game preview: North Carolina

Date/Time: Saturday, February 27; 6:30

TV: ESPN

Record against the Heels: 52-129

Last meeting: UNC 71, UVA 67; 3/13/15; Greensboro, NC (ACC tournament)

Last game: Miami 64, UVA 61 (2/22); UNC 80, NCSt. 68 (2/24)

KenPom:

Tempo:
UVA: 61.5 (#351)
UNC: 72.3 (#47)

Offense:
UVA: 117.7 (#11)
UNC: 119.8 (#5)

Defense:
UVA: 92.7 (#9)
UNC: 95.7 (#32)

Pythag:
UVA: .9397 (#3)
UNC: .9298 (#6)

Projected lineups:

Virginia:

PG: London Perrantes (11.2 ppg, 3.1 rpg, 4.4 apg)
SG: Devon Hall (4.2 ppg, 2.4 rpg, 1.9 apg)
SG: Malcolm Brogdon (18.2 ppg, 4.2 rpg, 2.8 apg)
PF: Anthony Gill (13.6 ppg, 6.0 rpg, 0.6 apg)
C: Mike Tobey (7.0 ppg, 3.9 rpg, 0.4 apg)

North Carolina:

PG: Joel Berry (11.9 ppg, 3.1 rpg, 3.9 apg)
SG: Marcus Paige (12.3 ppg, 2.2 rpg, 3.5 apg)
SF: Justin Jackson (12.4 ppg, 4.0 rpg, 3.3 apg)
PF: Brice Johnson (17.0 ppg, 10.6 rpg, 1.3 apg)
C: Kennedy Meeks (10.0 ppg, 6.1 rpg, 1.2 apg)

I brought it to my own attention that I haven't done a single preview of an ACC game all year.  So why not start with the biggest regular season game we've got?

There's a lot at stake here, in terms of ACC seeding.  A top four slot, of course, is the goal, in the hopes that a few of the teams 5-9 or so get taken out early.  The conference is so damn wrapped up on itself, though, that it's going to be all but impossible to avoid tiebreaker entanglements.  There's a fair chance that teams 3-6 are in a four-way tie at 11-5 after this weekend - in fact, that happenstance mainly hinges on UVA beating Carolina.  And if that happens, then 1-2 will also be tied at 12-4.  UVA has collected wins over every team in the top six except Duke and UNC; one of those can still be rectified.  If they get it, they'll be close to bulletproof in any tiebreaker scenario you can concoct.

If not, they'll have to scratch and claw and hope for a few things to shake out correctly.  Even at 12-6, the chances of the coveted double bye would be slim.  With GameDay in town and Bronco Mendenhall hosting a very big junior day, it'll be a big-time atmosphere in Charlottesville; that'll help, and a potentially shorthanded UVA team will need every bit of help it can get.

-- UVA on offense

Lately I've been trying to decide the answer to a chicken-egg question: Is Malcolm Brogdon dominating games because his teammates are suddenly not much help, or are they not much help because they're getting out of the way of a completely en fuego Brogdon?  One clue might be those elbow step-back jumpers he was beating Miami over the head with.  Darius Thompson had the opportunity to try the same thing on more than one occasion and passed on it.  Then Brogdon would go out and do it again.  It was almost as if he was trying to convince Thompson it was possible.

Anthony Gill's one-handers haven't been falling lately, which isn't helping.  I've always thought those are really tough shots - you have to be a smashmouth post presence and then immediately switch to a soft touch.  I'm hoping to see Kennedy Meeks guarding him Saturday, because Meeks isn't quick enough to regularly stop Gill.  I don't think Roy Williams has checked out that much, though.  The much more likely scenario is to see Brice Johnson on Gill and Meeks on Tobey; Meeks's bulk will give Tobey trouble, and Johnson has two inches on Gill.  Both would be forced further from the basket than they'd like to be.  They can hit the jumper (I'm not sure Tobey takes jumpers, though - he's more or less decided to resurrect the set shot) but obviously that's too low-percentage to rely on.

I'm also sure we'll see Justin Jackson on Brogdon, which is interesting.  Jackson has three inches on Brogdon, and step-back mid-range jumpers would be hard to pull off.  Brogdon's much beefier and stronger, though.  I'm always wishing Brogdon would go harder at his defenders and just knock them around a bit - probably no more so than in this game.

Thing is, though, UNC should be better on defense than it is.  They're not bad, but they're not really as good as they should be given their frontcourth depth and overall athleticism.  Johnson is a helluva rebounder on defense, but nobody else really is.  Jackson in particular is pretty much indifferent to the glass.  The Hoos should have plenty of second chances on offense, especially if they shoot enough threes.  Shooting threes is always a good way to increase your offensive rebounds anyway, but UNC's guards basically only take whatever comes to them.

Essentially, though, this will have to be more than the Malcolm Brogdon Show.  I'm very happy to see him take over like this, because I've been asking for it.  But UVA won't win too many games, and zero against Carolina, if he's the only one scoring in double digits.

-- UVA on defense

This Carolina team is no different than any Carolina team under Roy Williams.  Simple formula: Recruit a bunch of horses and let them run.  There isn't a lot of definition to a player's role.  Wing Justin Jackson handles the ball so much that KenPom's normally reliable algorithm pegs him as the point guard.

The offense is predicated on driving at the rim.  The Heels want to try and finish there, which they do well, or pull up for a jumper.  When they shoot threes, which isn't often because they don't have a sharpshooter, it's almost always a drive and kick.  Practically every single one of their made threes is assisted.  But they're one of the most skewed teams in the country toward two-pointers - only ODU and Navy are more so.  They're simply more athletic than just about everyone they play, so they use it.

This is where Isaiah Wilkins and Evan Nolte would come in handy.  Wilkins provides the athleticism needed to keep up on the interior.  Nolte is a plodder, but he makes up for it with almost picture-perfect positioning and excellent rotating.

Still, the pack-line is designed to stop precisely this kind of matchup.  ESPN put out a laughable preview of the game online, with keys to the game like "play good defense."  One of them was on the money, though: UNC needs to hit the threes they get from kicking the ball back out.  If the pack-line is on point, there'll be a lot of opportunities like that.  Guys like Joel Berry and Marcus Paige are OK, but far from automatic.

An all-in rebounding effort is crucial, too.  Yes, that's barely a step above "score more points," but Carolina has their bigs crash the offensive boards hard and depends on the athleticism of their backcourt (which doesn't crash) to stop transition chances.  When one of the guards drives the lane, the bigs follow and try to clean up putbacks.

This is the kind of matchup that makes college ball so much fun.  Given a nice oval track, the UNC race cars would love to do laps at 200 mph all day.  UVA prefers offroading it.  It's the race track vs. the mud pit.  Everything is based on whether the Hoos can bog down the Carolina offense, or if UNC can just run past the sand traps.

-- Outlook

The Hoos will need more than to make a mess of the UNC offense, though; they'll have to score some of their own, too.  Hard to do against the size and quickness advantages UNC will have, but the Heels are held back by a bit of an indifference on defense and a massive indifference to rebounding.  Boston College is in the bottom ten offenses in the whole country and still scored just shy of a point per possession.

It helps a bit too that Roy Williams is kinda checking out, as the Duke game so amply demonstrated.  His in-game coaching skills have always been, eh, a bit north of mediocre at best, but his give-a-shit levels are in rapid decline.  A close game gives a major advantage to Tony and Sons.

And close is what it's almost dead certain to be.  Against the ACC's six-team top tier, Carolina is 1-3.  That makes this a huge game for them as much as UVA - they'll still be tied for the ACC lead if they lose, but they would have zero margin for error because the tiebreakers would be hell on them.  And they're 5-4 on the road, having been incapable of putting close road games away against good teams - Northern Iowa and Texas both came up big too.

