have in the Pac-10, including ours. It's one thing to make a trip to Pauley Pavilion each year. Certainly, that's tough. It's another to make a trip to Maryland where they hate your guts and Blacksburg where they hate your guts and Cameron where they hate everybody's guts, and the Dean Dome where 21,000 people are watching you. Who hates WSU? UW? Scary. We may not be North Carolina, but by virtue of sharing a conference with them -and Duke and Wake Forest and all the rest - the spotlight shines nearly as bright here as in Chapel Hill. And certainly far brighter than Pullman, Washington. If that's not evident by the million-dollar-plus raise Bennett is getting, then I can't help you.

Those of you who wanted Leitao fired and then complained miserably about this hire, stop it. You have no right to complain, I don't care what you'd been led to believe by Jeff White. By now you have to have noticed the similiarities between Bennett and Leitao. Both preach defense. Both have COY awards under their belt - both in 2007, no less. Both had done well for themselves at schools in a big conference but a tough spot. In all of these respects, though, Bennett has done better than Leitao. Bennett's COY award was a national one. Bennett's defenses were better than ours. Bennett's situation at WSU has got to be harder than Leitao's at DePaul, and yet Bennett did more with less at his pre-UVA stop than did Leitao. By these metrics, Bennett is an improvement.

I'm not yet convinced Bennett is a better hire than Tubby, Capel, Barnes, etc. would have been, though, and I didn't actually want Leitao fired, so I reserve the right to be a little disappointed we didn't get them. All of them are proven coaches with proven track records on the whiteboard and the recruiting trail. Some of them are more than familiar with ACC-land. But I'm warming to Bennett, a process which started about ten seconds after the initial discontented shock, when I learned the answer to that question, Where the $%&# is this guy from? Oh, Washington State? Hm, they've done well for themselves lately. There's no doubt in my mind at least that Bennett is a better hire than some of the other fallbacks that were mentioned like Grant or McCaffrey. UVA fans should keep an open mind on Bennett, a short leash on Littlepage, and above all else, welcome the new coach to Hooville with open arms.

If We Do Not Make The NCAA Tournament In 2010, Craig Littlepage Must Be Fired.

That's the long and short of it right there.

If you're reading this, you probably already know what it's about, but just to maintain some pretense of journalistic integrity, here's what I'm talking about. So that being said, please do not take this post as an indictment of our new coach Tony Bennett. I'm not pissed off that we hired Tony Bennett. I welcome him with open arms to the UVA community and as a UVA fan, I wish him nothing but the very very best. ACC and national titles galore, all the money Paul Tudor Jones can shove at him, a statue on the Lawn next to Homer, and seven-foot tall recruits with 4.0 GPAs that fall all over themselves to come to Virginia and stay for four years - five, if the NCAA lets them.

But, again:

If UVA does not make the NCAA tournament in 2010, Craig Littlepage must be fired.

I don't need to tell you that this is the ACC. Basketball is king. Football is great, and success in football is a must, but it's ultimately not what this conference is known for. You have to do well in basketball. I also don't need to tell you about our general suckitude in this area. But I will. Since I showed up on Grounds as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed first year, we have achieved precisely one victory in the NCAA tournament. This puts us even with Virginia Tech and Miami this decade, and that's unacceptable, which is why two coaches have been fired in that time frame. In that time we are 58-86 in regular season ACC play. Also terrible. Being hired at UVA is enough to get Bennett onto the front page of ESPN.com, right above the latest idiocy about Chad Johnson, so it's not like we're a Baylor or a Northwestern struggling to stay afloat in a league that keeps us only because it's tradition. There's visibility here, which is a nice way of saying the whole world can tell we suck. You absolutely cannot fail twice in ACC basketball when it comes to picking coaches.

But, you say, Bennett will have been on the job only a year. Not making the NCAA's in one year can hardly be considered failure. He'll have a team full of sophomores and as likely as not, no recruiting class. I expect this to be a common sentiment. If you feel this way, tell me: what would have been success for Dave Leitao? NCAA? NIT? Or a lesser tournament like the CBI? Myself, I expected that Leitao would have this team back to postseason play, likely in the NIT. Most of the team and pretty much all the important parts were returning. All would be a year older. A solid recruiting class was coming in. Most of the really good players in the ACC (Toney Douglas, Tyrese Rice, Jeff Teague, Tyler Hansbrough, etc.) would be gone, out of eligibility or to the draft early anyway. This was ours for the taking. I didn't agree with Leitao being fired because the results this season actually mildly outperformed expectations and because of this window of opportunity to succeed. The timing was wrong.

But Leitao is now gone, and this is not only the second coach Littlepage has hired but the second time he's gone off the beaten path for it. Hiring Tubby Smith or Jeff Capel would have been the easy route, the safe route, and the one that earned Littlepage a feather in his cap as far as the fanbase was concerned. That's not to scoff at the idea, it's to encourage it. There's a reason they were considered the slam dunk, home run hires. They're excellent coaches and they would have listened to our sales pitch. And they would have brought instant credibility. This is different. This is going to take some convincing. Littlepage is going to sit at that press conference tomorrow and tell us he hired the best coach for the job, just as he did four years ago. Nobody's going to believe it, because the folks considered the best for the job are still coaching at the places they coached at last week. The one person who will believe it, who has to believe it more than anyone else in the world, maybe even more so than Tony Bennett himself, is Craig Littlepage. (If he doesn't, then he's a puppet who needs to go anyway.) So the fate of this basketball team is on Craig Littlepage.

The window, however, is now poised to slam shut. How many transfers will there be? No offense to Tony Bennett, but this is a coaching change. There are always transfers and decommitments. If there are not, then hats off to Tony because he will have managed to pull off an unprecedented sales pitch. What kind of a team will we have next year? Who will wear the uniform? Nobody can say for sure right now. But Bennett no doubt was brought in, at least in large part, because he took a previously pathetic Washington State squad to a shock-the-world kind of tourney season. My baseline expectation for Leitao was the NIT, as mentioned above. If Bennett is not an improvement over that, then Littlepage should be fired for overseeing a full decade of basketball failure at UVA.

We're at a tipping point. The fans wanted Tubby. The fans wanted a splashy hire. They didn't get it. The fans also want a good basketball team. If they don't get that either, support will dry up. Nobody's going to drive an hour from Richmond or 90 minutes from DC or two hours from Hampton Roads or donate any money for a bad basketball team coached by a nobody. Bennett has to be a somebody or this team is going to be at least five years from relevance.

This means he needs to be all in. Not "all in" as in the cheesy motivational slogan employed by Dabo Swinney. Really all in, with a sprinting head start and a cannonball off the high dive. He needs to call the players. Tonight. He needs to call the recruits. Tonight. (Assuming, that is, he is officially no longer employed by Washington State.) He needs a whole wardrobe full of Virginia Cavaliers schwag. He needs to have the Good Ol' Song memorized by tomorrow's press conference. Orange and blue need to be his favorite colors, Thomas Jefferson his favorite President, and Edgar Allan Poe his favorite poet. Coach Bennett needs to be a 'Hoo, not just be employed by the University.

It's the only way to save Craig Littlepage's job.