weekend review

Confession: I didn't actually watch one single pitch of the baseball this weekend.  Kind of stupid really, since I shelled out the money for the live video I ought to be taking advantage of it, but other stuff got in the way.  I will say this: the most encouraging development of the weekend is Scott Silverstein getting back on track by throwing four innings and allowing zero free trips to first base.  And against a good lineup, too.  Without Whit Mayberry I have no idea who'll be our fourth pitcher in the postseason - Shane Halley, maybe, or Johnny Wholestaff - but we're certainly going nowhere with just two.

So one of those things that got in the way was obviously the lacrosse game, which I wasn't gonna miss for the world.  I'd say it lived up to expectations.  I don't care if the two teams combined for only 11 goals, it was one of the better games I've seen this year because both defenses were at the very tops of their games.  Everyone loves watching offensive explosions, but a really good defensive battle is also to be appreciated, and that's what we saw.

First you have to tip your hat to Princeton's goalie, Tyler Fiorito, without whom the game wouldn't have been close.  I wasn't disappointed in the offensive effort despite only producing six goals - Fiorito probably robbed us of three on his own.  Also deserving a tip of the hat is their top defenseman Chad Wiedmaier, who basically shut down Steele Stanwick for large stretches of the game.  And no, that wasn't Wiedmaier who leapt futilely into the air trying to stop Chris LaPierre's end-of-half pass to Stanwick for the miracle goal.  I don't know who that was, but Wiedmaier was the guy conspicuously slamming his stick to the ground in anger.  I like making the other team do that.

Speaking of LaPierre, is there any other choice for player of the game?  Besides that unbelievable pass, which was nine-tenths hork-and-pray but still, you've got to appreciate the shot block.  Yeah, you know what I mean.  The only time this year I've seen someone hit that hard by a lacrosse ball was the time an Ohio State attacker got beaned by his own teammate's shot against Michigan.  (It was funny later because he was OK, but he went down like a bag of bricks.  At least Shocker meant to do that.)  I wonder how many different colors LaPierre's chest is today.

I'd be remiss also if I didn't mention Matt Lovejoy, who played maybe the best game of his career.  Not even kidding, and not even just because he got the first point of his college life.  The whole defense was simply excellent - best game of the season - and Lovejoy clearly led the way.

That game was a great experience for getting ready for our next opponent: Notre Dame.  The best defense in the country, but not an explosive offense.  If you're gonna play the Irish it's a good idea to get used to the idea that five or six goals might be enough, but you'll have a hell of a time just getting to that point.  And I'll tell you what else that game was good for: ammo against anyone who wants a shot clock in lacrosse, which I absolutely don't.  Look at me like I'm crazy all you want, because I'm well aware that both teams earned stall warnings on their first possession.  But the rest of the game, the stalling was not excessive, and the defense was of the tough, physical, and very entertaining sort that would largely disappear if all the defense had to do was wait 45 or 60 seconds to get the ball back.  That kind of tight, well-played matchup isn't going to show its face if we have ourselves a shot clock era next season.

One final thumbs-up: the jerseys.  I like orange numbers and lettering better than blue, but I never did like the stripe across the front of the shoulders.  If this is the look for the next couple years (the way the shoulder-stripes were also introduced in the tournament) then I'm a fan.  We'll be the lower-seeded team next-weekend (and thus in colored jerseys) and I hope and expect to see an equally sharp-looking blue or orange version.

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-- So the other big news of the weekend was Florida State's temper tantrum about media money, third-tier rights, and leaving the ACC for the Big 12 and so on.

My first thought is, what the hell is your damn problem?  We footballized the conference to try and help boost your profile.  We extended a middle finger to traditionalists in order to do so.  We bent over backwards to accommodate your wishes during our first round of expansion, put Miami in the other division so you could play them in the ACC CG (which you've never done), put the ACC CG in the state of Florida so it'd be nice and convenient for your fans to get there, and embarrassed ourselves by playing the game in front of a totally empty stadium as a result.  You repaid us with academic cheating scandals and mediocre-ass football, and now by whining like Texas about third-tier media rights.  You want to be treated like kings in football, start by beating Wake Forest and Virginia.