The tangibles, then, are close, with strengths and weaknesses for both teams, and a few more of the latter for the Hoos if they have to play without Wilkins or Nolte.  The intangibles all swing to the right side.  In the Dean Dome, even though that's not one of the ACC's tougher buildings, I'd have a very hard time giving UVA the edge.  At home, with a crowd that started the day fired up and will have all day to get nice and lubricated.... well, a loss isn't inconceivable, but too many of the intangible percentages are on our side to predict one.

Final score: UVA 68, UNC 64

trudge

What a drag this football team has become.  It's a drag to watch.  It's a drag to write about.  It's a drag knowing we lost last week, we lost this week, and we'll lose again next week.  And yes, I know that we didn't actually lose last week, but at 2-5, trudging our way through an unremarkable loss to yet another better-coached team, it sure has a way of feeling like that.

There are 128 teams in I-A football; 25 of them are currently out of legitimate bowl contention, which I define right now as being 2-5 or worse.**  Exactly one of those 25 is in the ACC.  That means more than 80% of the teams in the country remain interested in the proceedings.  And with 80 slots, most of those fans will take home some kind of prize.

This should be a terrific time of year.  These games only happen once a week - they should matter.  Well, they do for most people.  Most people are eagerly devouring details of Saturday's opponent, and when that day comes, well, it's one of only 12 all year so it's a big swing between winning and losing and your fortunes are either wonderfully uplifted or woefully downtrodden.  Until the next week when you get to do it all over again.

That hasn't been the case around here for four years.  Occasional smatterings of meaning have been tossed onto the canvas here and there like Jackson Pollock scooping from the bottom of the can, but in the end it's all come down to the same thing.  Lose, complain about coaching, repeat.  Saturday, I'll turn on the TV again, and I'll hope for a miracle, for some entertainment, for something good to happen, but certainly not expect it.  Nobody's hanging on every play wondering whether it's the difference between Good Times and Bad Times, because we already know which way we're headed.  We've already read the spoilers.

This is not interesting.  This is utterly, incomprehensibly, lame.  Football season has become a long slow walk to basketball season.  If ESPN were smart they'd have ponied up for the rights to UVA vs. Morgan State on November 13; a whole legion of UVA fans are going to be so desperate for a rescue from the grind of watching this football team that they'll paste themselves to the screen for hoops.

The whole rest of the ACC is still shooting for something.  Craig Littlepage, Jon Oliver, and Mike London have ensured that's not the case in Charlottesville.

**For the sake of expediency.  I'm sure there are some three-win teams whose fans are already telling the in-laws, yes, we can visit for Christmas, we're not taking that trip to Florida after all.

-- I didn't hate the offensive gameplan this week.  The run game worked - really, honest-to-God, properly worked.  Give the O-line a pat on the back.  Taquan Mizzell has never had a 100-yard game in college before; his next-best performance is barely half his new career high.

And I tipped my hat at those TE drag routes with the QB rollout.  You don't want to get too reliant on plays where you have to eat it if the one option doesn't pan out, but regardless.  (Tangent: that needs to be a goal-line play.  Rollouts away from the blocking, with a following receiver like that, are close to foolproof inside the 2.  Receiver open, throw it.  Receiver covered, sprint for the pylon and dive.  Even if your QB is fast and agile like Jared Lorenzen, he's still two yards tall.)

So yeah - whatever reason we lost the game, and it might've been the four interceptions, just guessing here - it mostly wasn't Steve Fairchild's fault.  That said, I still hate that his go-to third-and-long play is a screen pass.  That works never.

-- I also applaud the reasoning behind the attempted trick of waving off the "extra" player, because I'm just going to assume the coaches are self-aware of UVA's reputation for screwing up substitutions and figured if anyone could pull off a trick like that it would be UVA.  Then again, if anyone could forget that the 12-men rule takes effect when you break the huddle and line up, rather than at the snap, it would also be UVA.  The refs were nice and fooled, even if the UNC defenders can count to 11.

-- Nicholas Conte has a 46-yard punting average?  I did not realize that.  At least one of our players is earning an A+ for on-field play.

game preview: North Carolina

Date/Time: Saturday, October 24; 3:30

TV: RSN/ESPN3

Record against the Heels: 54-61-4

Last meeting: UNC 28, UVA 27; 10/25/14, Charlottesville

Last weekend: UVA 44, SU 38; UNC 50, WF 14

Line: UNC by 17.5

One of college sports' greatest advantage over the pros is the total lack of tangible benefit to losing.  (No, the potential firing of a fireable coach doesn't count; it's all hypothetical ether til that day actually arrives.)  In that sense, despite the complete debauchery that is the recruiting process (especially at oh say Louisville) and the golden handshakes we all pretend don't exist, and all the tattoo scandals and fake degrees and free shoes and everything, despite all that, there's still at least one absolutely pure aspect to the college level of football: it ain't for nuthin' but braggin' rights.  Nobody's lamenting the loss of draft pick status when you win, nobody's encouraging the team to lose, there's no such thing as tanking.  That's why the Syracuse game was great stuff.  Come what may in the end, there's at least one school in the ACC who can't lord it over us for a year.

Which brings us to the South's Oldest Rivalry - and the five game losing streak in this particular game that we currently wear.  Prior to that, UVA had won four straight, seven of eight, and ten of twelve, and in fact was very close to completely leveling the all-time series.  Plus we had that fun little streak where we hadn't lost to them at home since 1981.  Nice.  Bragging rights.

The Hoos are very unlikely to go bowling this year and very unlikely to save their coach's job, but losing accomplishes nothing and is always worse than winning - particularly in a rivalry with a name.  UNC is on a completely opposite trajectory from UVA, proving there is no such thing as sports-god justice given the two schools' vastly differing attitudes on classroom work, so bragging rights here are likely to continue to slip further away, but at least a win would be an unadulterated joy.

-- UVA run offense vs. UNC run defense

Top backs:
Taquan Mizzell: 66 carries, 254 yards, 3.8 ypc, 2 TDs
Albert Reid: 37 carries, 163 yards, 4.4 ypc, 1 TD

UVA offense:
112.17 yards/game, 3.35 yards/attempt
119th of 128 (national), 13th of 14 (ACC)

UNC defense:
213.83 yards/game, 4.52 yards/attempt
82nd of 128 (national), 11th of 14 (ACC)

It's amazing what a functional running game can do.  Matt Johns played well against Syracuse, but I don't think the passing game was all it could've been given the shitshow that is Syracuse's pass defense.  With our usual running game, that would've been another loss.  Instead the ball actually moved on the ground.  UVA managed about four-and-a-quarter yards per carry without sacks, which is basically mediocre.  I'll take it, after what we've seen so far.  It moved them off the bottom of the conference, at least.

Of course, that's half because UNC shut down Wake Forest last week.  Kind of.  This was in large part because 1) UNC kept the pressure on Wake's non-scrambly quarterback, John Wolford, and 2) Wake's punter felt it necessary to receive a snap with his knee on the ground.  Slick.  Anyway, UNC.  Normally, midseason analyses of opposing run defenses begin with "have they played Georgia Tech yet?" and if they have, take any poor standing in the rankings with a grain of salt, and the earlier the game, the bigger the grain.

But UNC actually stopped GT pretty effectively.  Then again, Delaware, a team even more run-wacky than GT, racked up almost 300 yards.  Illinois, outside the top 100 in rushing effectiveness, also had their way.  Even North Carolina A&T had some success on the ground.

With a little consistency on the O-line, something that's been entirely lacking this year, the Hoos might actually find some room to run. (?)  UNC has an inexperienced defensive line and has found it tough to get any disruption from the front.  Linebackers Jeff Schoettmer and Shakeel Rashad do pretty good work, but they also have to do most of it.  UVA will never run roughshod over anyone, but I'm comfortable saying this matchup won't be a disaster, either.