Naturally, the Big 12 is where they'd want to go if they want to control their third-tier rights.  Texas made a giant stink about them, drove off the desirable parts of their conference, and turned to the rest of the Big 12 and said "now gimme my Longhorn Network."  The remainder of the conference said, "that would be fine, and would you like us to suck your dick too?"  Now Florida State apparently wants the same treatment.

Fortunately, there are calming voices in the wilderness.  Because despite a few harsh words I might have just said about Florida State, the ACC is not better off if they leave.  Frank the Tank is a guy who's always had a level head about realignment issues, and here's his take on the situation.  An excerpt:

ESPN has zero incentive to see the ACC get raided. None. Nada. Unlike its contracts with every other power conference, ESPN has complete top-to-bottom control of all ACC TV rights. This means that ESPN has more of a vested interest in the survival of the ACC specifically over every other conference – it’s the one league that the people in Bristol aren’t sharing with Fox, CBS or the Big Ten Network. In fact, think of it in these terms:
The ACC is the single largest content provider to all of the ESPN networks, whether college or pro.

Emphasis his. Remember who writes the checks, now.

This next is even better.  It's a very, very enlightening look at the reality of the situation and highly recommended.  The money shot:

I’ll bottom line this for those of you who think FSU should dump the ACC for the Big 12 because the Big 12 would allow the Noles to reap huge profits from their third-tier rights. If FSU left the ACC for the Big 12 the only additional athletic inventory it would have to offer a TV network is its worst football game and three or four additional men’s basketball games. How much money do you think the Seminoles stand to gain from the ability to sell their football game vs. Savannah State and men’s basketball games against Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Georgia Southwestern, Jacksonville, and UNC-Greensboro?  How many of those games would FSU have to sell before unburying itself from the ACC’s $20 million exit fee?

The rest of the article comes highly recommended at least by this intrepid blogger.

So my semi-educated guess is that FSU, or at least their board of trustees, is all bluster.  I don't think they'll go anywhere.  I could be wrong, of course.  I could be overestimating the intelligence of their brain trust.  But if they're really serious about the Big 12, someone should set them up a meeting with the presidents and ADs at Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, and Texas A&M, so as to get a few pointers on working with Texas.

-- Schedule news today: the football "future schedules" page on the official site now lists a home-and-home in 2017 and 2018 with Stanford.  Damn if that ain't a long way off.  I'd still rather put some Big Ten or SEC teams on the schedule - we seem to be going Pac-wacky with USC, and now future dates with UCLA and Stanford - but I'm not gonna complain about a home-and-home with quality opponents regardless of where they're located.

Also, next year's Big Ten basketball opponent for the Challenge is out, and it's Wisconsin.  Cue up the jokes about the score being 38-35.  Add that to our gig in the preseason NIT and the picture of our hoops schedule is starting to come together.

-- When it comes to baseball recruiting, every time you get a good one you have to sweat it out until the MLB signing deadline in August to see if you'll actually get to keep your new toys.  Sometimes they stay (Branden Kline, Danny Hultzen, Derek Fisher), sometimes they go (Justin Nicolino.)  So we greatly appreciate the gem of this year's class saving us the heart attacks; top pitcher Nathan Kirby, who could've been a first-rounder, decided to not even go through the medical requirements.  It would've been a little better if he'd phrased it in a way that didn't sound like he was purposely failing a drug test, but we know what he means.  Kirby could very well be the best player entering college ball in the whole country next year.  So if this year is our reloading year, next year is the one where we just grab a bigger gun.

weekend review

Thank everything for Steele Stanwick and a slippery Klockner field, or this wouldn't be a very fun weekend review in the lacrosse section. The good news in that department: An 11-10 win in which UVA significantly outplayed UNC for long stretches. The bad: Dipshit brainfarts that put the game severely in jeopardy.

Nobody was immune. Adam Ghitelman's decision to heave the ball upfield with six seconds on the clock in the third quarter led to one Carolina goal four seconds later. Rhamel Bratton tried the slick, low-percentage pass toward the net (and copious defenders) when all that was required was to run around the field for three minutes. Chris LaPierre froze in the face of a double team, which naturally dislodged the ball a split second later. All of these led to goals and heightened blood pressure.

The other thing that kept leading to goals was the defense's decision to defend everyone but the ballcarrier in transition. This is probably brain-damaged coaching rather than brain-damaged playing. Yes, I get that we don't want the ball to be passed to one of UNC's actual stars, but once the guy with the ball gets within eight yards, does it matter if it's Billy Bitter or Billy the Clown? They're going to score from that range, and it's not helpful to let them get there.

That said, transition defense was a major struggle but settled defense, amazingly, was not. My first thought was that the defense had improved just enough to allow Ghitelman to make the saves and look like the goalie he really can be. Later I realized that was wrong: the defense improved a ton. It turned Carolina's offense into our own offense at its most frustrating: ball gets passed around the perimeter until it's turned over or shot harmlessly into the goalie's stick. Credit the switch to the zone, a timely adjustment that was probably forced upon the coaches as much as anything by Matt Lovejoy's season-ending (OH GREAT) surgery. UNC clearly didn't expect that.

Overall a pleasant surprise that shouldn't have been a surprise at all (a reminder that this can still be a dominant team, even against quality opponents, when it wants to be) pockmarked by some monumental insanity. Encouraging; dumb mistakes are more easily fixed than the entire system.

It sets up the Duke game next week for an interesting scenario: because of how the tiebreakers work, UVA is either going to be the #1 seed or the #4 seed in the ACC tournament. Not that it ever matters, but that's the way it breaks this year.

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Just to get this part out of the way: the baseball team lost a game. OH NO. We being UVA fans, no doubt by now the meltdown is well underway. (checking to see.) (not finding anything.) (doublechecking.) (still no.) Huh, OK, so, baseball fans are a patient bunch, or more patient than basketball fans anyway. It helps that that was only the third loss in 34 games and that a series win on the road against a top-ten team that's probably second-best in the conference is a good thing, not a bad thing. And you'd expect this patience from a group of people who enjoy a game in which they have to sometimes wait for the pitcher to get done scratching his ass and horking loogies on the ball ground before he decides he's ready to deliver again. Gives us time to get another beer.

Anyway, even then it's not entirely rainbows. All three losses have been on Sundays, which means Sunday starter Cody Winiarski is in for some scrutiny, especially after a game that saw his ERA jump up nine-tenths of a point. Every time he struggles and every gem that Will Roberts pitches on Tuesdays increases the call for Roberts to be moved to the weekend rotation. Never mind that Winiarski completely shut down both Poly and Maryland; a bad outing against the team with the seventh-best batting average and ninth-best slugging percentage in the country is enough to bring the doubters out of the woodwork. Explaining to people that George Washington bats .254 as a team and is 245th in the country and Georgia Tech bats .330 and is seventh never seems to have any effect; there's still a crowd that wants to see Roberts "get his chance," as if pitching on Tuesdays isn't a chance and as if that means he'll be forgotten about come the postseason and further as if he and Cody and the rest of the pitching staff hadn't been pitching side by side all offseason under the scrutiny of the coaches. RRGGH. Roberts is pitching wonderfully but Winiarski isn't pitching badly.

Anyway. Georgia Tech. Killed 'em. Danny Hultzen was lights the hell out again, allowing one earned run and one walk and striking out 12 on Friday. The bats came alive late, and Danny had his 7th win of the season. The lineup continued to hammer GT pitching for the rest of the weekend, earning a 12-9 win on Saturday and taking a 10-8 loss on Sunday. Even with the loss and a few extra runs for GT hitting, you are directed to be ecstatic about this: GT's starters are not chumps - they are the opposite of chumps - and our bats chased Mark Pope from what had been a pitchers' duel til the 7th, beat Jed Bradley into submission, and rained hits on Buck Farmer, too.