-- UVA pass offense vs. UNC pass defense

Quarterback:
Matt Johns: 117/191, 61.3%; 1,432 yards, 11 TDs, 8 INTs; 7.5 ypa, 134.9 rating

Top receivers:
Taquan Mizzell: 35 rec., 409 yards, 3 TDs
Canaan Severin: 30 rec., 418 yards, 3 TDs
Olamide Zacchaeus: 9 rec., 48 yards, 0 TDs

UVA offense:
244.3 yards/game, 7.3 yards/attempt
62nd of 128 (national), 8th of 14 (ACC)

UNC defense:
135.5 yards/game, 5.5 yards/attempt
10th of 128 (national), 2nd of 14 (ACC)

You hear a lot about UNC's improved defense, and this is what they mean.  UNC was a wreck last year in pass defense, allowing 8.5 yards per attempt.  They've slashed three yards off of that, which is impressive.  Opposing quarterbacks are barely above 50/50 in completing their passes.

The linebackers are solid in pass coverage, and they pair up with a very solid secondary.  Carolina does a good job of limiting the YAC because their back seven or eight are sure tacklers.  Gene Chizik has taught them how to keep plays in front of them; UNC is tied for first in the country for fewest allowed pass plays above 20 yards with just 10.  That's a skewed stat when you've got two run-heavy teams on the schedule, but those teams also tend to produce big pass plays when they do bother trying.

The plus side is, Matt Johns should hopefully stay clean.  Junior Gnonkonde leads UNC's pass rush with two sacks - which is half the team total.  They both came against Wake Forest.  Even with a constantly shifting lineup, UVA has been respectable in pass protection, and Johns is good about not rooting himself to one spot.

Still, time to throw is one thing, but you have to find someone, and there's extra pressure on the playmakers this week - Mizzell and Severin, principally - to be the ones to create extra space and move the ball.  Johns is still being leashed to the pass-game-as-run-proxy strategy a little too much for my liking, and I expect guys like safety Donnie Miles to be in too many places at once, being as the pass game isn't big on subtle mental games.  I don't expect Johns to have a great day; the average per attempt could be as low as in the 4s.

-- UNC run offense vs. UVA run defense

Top backs:
Elijah Hood: 79 carries, 545 yards, 6.9 ypc, 6 TDs
Marquise Williams: 56 carries, 405 yards, 7.2 ypc, 5 TDs

UNC offense:
218.5 yards/game, 6.15 yards/attempt
5th of 128 (national), 1st of 14 (ACC)

UVA defense:
160.83 yards/game, 4.47 yards/attempt
79th of 128 (national), 10th of 14 (ACC)

Here's where it gets scary.  OK, let's be honest, here's why UVA is going to lose this game.  The Hoos could move the ball.  The run game has a chance to be respectable and the quarterback play is still solid.  That seems good until you see how an offense really operates.  There's a lot of experience everywhere on this side of the ball and Larry Fedora is a quality offensive mind.

Elijah Hood is in his sophomore season and now living up to the hype.  He's just shy of seven yards a carry, and capable of running people right over.  He gets a lot of running room from an incredibly experienced interior line; right guard Landon Turner in particular is a pro prospect, and all five starting linemen were also starters last year.  On negative plays, which are few and far between, Hood has only lost six yards all year.  By comparison, Taquan Mizzell lost seven on negative plays just against Syracuse.

Then you add Marquise Williams's legs, which not only have plays run specifically for them but can also carry him right out of trouble.  The UVA defensive line really stinks at maintaining containment in the pocket and this tendency is going to burn them like eight or ten times.  Not even a little bit optimistic about this.

-- UNC pass offense vs. UVA pass defense

Quarterback:
Marquise Williams: 84/131, 64.1%; 1,127 yards, 9 TDs, 6 INTs; 8.6 ypa, 149.9 rating

Top receivers:
Quinshad Davis: 24 rec., 288 yards, 1 TD
Ryan Switzer: 19 rec., 265 yards, 2 TDs
Bug Howard: 17 rec., 281 yards, 2 TDs

UNC offense:
263.7 yards/game, 9.4 yards/attempt
12th of 128 (national), 1st of 14 (ACC)

UVA defense:
252.2 yards/game, 8.0 yards/attempt
109th of 128 (national), 14th of 14 (ACC)

And this is worse.  Williams has been awfully efficient, and not only that, but he spreads the ball around exceptionally well.  Four different receivers - the players above plus Mack Hollins - have a minimum of 265 yards.  Three of them are 6'4" or taller (Switzer is the only exception.)

There is no need to overanalyze this.  UVA's secondary has been horrendous this year at reading routes and communication and important stuff like making sure all the receivers are covered and not triple-covering some decoy route.  UNC has tall, fast receivers, running a system basically guaranteed to confound a very confundable secondary, and a quarterback that, should you succeed in getting pressure on him, will destroy you for losing contain, which this D-line does all the time.  UVA's best chance may be to run a 2-3-6 defense, put two defensive ends on one side, at least try to force Williams to operate in just half the field, and flood the secondary with defenders.

-- Favorability ratings

Run offense: 4
Pass offense: 3
Run defense: 1
Pass defense: 0

I considered a negative number for the pass defense.

Average: 1.5

That's not really the average, but we're tacking on a half-point penalty for special teams, because Fedora loves to mess with London, who has yet to figure out how to defend a fake punt.

-- Outlook

If only the ability to sometimes make chicken salad out of the run game could sustain a game.  At best I think UVA can use it to artificially pump up the time of possession and limit UNC's chances with the ball.  They have such an explosive offense it might not matter, and even when the Hoos do get a stop, who knows what might happen.  A popular sentiment on the boards this week, what with Syracuse running yet another successful fake punt on UVA's special teams, is that UNC will do the same thing when they get a chance.  That seems likely, unless Fedora is just holding things close to the vest.

Which he might do, considering the strong likelihood that his offense will make mincemeat out of this defense.  UVA under London has shown no propensity whatsoever to stopping a Fedora offense, or Marquise Williams in particular.  Except for most of the second half last year until they ruined it by giving up the game winning drive, allowing recovery of an onside kick, and then handing UNC a first down on 4th-and-1 by putting 12 men on the field.  Truly a Mike London Special.  This one's not ending well, either.

Final score: UNC 45, UVA 13

-- Rest of the ACC

Byes: none

Clemson @ Miami - 12:00 - This one might put a few more Fire Golden planes in the sky.

NC State @ Wake Forest - 12:00 - The Pack losing this one would make a mockery of the scheduling-for-success concept after their hideous OOC slate.

Pittsburgh @ Syracuse - 12:00 - Pitt can be the third ACC team to earn bowl eligibility; quite a first season for Pat Narduzzi.

Boston College @ Louisville - 12:30 - Battle of the Birdies.

Duke @ Virginia Tech - 3:30 - Michael Brewer returns to QB for the Hokies, but it's their once-vaunted defense that's bringing them down this year.