So: 31-3. Two one-run losses and a two-run loss, up against more than a five-run average margin in our wins. This team has never been out of a game. They're loose, enjoying themselves. They've got that swagger, without swaggering. The last time we saw a UVA team rolling like this was probably during the soccer team's run to the national title (not to put any pressure on.) But soccer is the kind of game where any old fluke at any time can explode all your work up to that point. Baseball can be fluky too but you know you're gonna get your nine hacks, every time, and there's something reassuring about that. There's also something reassuring about Danny Hultzen being on your team. Don't forget that.

that one's gonna leave a mark

Ah, Bill Simmons. The only sportswriter with whom a love-hate relationship can truly blossom. Simmons is at times the most entertaining guy in the business and highly useful, and at others obnoxiously unreadable. Falling (mostly) into the former category is the Levels of Losing that he made popular.

Incredibly, UVA found a way to lose in such a way as to bring like two-thirds of these levels into the equation. I wonder if that's ever been done before. There are fifteen levels. (Simmons claims there are sixteen but that's because he allows the insufferable whiny Red Sox girly-girl that exists within every Red Sox fan to write the end of the column, and places Bill Buckner at Level I. I acknowledge no such extra level.) Take a gander at how many of these applied to last night's lacrosse game:

- Level 15: Princeton Principle. No - we are not a Cinderella team.

- Level 14: Achilles' Heel. Yes. Faceoffs faceoffs a thousand times faceoffs. I told you we would not win if we couldn't win faceoffs. Final result: 26% - and we still almost won.

- Level 13: Alpha Dog. Duke's 14th goal was Max Quinzani's 68th goal of the season on Ned Crotty's 62nd assist. We have an excellent, well-rounded offense, but nobody that statistically dominant. Mark it a yes.

- Level 12: Rabbit's Foot. No.

- Level 11: Sudden Death. Not technically, but, yes, with 12 seconds left, it might as well have been. Don't tell me you weren't thinking "they can't score here or we lose."

- Level 10: Dead Man Walking. No, not really. The Stony Brook game caused a palpable sense of dread but that's not quite how this is meant.

- Level 9: Monkey Wrench. Not only yes but fuck yes. Picture the scene, in case you didn't watch. It's 8-5. Duke has the ball but our defense has been doing a good job of keeping them at bay, and it culminates in a shot that goalie Adam Ghitelman saves - with his damn face. Announcers make joke about courage. The ball, incredibly, is lodged in his facemask, but the refs don't blow the whistle, so the closest Duke attacker tries to dislodge it with his stick. Repeat: ball stuck in facemask, Duke attacker poking at it. HE IS HITTING OUR FUCKING GOALIE IN THE GODDAM HEAD WITH HIS FUCKING STICK. Defenseman Matt Lovejoy sees this and does the only thing a defender is honorably allowed to do in that situation: levels the Dookie with a vicious shoulder check. Penalty is called, but not for the faceshots; on Lovejoy for unnecessary roughness. Because there's no reason to hit a guy who's clocking your teammate in the head, right?

Duke doesn't score on the ensuing man-up chance - in fact, Ghitelman makes yet another nice save and UVA clears, but Duke naturally doubles the ball as our middie (Pomper, I think, but I can't remember and I'm not going back to look) tries to burn time. With the penalty expired, or nearly so, Duke regains the ball and races downfield for a transition goal to make it 8-6. They would score six more after that before we finally got the ball in the net again.

No doubt Ghitelman would have been penalized if he'd grabbed the ball out of his mask during play - you can't use your hand to play the ball - which is obviously why, other than the fact that there was a crosse up in his face, he didn't do that. So why is the presence of the ball an excuse to take illegal headshots? And if the ball was live (which I guess it was til the refs blew the whistle) then why the penalty for a shoulder check to the front of a guy who's playing the ball? Because it's Duke. You play Duke, Duke gets the calls. Duh.

Level 8: Butt-Kicking. No - and in fact, this shouldn't even be that high. A full-fledged butt-kicking wouldn't have been half so painful to watch.

Level 7: This Can't Be Happening. No. Reserved for losing to a clearly way inferior team. Stony Brook would have fallen under this category.

Level 6: Drive-By Shooting. No. Reserved for teams even worse than clearly way inferior.

Level 5: Broken Axle. Yes, on account of not scoring at all while Duke rattled off seven straight.

Level 4: Role Reversal. No. Sadly, this is what happened to Duke in the ACCs. But not here.

Level 3: Guillotine. Gotta go with yes. The whole time, the lead felt tenuous. We weren't winning faceoffs, we were looking sloppy, and at the same time so were they and you just knew that if Duke ever stopped being sloppy, the result wouldn't be pretty. All it took was an executioner to set it off, and this one came dressed in black and white.

Level 2: Stomach Punch. Tie game, momentum on our side, faceoff, ball right there on a UVA crosse for a last possession - and then it wasn't. Yes, and for a couple other reasons besides.

Level 1: The Tailspin. No, I suppose not. This one seems anticlimatic.

In one game, UVA found a way to lose in seven of the fifteen ways on Simmons's Levels of Losing, which has got to be some kind of record. And where's the category for Missing Your Best Chance when you know you haven't had this good a team in years, you won't next year, and there's no doubt in anyone's mind that yours was the best team all season? What about Didn't Win For The Gipper? What about The Next Game Would Have Been Way Easier? Notre Dame's had a good run of it so far but Duke is going to crush them, and yes I know they already lost to the Irish once but they won't again. What about Great Now There's Nothing Left But A Meteor Game? Yes, I actually hope Duke wins because I like Notre Dame way less than Duke and if someone's going to win their first-ever lacrosse championship it better be a team that's paid a few dues, but still: ewwww.

Great way to kick off the decade.

game preview: Duke

Programming note: Taking a break tomorrow since it's a holiday weekend, but I'll be doing stuff on and off throughout the weekend. Besides, Friday is usually a day off during football season anyway, and Saturday's lacrosse matchup is as big as any regular season football game.

Anyway, you know Duke. More than you'd like to, I'll bet. You know Duke because this will be the third UVA/Duke clash this year, and because beating them in the ACC tournament forced announcers to change the story from "seven-game losing streak" to "lost seven of the last eight to Duke."

Actually, let 'em talk that way. This is our boogeyman game. In the last ten years, half of UVA's lacrosse seasons have ended right here in the semifinals, including the last two. Plus it's Duke; obviously you know about the long losing streak, and breaking it required averting a total first-quarter disaster in the ACC tournament that threatened to end that tourney run right then and there. So UVA fans are understandably extremely nervous. Maybe we wouldn't be so nervous if UVA wasn't facing the one opponent to beat them all year - and win fairly handily. Or if it wasn't an opponent that had a penchant for beating us. Or if said opponent hadn't just got done manhandling North Carolina. Or if the team hadn't had such a scare last week and hadn't looked badly out of sorts at times. Or if there weren't a ghastly backdrop to the whole thing that makes everyone wonder just what frame of mind the team is in.

Last year none of that was even remotely true. The team had just finished completely steamrolling two totally hapless opponents. The next opponent had already been beaten handily once that season and had just barely escaped their quarterfinal matchup. And there was a blissful lack of felony charges pending against former teammates. So there wasn't nearly the anxiety level going in, and naturally we got beat like a drum.

But there's enough to be nervous about this year, so as a nice calming exercise, let's list reasons why not to be:

1. Last week's game wasn't half as bad as it looked. In fact I put it to you that it was one of the best defensive efforts of the year, rivaled only by the Cornell game and the UNC game. And the UNC game, in which UNC only scored five goals, was helped by the fact that UNC is a terrible shooting team. Nine goals allowed might seem a pedestrian showing, but given the time of possession (a stat which they don't really keep in lacrosse but I wish they would; in this case its obvious which team won that battle) it's phenomenal. Stony Brook's big three were held to five measly points, and UVA only took two penalties - one a procedure call which wasn't entirely Lovejoy's fault since his stick had been slashed out of his hand. And neither man-up chance resulted in a goal for Stony Brook. Play defense like that against Duke and our chances will be greatly improved.