Florida State @ Georgia Tech - 7:00 - Raise your hand if you thought GT would start the ACC season 0-5.  Yup, that's nobody.

game preview: North Carolina

Date/Time: Friday, March 13; 7:00

TV: ESPN

Record against the Heels: 52-128

Last meeting: UVA 75, UNC 64; 2/2/15, Chapel Hill

Last game: UVA 58, FSU 44 (3/12); UNC 70, UL 60 (3/12)

KenPom:

Tempo:
UVA: 57.9 (#349)
UNC: 69.7 (#15)

Offense:
UVA: 112.5 (#23)
UNC: 114.4 (#13)

Defense:
UVA: 84.8 (#1)
UNC: 94.0 (#31)

Pythag:
UVA: .9627 (#3)
UNC: .9055 (#13)

Projected lineups:

Virginia:

PG: London Perrantes (6.3 ppg, 2.5 rpg, 4.7 apg)
SG: Malcolm Brogdon (13.7 ppg, 4.0 rpg, 2.6 apg)
SF: Evan Nolte (2.9 ppg, 1.4 rpg, 0.7 apg)
PF: Darion Atkins (7.6 ppg, 5.9 rpg, 0.7 apg)
PF: Anthony Gill (11.6 ppg, 6.7 rpg, 0.9 apg)

North Carolina:

PG: Marcus Paige (13.7 ppg, 2.9 rpg, 4.6 apg)
SG: J.P. Tokoto (8.7 ppg, 5.6 rpg, 4.2 apg)
SF: Justin Jackson  (10.1 ppg, 3.7 rpg, 2.5 apg)
PF: Brice Johnson (12.8 ppg, 7.9 rpg, 0.8 apg)
C: Joel James (2.7 ppg, 1.8 rpg, 0.1 apg)

Can I just start off by pissing all over the refereeing in the FSU game?  Not that anyone needs it pointed out, it had both coaches fuming and the usually restrained Sean McDonough (whose announcing I tend to enjoy) was more than a little critical.  But still.  I was gonna say it was the usual, vintage Jamie Luckie, but it was absolute shit even by Luckie's low standards.

The ironic thing was that the call that sent Leonard Hamilton over the edge was not only 100% right, but damn well should've been looked at for flagrant potential.

Anyway.  A well-played game by UVA in spurts, and frankly would've felt a lot better if not for a streak of rimmed-out shots early in the second half.  Maybe it's good they didn't fall - gives the team a reason to refocus their efforts in a few places where they were rough around the edges.  North Carolina is another athletic team like FSU - not quite as big, but obviously with a great deal more scoring talent.

As of the moment I type this, Notre Dame has already raced out to a comfy lead against Miami, and there's no real reason they should lose it.  That makes the ACC's final four possibly every bit as good as the one that'll happen in Indy.  It's not going to be an easy road to a repeat, but if the Hoos do pull it off, they'll establish themselves as clearly the class of the ACC, and start to induce whispers about a changing of the guard.

-- UVA on offense

The promised injection of athleticism from Justin Anderson's return never really came to fruition.  True to his word, Tony Bennett only played him in short stints.  It's a tough balancing act, because you don't want to tire him out from running him for long stretches, but Anderson isn't a reserved player and could really use a long stretch or two.  He didn't score, and actually seemed tentative.

Malcolm Brogdon also had an off game, and the only thing that really stood out on the stat sheet was the nine assists from London Perrantes.  UVA found shots difficult to come by and had to generate them from a lot of off-the-ball motion.  UNC's defense, while active, won't be quite as up-in-the-grill as Florida State was.  FSU likes to play like that, but that was way aggressive even by their standards.

Still, the approach will be similar.  UNC is UNC, which means as always they'll try to out-athlete you and usually will win if you let them make it into a one-on-one contest.  UVA will want to use that against them, the way a karate master might use his opponent's weight and power against him.  UVA pulled away from UNC in the second half of their regular-season meeting partly because UNC got a bit desperate, starting trying to put on more pressure, and opened up shooting and passing lanes.

I've loved what I've seen out of Mike Tobey the past couple games - against Louisville, on one occasion he ripped an offensive rebound away from no less than Montrezl Harrell and stuffed it back in the hoop, and against FSU he got to the basket with great timing and continued to insist on owning nearby rebounds.  He'll be the tallest guy on the court on Friday, and has an opportunity to continue being a force down low if he contends with the bulk that Joel James and Kennedy Meeks carry around.

Despite UNC's quality KenPom numbers, good teams tend to score on them.  Sometimes bad teams score on them.  More often than not, teams reach a point per possession.  UVA should be able to do the same.

-- UVA on defense

Carolina wants to do two things: run around like crazy, and get the ball inside.  Whether that means scoring in transition, slashing at the basket, or feeding the post, UNC prefers to two-point you to death, even more so than FSU, who themselves were pretty heavily weighted toward the two.  UNC is second in the country in percentage of their points coming from two-point buckets, and 349th in the same for three-pointers.

Naturally, that's great for UVA, which typically only gets in real trouble when teams are bombing from three.  On UNC, only Marcus Paige and Nate Britt (and the latter plays only 16 minutes a game) shoot high volumes from three, and they're both respectable but not deadly.  (Justin Jackson will probably try a few as well, but he shoots .270 from there, so, fine, shoot all you like.)

Paige gets a lot of press, but there's a little bit of the volume scorer in him; he boosts his O-rating by being a great foul shooter and a solid distributor.  He's not an exceptional shooter.  The guy to actually be most worried about, I think, is Kennedy Meeks, a big ball of beef in the middle.  Meeks returned from an illness to play against Louisville, and though like Anderson he didn't start, he did give the Heels 19 solid minutes.  Paige gets all the attention, but Meeks does a ton of dirty work that's been absolutely critical to UNC's success.

UVA's rebounding chops - 5th-best defensive rebounders in the country - will be put to the test by UNC, which thanks mainly to Meeks and Brice Johnson, rebounds over 40% of their misses.  They're 6th in the nation.  Meeks and Johnson get stickbacks like you wouldn't believe.  The fact that UNC's offense tends to feature Paige and J.P. Tokoto driving at the rim, missing, and having Meeks and Johnson try to clean up, that tends to help push Carolina's tempo as high as it is; it's a juicy transition attempt if they can't finish.

The fact that UNC is built a lot like FSU is another good sign for UVA.  Never discount the talent they bring to the table, but they've shown this year they're by no means unstoppable, and UVA has the formula to do it, again by nullifying strength with strength.

-- Outlook

I've been pointing out the similarities between FSU and UNC, and there are many.  UNC is in many ways a better version of the Seminoles.  But they have plenty of differences, too, especially this: whereas FSU wants to roil the waters and play rough a bit, UNC wants to run and play an artistic version of the game.  FSU is a muddy Jeep Wrangler; UNC is a slick Jaguar.  The Wrangler is still one of the best mudders around, but easily the most unrefined vehicle anywhere on the road.  The Jaguar is shiny, gorgeous to look at, smooth, and sometimes absurdly unreliable and crazy expensive to fix.

UVA's approach should work against either, though.  UVA always gets their stops.  The only exception has been Duke and their unreal barrage of threes, which UNC is uniquely ill-equipped to replicate.  If you let UVA score with any regularity, you're almost always screwed.

All bets are off, of course, if Jamie Luckie referees the game, and especially if he brings back his Dungeons and Dragons dice to randomly determine how many steps equals a travel.

Final score: UVA 79, UNC 71

blip

At risk of blasting my own horn (oh hell, that's the whole point of this entire endeavor) I did something during the Duke game that's usually almost impossible to pull off: I pegged the game's turning point as it happened.  Most of the time you have to do that in retrospect, unless the game is really close and then suddenly it's not.  In this case UVA held a pretty safe lead before it happened, and a pretty safe lead after.  KenPom's win probability graph had UVA's chances moving from about 98% to 96%.  Who'd have thunk?

Well, me, when that tiny little knife in the pit of the stomach made its appearance on a Tyus Jones three-pointer shortly after a Justin Anderson miss on the same.  Anderson's shot was thisclose to going down; Jones hit nothing but net, and the result was a six-point swing.  No, it was more than six points - it was the entire spectrum of Duke's confidence.  Jones gave them their fortitude back, ten seconds after it was two inches from disappearing entirely.