2. We still have an offense. Even with the brain farts suffered against Stony Brook (stepping out of bounds? Really?) it was a pretty efficient effort. The offense caused a few defensive mistakes and probably would have scored 16 goals with anything resembling a reasonable faceoff margin. The theme of the upcoming game is "whoever has the ball will score" and this is a UVA team that's not had trouble scoring all year.

3. There is no way the faceoff battle will be that damn lopsided again. 5 of 23 is an astronomically bad number. And we still won! We thought Duke killed us at the X in the loss, and they did: our faceoff guys won 8 of 25. Both are outliers. So is the 22-for-32 effort in the ACCT win. But when we lost the faceoff battle to Duke, we lost the game by four; when we won the faceoff battle, we won the game by four but only because the defense kind of slacked off after gaining what looked like an insurmountable seven-goal lead. I can't see anything so lopsided happening this time around, which means a tight game. And a tight game goes in our favor, because...

4. Duke is having major-league goalie issues. You'll remember that their starting goalie, Dan Wigrizer, got yanked during our ACCT matchup, and effectively lost his starting job then and there. Backup Mike Rock took over and started the next three games. Then Rock got pulled in the UNC game - a game they were winning - because he'd only managed to make one save against five UNC goals. Wigrizer finished the game after a short and unsuccessful stint by third-stringer Devon Sherwood and didn't do all that great either. Lord only knows who'll get the start in net for Duke on Saturday, but all three options have enough of a body of work to show that whoever it is will play poorly.

Way things are going now, no result between a 15-goal loss and a 15-goal win will surprise me all that much. "Whoever has the ball will score"....that much is true, but UVA's the team you want to bet on if both teams have the ball equally. Just.....win a faceoff.

director's cup update

Well, not officially. Not til Thursday. But they finished up all the championships that go into this update, so I did some back-of-the-envelope type numbercrunchinating, and came up with the following projected standings at the top:

Stanford - 555.5
Florida - 548
Penn State - 521.5
Virginia - 515
North Carolina - 457
Oregon - 454
Florida State - 448

Just rough pinscratch figuring, mind you, but the standings should be just about right and the numbers probably not much more than, say, plus-or-minus eight. In any case three things are pretty clearly true:

- UVA's not falling further than 4th in this update.
- Despite that, UVA actually made up ground on first place.
- That's as good as it gets for the winter. We should stay in the top ten at the final winter update but won't look much better than that, and may drop further.

There's 25 more points coming this way - that's what you get for losing in the first round of basketball tournaments. It sucks gonzo that the women's team decided to be the 5/12 victim in their tournament - it cost at least 25 points in the standings. Plus, the men's swim team should probably be good for another 70 or so.

Winter sports are not usually our strong point, but there's a lot that went right so far, despite the lady hoopsters' Green Bay fiasco:

- The lady swimmers grabbed ninth place at nationals. Lauren Perdue grabbed three top-eight finishes, and the team would have ended up eighth but for a DQ'd relay. Not a big DC points difference, though.

- The wrestlers took 15th at nationals, their best finish ever.

- Robby Andrews' national championship earned a 20th-place finish for the Hoos.

All are among the top finishes ever for the program - in wrestling's case, best ever. So with a likely top-ten finish after the winter sports wrap up and the really strong stuff - the spring sports with baseball, lacrosse, and tennis - coming up, is this the year, somebody (us, natch) knocks Stanford out of the #1 spot?

Uh, no. Keep in mind Stanford owns at sports we don't even participate in, like water polo. You only get to count 20 sports toward your Director's Cup standings and because of that, Stanford always has to leave off points in some of their sports. But, if our powerhouse teams don't stumble at the wrong times, a top-five is definitely attainable.

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So speaking of the powerhouse teams, what did they do this weekend? Powerhoused, of course.