As much as I'd like to move that number one from the loss column to the rankings column, at least we know what it takes to beat UVA these days: six-of-eight shooting on three pointers, and all of the last four.  After Anderson missed, that's what Duke did, en route to not missing a shot in the last four minutes of the game.  You know what?  Great.  Duplicate that formula and you've finally figured out the trick to beating Virginia Kentucky everyone up to and including the '92 Dream Team.

The rest of the week - no disrespect at all to the opponents involved - was surprisingly easy.  It's all relative, of course - it wasn't, like, Harvard-easy.  UNC and Louisville put up a fight, albeit not for 40 full minutes.  It's easier to do, of course, when one game is at home and the other is in one of the ACC less-intimidating atmospheres.  (Seriously, is there a team anywhere else, outside of Chapel Hill, where the ratio of powerhouse-ery to crowd atmosphere is so huge?)  Theory on this: these three teams are completely on another level athletically, above and beyond what UVA's gotten used to seeing the past month (or more) and it took a little time to get used to.  When they did, which was right about halftime of the UNC game, the game slowed down again.

I've been including the upcoming NC State game in the stretch of doom calculations, but if you believe the above theory, it might be more of a blowout than I've been assuming.  I mean, BeeJay Anya's a pretty good player, but once you've tried to score on Montrezl Harrell, can it be that much harder?  I still think it's a dangerous game.

That said, the chances are excellent that UVA loses just one game the rest of the way at the most, which should worry a league that all sits at least two losses behind.  Beating Duke would've been great and all, but there isn't a soul among us who wouldn't have taken two out of those last three, if offered beforehand.  And UVA has held double-digit leads in all three games.  Despite the loss, this was a test passed with flying colors so far; if they finish the final portion of it, another long and relatively relaxing stretch awaits.

****************************************************

-- It's been a while since I wrote this, so it was of course bound to rear its ugly head in a huge way: We still can't have nice things.  Justin Anderson's fractured finger capped a very rough injury stretch (at least, I really hope that capped it) in which UVA lost its top scorer in basketball, top hitter in baseball, and top defenseman in lacrosse.  Already thin from the transfer loss of Greg Danseglio, the lacrosse team really could not afford losing Tanner Scales to an Achilles' heel, but it did anyway.  Joe McCarthy's back surgery leaves a gaping hole in the lineup.  And of course, something had to be up when Evan Nolte started the second half.

Weirdly, even in a game where Anderson got hurt, Marial Shayok only got four minutes.  I might automatically assume he and Nolte would pick up most of Anderson's minutes, if not for that stat.  It's still logical, but Tony's been tinkering with the back end of the lineup a bit and I wouldn't make any hard-and-fast guesses for NC State, let alone four weeks from now.  Good news is there's a reasonable chance Anderson is back for postseason play.

-- You have to love Syracuse, which could at any time have chosen to take a postseason sanction but chose to do it in the middle of a season that wasn't likely to land them in the NCAAs anyway.... and then throw a pity party for Rakeem Christmas's playoff dreams.  Does it suck that Christmas's Syracuse career ends without any tournaments of any kind?  Yes, but to avoid that, Syracuse might have had to feel a little more pain from the self-sanction.  So Christmas gets thrown to the wolves, and just for a bonus, gets to be used by Syracuse as the face of their passive-aggressive campaign against having to bear such a brutal punishment.  How cynical.

-- Sometimes the basketball gods are just.  Not when they put Anderson's finger in a splint, no, but take Darion Atkins.  Atkins dogged a Louisville player into a turnover just seconds after a defensive rebound, giving the Hoos the ball right back.... and then Atkins scored on the ensuing possession.  Feed the guy who made the play - I like it.

-- I was reminded again why I like Doris Burke.  75% of sideline reporters ask the stupidest %@#&ing questions, mostly: "describe your emotions."  Burke pinpointed a matchup she wanted to ask about - and made a good choice - and in doing so gave Tony Bennett an opportunity to sing the praises of a deserving player, which he proceeded to do.

-- Lacrosse starts the season the same way as last year: a one-goal win over Loyola.  Now that the season is underway, that would be a good time to write a season preview, yes?  This week.  Short version of the game: offense good, defense eh.

-- I put together the next round of ACC simulations, but that's gonna wait til Tuesday also.  So now here they are:

UVA is a frightening lock for the 1 seed; it'd take a mathematically unlikely face-fall to drop out of the top spot.  What's a bit more surprising is the tight grip Duke has on #2, and UNC on #5.  Neither have much of a schedule left, except each other.  KenPom likes GT a lot more than the standings show, though, and UNC also has to visit Miami; that, combined with Duke's higher pythag, accounts for a lot of the difference.  Fortunately, it makes sense; Duke owns the tiebreaker on everyone in the top 5 except for UNC, who they haven't played yet.  By virtue of being the only team to beat UVA while the rest of the contenders have all lost, they're in great shape.

This is a great year to show off the excellence of the tourney format; five great teams looking for four double-bye slots.  It might not matter early, because the first opponent will be a putz (either #12 or #13) and then you play the 4 seed anyway, but the extra game might de-freshen the legs a little as the tourney heads toward Sunday.

Me, I'd definitely welcome a Sunday rematch of last year's final.  Both teams would be motivated by recent losses to the other, and the chance to beat Duke two years in a row would spark whispery but unmistakeable changing-of-the-guard talk.  Not to be premature or anything.

tipping point

It's not always you can tell exactly when the end comes.  You could call us fortunate in that regard.  We can debate for a long time why Mike London has not succeeded as UVA's head coach, and will not succeed as UVA's head coach, but at least now we know when it ended.  As soon as the ball landed in the hands of a UNC defensive lineman during a horribly ill-advised screen pass.  Flip the switch, turn out the lights, and start the search.

Kevin Parks talked about a knife to the gut, and it's extremely hard not to feel bad for the guy.  The ball was taken out of his hands by the coaching staff.  I don't get it.  The announcers spent the whole game talking about Parks and how the coaching staff raves about his character and talent - which is great, and I believe it 100%.  Now I'm just wondering when the staff plans on using that to their benefit.  Parks was left waiting for a pass that never got there, which is somehow sadly fitting.

Sure, there's four games left.  Anything could happen and so on and so forth.  I don't see it.  Not from a coaching staff that constantly puts its players in position to fail.  It's everything from the preposterous to the amateurish.  After five years, Mike London still can't figure out how to make sure the right number of players go on the field.  It's not even the first time, nor is it the first time a special teams unit ran pell-mell down the field without caring where the ball was.  You can look it up.  It's a pitiful disservice to his guys.

There's one thing left to hope for: sending him off with a win on Thanksgiving.  Maybe a bowl game in Shreveport or Detroit.  If the Hoos can figure out how to beat a Georgia Tech team that just dropped 56 points on Pittsburgh, or a Miami team that looks like the division's best so far.  Maybe the VT game can be a 5-6 Thunderdome match.  Two teams enter, one team leaves bowl-eligible.  Not what anyone envisioned, that's for sure.

**************************************************

Let's talk offense for a little here.  One of the most common complaints about Steve Fairchild is that the offense is "vanilla."  It's time to put that to rest once and for all.  Next time you hear someone complain that it's "vanilla," just know they're only saying that as a reflex action.  The design is actually rather good, and here's the thing: I really like it.  UVA ran a couple reverses and a tricky WR pass that Lambert caught, the second WR pass they've run this year.  There was plenty of downfield passing.  Lots of different players are involved.  This is not just some handoff-handoff-dump pass-punt crap.  This is pretty complex.

And here's what I like best: Most run plays are run from a look that could send the ball any one of three different ways.  You have a shotgun look with a running back next to the QB.  A receiver (or someone like Taquan Mizzell) goes in motion and the snap is timed so that the motion man arrives just about the same time the snap does.  This isn't easy; the quarterback needs a lot of reps to get that timing down.  Then the QB can hand to the motion man, he can hand to the RB, or he can simply take it himself.  I don't think this is ever read-option, even though it was called that when Fairchild first got here.  It just looks like one.  I think this is called by the coaches.  That's just fine.  The point is that the defense has to hesitate a split second before committing to a ballcarrier.  This has given the O-line room to execute a block, and in turn, the run game is fairly productive.  This is despite an O-line lacking badly in experience and held together with chicken wire and duct tape.

I have just about no problems with the design of this offense.  Given an experienced, healthy O-line and maybe a real explosion threat at receiver, which is missing right now, you could really see some fireworks with this offense.  However, I have huge problems with the execution.  Fairchild isn't too vanilla, he's too goddam tricky.  Too fast to abandon what's working, too quick to try and out-chess-match the other DC.  Here's how you coach the last drive** that ended in the screen pass pick: You call together your O-linemen.  You get in their faces and inform them - loudly - that the plan is to stuff the ball down the throats of those no-tackling pretenders over there and they'd better hit some SOB as hard as they can and the devil take the hindmost.  And then you three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust your way to a win.  Especially when you're one more first down away from game-clinching field goal.  When, on the other hand, the trick play you so desperately want to run is so damn predictable that the announcers had you pegged, you're doing it wrong.  I don't blame Greyson Lambert one bit for the pickoff.  I blame Mr. Tricky up in the booth.

(I do, though, think the first one was totally on Lambert.  You gotta know in that case: an incompletion is just as good as a dumpoff.  They both mean a field goal.  Some people called it bad luck that the ball landed in the hands of a defender, but, no, that's entirely predictable when you throw toward that many defenders.

**I know, I know: said the keyboard jockey who's never coached a game of football in his life.  But then, the guys who do coach for a living, aren't exactly doing a better job.

**************************************************

So, let's review some predictions:

- Greyson Lambert starts.  Yup.

- The UVA passing game generates over 300 yards.  Ah, bummer - they were close at 284.  And getting to 300 probably would've won the game.

- UVA passes more than they run.  The Hoos attempted 41 passes and were credited with 43 runs, but one sack by UNC makes it an exactly even split.  Still not good enough.

- UNC also passes for more than 300 yards.  They did not, which is rather a credit to the defense.

- Zero sacks again for UVA, but not zero turnovers.  Half right is wrong.

- UNC averages fewer than 4 yards a carry.  UNC's running game was absolutely stuffed.  Very good work there by the defense, again.

New stats:

16-of-41 on specifics (39%.)
4-3 straight up
3-2-1 ATS

game preview: North Carolina

Date/Time: Saturday, October 25; 12:30

TV: ESPN3, ACC Net.

Record against the Heels: 54-60-4

Last meeting: UNC 45, UVA 14; 11/9/13, Chapel Hill

Last weekend: Duke 20, UVA 13; UNC 48, GT 43

Line: UVA by 7

Injury report:

Virginia:

OUT: C Jackson Matteo, CB Demetrious Nicholson, OG Eric Tetlow, OT Jay Whitmire
DOUBTFUL: None
QUESTIONABLE: OG Ryan Doull
PROBABLE: None

North Carolina:

OUT: RB Conner Gonet
DOUBTFUL: RB Elijah Hood
QUESTIONABLE: OT R.J. Prince
PROBABLE: OT Kiaro Holts, WR Kendrick Singleton, DT Tyler Powell

This hasn't been a real competitive rivalry lately.  UNC's margins of victory the past four years: 34, 11, 24, 31.  It put an abrupt end to the long winning streak the Hoos had over the Heels in Scott Stadium.  UNC is reeling a bit at the moment, though.  Nobody's too sure what's a bigger scandal: the fact that an office staffer artificially pumped up the grades of thousands of UNC students over 18 years, or the Carolina defense.  One is a horrible affront to everything people expect out of an elite university, and the other made Debby Crowder a household name.

-- UVA run offense vs. UNC run defense

Top backs:
Kevin Parks: 120 carries, 502 yards, 4.2 avg., 3 TDs
Khalek Shepherd: 46 carries, 212 yards, 4.6 avg., 1 TD

UVA offense:
171.7 yards/game, 4.26 yards/attempt
69th of 128 (national), 8th of 14 (ACC)

UNC defense:
218.0 yards/game, 4.81 yards/attempt
99th of 128 (national), 13th of 14 (ACC)

Stop me if you've heard this story before: Bad teams able to run on supposedly ACC-level defense.  This is not quite as much so as Duke; for one thing, UNC has played teams with a pulse, and not everyone has run buck-wild, either.  On the other hand, UNC can't be said to have shut anyone down, either, not even Liberty.  Only Clemson really had trouble running the ball, but Clemson doesn't actually have a good run game.

Neither does VT - as has been on display the past couple Thursdays - but they were at least functional against UNC.  East Carolina, of course, went apeshit.  And the Carolina defense has been rather prone to allowing long rushing plays by wide receivers; Cam Phillips of VT had a 30-yarder and GT's DeAndre Smelter went for 75.  At some point UVA will probably try an end-around with Darius Jennings.  If it's run to the wide side of the field and not stupidly at the near sideline, it has a chance of going for big yards.

If Ryan Doull is able to return, it should also provide a boost.  Doull isn't amazing, but he's an improvement over Cody Wallace.  And of course, the other big If is whether or not Steve Fairchild actually has the guts to stick with the running game.  UNC's problem here is that they run a nickel defense without an especially stout front six.  The front four is pretty average, and the two starting linebackers - Jeff Schoettmer and Travis Hughes - aren't very productive.  Hughes, who you'll remember as a guy hotly pursued by UVA out of the 757, is only on pace for 65 tackles, a low number for a starting linebacker.

As with Duke, attacking the middle ought to provide more dividends than trying to tiptoe around the edges; un-enamored as I am of our ability to move a line, you'd rather not give a nickel defense time to pursue to the play.  UNC's safeties aren't as strong as Duke's - there's no Jeremy Cash running around - but this still really is one of those games where coachspeak about committing to the run should actually pay off.

-- UVA pass offense vs. UNC pass defense

Quarterbacks:
Matt Johns: 82/147, 55.8%; 1,012 yards, 8 TDs, 5 INTs; 6.88 avg.
Greyson Lambert: 63/97, 64.9%; 564 yards, 2 TDs, 4 INTs; 5.81 avg.

Top receivers:
Taquan Mizzell: 24 rec., 118 yards, 0 TDs
Miles Gooch: 23 rec., 349 yards, 1 TD
Canaan Severin: 23 rec., 266 yards, 2 TDs

UVA offense:
235.6 yards/game, 6.54 yards/attempt
90th of 128 (national), 9th of 14 (ACC)

UNC defense:
304.7 yards/game, 8.71 yards/attempt
121st of 128 (national), 14th of 14 (ACC)

Last week was a mixed-messages party.  Mike London declared that "nobody loses their starting job because they're injured," didn't put Greyson Lambert on the injury list, and didn't start him - and then didn't even play him, despite assurances to the contrary, because a quarterback who completed less than half his passes was in too much of a rhythm.

So I really hope it's just that London thinks he's being clever by continuing to refuse to name an actual starter, but I have my doubts.  Matt Johns didn't play horribly last week, but that impression comes about only because the passes he did complete went for big yardage.  (And because it was still better than almost every David Watford performance.)

This area is where UNC diverges heavily from Duke, however.  Duke had a respectable pass defense.  UNC hasn't been able to stop anyone.  OK, Clemson's Deshaun Watson has turned out to be a pretty good quarterback.  But Quinn Kaehler?  San Diego State is just slightly inside the top-100 in passing efficiency and the Aztec QB Kaehler threw for 341 yards.  Carolina doesn't bring an aggressive pass rush, and probably has only one player who elicits much concern in offensive coordinators: cornerback Brian Walker, who's picked off three passes and returned them all a long way.