- Baseball swept Boston College, and in superdominating fashion. Game 2 only looked close because Kevin Arico, brought in to close out Robert Morey's gem, decided to make it interesting. The rotation absolutely killed the Eagles. In 21 total innings, Hultzen/Morey/ Winiarski gave up 10 hits and 2 earned runs. TWO. RUNS. Hultzen pitched eight of those innings and is a frickin' machine, as usual. Morey pitched seven and is a machine in training. Winiarski went six and probably extended his stay in the rotation til at least next week (I'd say it was probably do or die this weekend for him; there's only one weekday game and Roberts or Kline would be ready to go on Sunday if they had to be) and gave us reason to believe he can do a pretty good impression of a machine at times. We'll go as far this year as our pitchers can take us.

And the bullpen, outside of Arico who I'm really not worried about, was similarly sparkling. Not that the starters gave them much chance to work, but Halley, Davis, Wilson, and Mayberry didn't allow any runs at all. Mayberry had to work himself out of a little jam, but the nice thing about ten-run leads is they give the manager a lot of confidence in deciding to give his freshman pitcher more than enough rope to hang himself. Mayberry responded nicely, grew up a little bit, and the bullpen just got better.

Speaking of getting better, Halley's separated shoulder has done just that, as you might notice, and the bullpen has just gone from thin-looking to pretty damn robust. Get Halley and a looking-better-all-the-time Mayberry in the mix and suddenly Brian O'Connor has options and lots of them. I'd like to have another lefty in the pen, but Scott Silverstein can't stop getting hurt, so we have Neal Davis and that's it. Still, picky picky.

- Lacrosse didn't quite dominate the way they have the ability to, but hey: win's a win. The defense looks like it could really use Ryan Nizolek back, and took a lot of blame for letting Towson get closer than they probably should have. I say, throw this game on the pile with every football and basketball game we lost - the one labeled "sucky offense leads to sucky-looking defense." My take on lacrosse is: look, sooner or later, the other guys are gonna score, so you better be scoring too. The faceoff men were absolutely murdering Towson's in the first half, but when you turn it over eight times in a quarter, of course you're going to be losing.

Granted, there were at least three Towson goals that I can remember where I said to myself, hey, you got any clothespins? Cause we're hanging Ghitelman out to dry here. Like that third quarter goal where Lovejoy got burned on the restart. I mean, pay attention, dude. Lovejoy actually looked really good at times, but his mistakes were exceedingly visible.

Oh well. Guess it was nice that we could give Towson native Harry Prevas a start in Nizolek's absence. And it certainly speaks to our offensive talent that we can get 15 goals in a not-real-impressive showing. Yup, just another day at the office.

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I suppose it wouldn't be UVA if I didn't have the chance to crap on your parade route a little bit and mix in some bad news with all the sunshine. The football team will be short one more player for the upcoming season without Riko Smalls, and the basketball team is losing - yeah, you guessed - Tristan Spurlock. Both had played similarly miniscule roles with their respective teams - Smalls, in fact, never appeared in a game - so it's largely just a lot of potential being lost. In Spurlock's case that potential is probably a lot more real than with Smalls, who was heir to the Keith Payne mantle of "player most wildly and unrealistically overrated by overexcited Hoo fans."

And in Spurlock's case especially, you have to at least tip your hat and wish him well. I don't know what things were like behind the scenes any more than you do, but Spurlock made an effort not to be a public distraction when he clearly was chafing at the bit to get in the games. And he wasn't recruited to play this system, he was recruited to be J.R. Reynolds reincarnate. He gave it a shot anyway - I don't think you can ask for much more.

Once we get the official word that Landesberg is out as well - and believe me, I'd like nothing more than to be wrong about that - then you may commence random and almost totally useless speculation about what Bennett's rotation will look like next year. Useless because we pretty much have no way of knowing which of the six freshmen will adapt best to the system; did you honestly expect Will Sherrill to see more than 10 minutes of total floor time all year, let alone start a few games?