Given a choice, I'd prefer to see Lambert play most, if not all, of the game.  Against a pass defense like this one, incomplete passes are a waste of time, and you'd rather not give UNC's offense much of a chance to get on the field.  The worst thing you can do is a three-and-out drive that takes a minute off the clock.  If Michael Brewer can complete two-thirds of his passes and lead VT to 34 points, surely the Hoos can figure this out too.

-- UNC run offense vs. UVA run defense

Top backs:
Marquise Williams: 91 carries, 448 yards, 4.9 avg, 4 TDs
T.J. Logan: 47 carries, 213 yards, 4.5 avg., 1 TD

UNC offense:
152.3 yards/game, 4.07 yards/attempt
80th of 128 (national), 9th of 14 (ACC)

UVA defense:
100.6 yards/game, 3.03 yards/attempt
11th of 128 (national), 2nd of 14 (ACC)

It looks like UNC won't have running back Elijah Hood for Saturday; Hood leads Carolina's RBs in carries, but Romar Morris has been just as productive, and T.J. Logan's been better.  News has been better for UNC on the offensive line, though; the right side consists of Landon Turner and Jon Heck, both of whom missed time with injuries earlier in the year, and both of whom got back on the field in the past couple weeks.  Not coincidentally, UNC ran for about 190 yards in both the ND and GT games.

The primary ballcarrier, though, is quarterback Marquise Williams, because UNC runs a great deal of read-option.  In the basic-est of read-option plays, a right-handed quarterback like Williams runs to the left while the RB heads right, so strong days from Logan and Morris with a fully healthy right side of the line were no surprise.

Williams is a strong runner; he's a fairly big guy, linebacker-sized but elusive.  Quin Blanding learned a lesson about college quarterbacks when UCLA's Brett Hundley ran him over in front of the goal line; this is the time to apply it.  Blanding's got a tough job in the read-option.  He has to watch the handoff and head where the ball is, while ensuring that there isn't a receiver streaking downfield.  The read-option creates a numerical mismatch in favor of the offense, so quality safety play - i.e., bringing reinforcements - is one way to nullify that.  Traditionally the read-option is defended with a "scrape exchange" which lures the QB into keeping and then running smack into a linebacker.  In this case that will be Daquan Romero, another very important player for this matchup.

The third way to beat the read-option?  Simply blow it up at the line.  One of its goals is to get multiple blockers onto the second level, which is hard to do if Jon Tenuta has dialed up the right blitz.  Anyway, the run game in Fedora's offense is a clear second fiddle.  UVA is strong against the run for a reason, and should have success regardless, but this isn't the main matchup.

-- UNC pass offense vs. UVA pass defense

Quarterback:
Marquise Williams: 156/242, 64.5%; 1,776 yards, 15 TDs, 6 INTs; 7.34 avg.

Top receivers:
Ryan Switzer: 34 rec., 429 yards, 3 TDs
Mack Hollins: 24 rec., 435 yards, 5 TDs
Bug Howard: 23 rec., 197 yards, 2 TDs

UNC offense:
300.0 yards/game, 7.14 yards/attempt
62nd of 128, 5th of 14 (ACC)

UVA defense:
230.7 yards/game, 6.48 yards/attempt
35th of 128 (national), 7th of 14 (ACC)

This didn't go well last week.  Zero sacks, zero turnovers.  Under those circumstances, holding Duke to 20 points is pretty decent, but it's four scoring drives.  UNC has only allowed 11 sacks in 7 games thanks to a solid O-line in protection and quick-hitting passes, and Williams has only thrown six picks as well.  And with a faster-paced offense, four scoring drives could turn into six.

Coverage will simply have to be excellent, and a little more pressure on Williams would help.  He's elusive, has a strong arm, and can extend a play with his feet and then fit the ball into a small spot.  And the Heels spread it around a lot.  Quite a few plays go to the running backs, but four different receivers all have 20+ catches this year.  Ryan Switzer in particular is speedy and dangerous in the open field, and the Heels like to set him up in the slot with blockers and space.

UNC also likes to be tricky; receivers Switzer and Quinshad Davis have each thrown a touchdown (one of which was to Williams) as well as punter Tommy Hibbard.  When you run as many plays as UNC does (they're one of the fastest teams in the country at just under 80 plays a game) the bag of tricks has to be large.

UVA needs to score points, yes, but the game is likely to be won or lost here.  Pretty much nobody's been able to stop the UNC passing attack, except for VT.  UVA can't likely win a shootout, so the Hoos need to drag the point total down to a more workable level.  Cut down on UNC's big plays and limit their passing attack, and it's possible; if UNC is able to put up 40-plus points again, UVA probably won't be able to overcome that.

-- Favorability ratings

UVA run offense: 5.5
UVA pass offense: 6.5
UVA run defense: 6
UVA pass defense: 2.5

Average: 5.125

-- Outlook

This is a very, very big game.  I don't usually go in for speculation about "is this Mike London's most important game???" but this is about that important.  With Miami and FSU both yet to be played (and let's face it, Miami is a good team and the likely favorite for the division title) 4-4 is no place to be if you want to get bowl eligible.  That most likely requires beating both Georgia Tech and VT to get there.

Well, GT is basically Carolina with a funkier offense.  No defense at all, but capable of winning a shootout.  Can't beat UNC?  Then probably would have trouble with GT.  And VT, despite the fact that their 24/7 board boasts no fewer than 22 different "fire the coaches" threads from just the Miami game alone, undoubtedly has something up their sleeve the same way they surprised Ohio State.

So this is the crossroads.  Win this one, and finding one more - just one more, even two - should be doable, and confidence will be renewed.  Lose and....well, we don't even know if 6-6 would save London's job, let alone something worse.

-- Predictions

- Greyson Lambert starts.

- The UVA passing game generates over 300 yards.

- UVA passes more than they run.

- UNC also passes for more than 300 yards.

- Zero sacks again for UVA, but not zero turnovers.

- UNC averages fewer than 4 yards a carry.

Final score: UVA 31, UNC 28

-- Rest of the ACC

Byes: Duke, Florida State, Louisville, NC State

-- Miami 30, Virginia Tech 6 - Thu. - Overheard from the broadcasters:

"Can you imagine [the VT] offense against [the UVA] defense??"
"..."
"........."
"I don't think I want to."

"The Coastal is so wide-open; you can't count out any team in the race."
"Well, except for Virginia Tech."

-- Boston College @ Wake Forest - 3:30 - It's rare that a team is as much of a running powerhouse as BC without employing some Paul Johnsonish throwback kind of offense, but BC pulls it off.

-- Georgia Tech @ Pittsburgh - 3:30 - Five teams in the Coastal are either 2-1 or 2-2, including these two.  This week should help clarify things a little.  For GT's side of things, they started hot but it's not inconceivable (though also not real likely) that they could finish outside the bowl picture, even though they only need one more win.

-- Syracuse @ Clemson - 7:00 - Clemson should add themselves to the ACC's bowl rolls this week.

tarred heels

Our game with UNC is this Saturday, and conveniently enough, a full investigative report was released today on the academic fraud that's been taking place there.  It's been known for a while that UNC had been plagued by "irregularities" in the African-American Studies department (AFAM, as the school calls it.)  The head of that department, Julius Nyang'oro, already got himself fired for running sham classes, but as it turns out, this really wasn't Nyang'oro's baby, and it wasn't just a couple years' worth of phoniness nor was it limited to the football team - as you might have assumed by the fact that UNC vacated the '08 and '09 football seasons.

No, the truth is that the University of North Carolina essentially ran a diploma mill for almost two decades.

The report is awfully damn comprehensive.  The cliffnotes:

-- A staffer - not a professor or a tutor or a TA or indeed a teacher of any kind - took it upon herself to build a small fiefdom of "paper classes", for which she would assign grades based entirely on the fact that a single paper was turned in with a student's name attached.

-- She developed for herself the power to sign the department head's name to any form necessary, such as grade change forms.

-- The academic support staffs for the various Tar Heel teams knew all about it, steered players to the classes, and explicitly warned their coaches when the grade-point inflator was going to retire and that they'd have to find some other way to keep their players eligible.  Specific teams mentioned are football, both basketball teams, Carolina's vaunted women's soccer team, and the baseball team.

-- Tutors, in several cases, did the actual paper-writing.

-- Once the general student population got wind of this, and learned they could sign up for these classes too, some of them took so many of these phony classes that they accidentally earned an AFAM minor.

-- This went on for 18 years, long enough to cover the basketball reigns of Dean Smith, Matt Doherty, and Roy Williams, not to mention John Swofford's tenure as UNC AD.

The report is full of illustrative details and example - here's one particularly interesting one:

In Spring 2006, Professor Bereket Selassie taught a lecture class on North-East Africa, AFRI 124, with 25 enrolled students.  At the end of the semester, Professor Selassie recorded a grade of AB (an incomplete grade that technically means "absent from the exam") for a football player who never attended the lectures or the exam.  When we asked Professor Selassie about this student, he was flabbergasted to see that the AB for that football player had been changed to an A- through a grade change form.

We then interviewed both Crowder and the football player and learned that he was one of Crowder's add-on students.  She had placed the football player on Selassie's class roll, given him a paper topic, and graded the paper.**  Crowder changed the grade from an AB to an A- using a grade change form and signed Nyang'oro's name as instructor.

**The player told us that he had interacted only with Crowder and did not even know who Professor Selassie was.  From his perspective, the football player saw this process as typical and consistent with the 19 other AFAM paper classes he took during his Chapel Hill career.

Crowder - Debby Crowder - is the abovementioned fiefdom-building staffer who decided academic standards were for her to poop on.

So let's recap: A player is enrolled in a class by an office staffer, who tells the player nothing about the class itself or who teaches it or where it meets, but instead assigns him a paper.  He turns one in (and may or may not have written it himself.)  She grades it, using the ingenious process she devised herself (described elsewhere in the report as checking to see whether it had enough pages), then gives the player full credit for the class using a forged signature.  The professor doesn't even know what happened until eight years later.

This is not just a one-time thing, it's standard operating procedure for 18 years and essentially is how this player plus many of UNC's other athletes received a degree.  Nobody in the administration checks up on this and the athletic support staff uses this as more or less their only method of keeping anyone eligible.  Diploma mill, wrought of fraud on a truly staggering scale.  Carolina fans these days resemble defense lawyers with an obviously guilty client; the prosecution brings every gun to bear and you just try and poke holes anywhere you can, such as by insisting that anything said by Mary Willingham and Rashad McCants should be ignored.

**********************************************

If you're like me, you have two questions: one, is there any punishment coming down the pipeline?  And two, we all know the world of keeping athletes eligible is a shady one - is this happening at UVA?

For the first question, there are really only two governing bodies that matter: the NCAA and the SACS.  SACS is the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools - the accreditation body for thousands of colleges in the 11 states under its jurisdiction.  SACS is who put UVA on notice for the whole Dragas Affair.  If SACS says you're not a real school, you're not a real school, and it's natural to wonder if UNC's whole accreditation could be in jeopardy.  And naturally, SACS has already looked at this and.... done nothing.

Then you have the NCAA, which has already dropped some punishment on UNC's head - a bowl ban a couple years ago plus UNC's voluntary vacation of wins and a scholarship limit which expires after this year comprises the extent of it.  Could they open this up again?  They tend to signal an unwillingness to be a governing body over the academic rigor of a school's programs, which makes sense on one level and on another level is sort of like saying they won't punish anyone for feeding their players steroids because they're not a chemistry lab.  You ask me, I think that if vacating wins is actually considered a real penalty, then everything the whole athletic program ever did between 1993 and 2011 should go down the memory hole.  That sort of illustrates the silliness of that as a penalty, though; among other things, the women's soccer record books would be totally obliterated, considering that UNC won 11 titles in that time frame.  No, I don't think the fraudsters should get to claim them, but then, I also think that sanctions should be a deterrent, which crossing out entries in a book and forcing the removal of trophies to a dusty closet does not do.

The NCAA also tends to wash their hands of things if the student body in general is involved.  They're happy to allow a loophole in their rules, for example, that ostensibly forbid schools build palaces to house their athletes.  Kansas, following the lead of others, is building "dorms" for basketball players that cost $17.5 million and are permissible under the NCAA's rules because, while you can't build stuff for athletes, you can reserve space in student housing for them.  And this is "student housing" because 51% of the space is non-athlete.  By the same token, it's easy to envision the NCAA just washing their hands of this and calling it a school issue.  So the very-possible worst-case is that a few people get fired, and the school's leadership can wring their hands and talk about being embarrassed, and there's really nothing to prevent anyone else from doing this.

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say the NCAA will do something, just not anything that anyone considers sufficiently far-reaching.  They may not be able or willing to regulate the content of a class, but they won't be able to ignore the athletes' academic support pushing classes that were obviously phony and using them to keep athletes eligible.

But is this the sort of thing that "happens everywhere"?  Or specifically, at our beloved UVA?  I could speak anecdotally: I had a couple classes - real ones in a real major - with Groh-era receiver Michael McGrew, who not only wrote but presented his own papers - next to impossible if they'd been written by a tutor.  Another player who did his own work, easily observable because it was a studio class in which faking it would've been next to impossible?  Roger Mason.  (Though, his attendance was something less than perfect, and noticeable because he wasn't the only basketball player in the class, but he missed a good deal more of it.  I have no idea what grade he got, and he was off to the NBA draft that summer.)

As well, in this case our somewhat adversarial admissions department is an easy shield from any criticism.  The academic side of the school is notoriously prickly about not giving any special treatment to athletes, as Jameel Sewell, Jeffrey Fitzgerald, and Chris Brathwaite can attest to.  A school that won't scam its way to eligibility for its own starting quarterback is pretty emphatically not in danger of being accused of shenanigans.

That's what oversight looks like, irksome as it may be to those who wish they'd ease up just a little.  No oversight at all is what put Carolina into this mess.  Faced now with the full extent of the fakery, today might possibly be the worst day since the founding of the school to have a UNC degree.

2014 season preview: North Carolina Tar Heels

Schedule:

8/30: Liberty
9/6: San Diego State
9/13: BYE
9/20: @ East Carolina
9/27: @ Clemson
10/4: Virginia Tech
10/11: @ Notre Dame
10/18: Georgia Tech
10/25: @ Virginia
11/1: @ Miami
11/8: BYE
11/15: Pittsburgh
11/20: @ Duke (Thu.)
11/29: NC State

Skip: Boston College, Florida State, Louisville, Syracuse, Wake Forest

2013 results:

South Carolina: L, 27-10
Middle Tennesee: W, 40-20
Georgia Tech: L, 28-20
East Carolina: L, 55-31
Virginia Tech: L, 27-17
Miami: L, 27-23
Boston College: W, 34-10
NC State: W, 27-19
Virginia: W, 45-14
Pittsburgh: W, 34-27
Old Dominion: W, 80-20
Duke: L, 27-25
Cincinnati: W, 39-17

Record: 7-6 (4-4); 5th, Coastal

Projected starters:

QB: Marquise Williams (rJr.)
RB: T.J. Logan (So.)
WR: Quinshad Davis (Jr.)
WR: Ryan Switzer (So.)
WR: Bug Howard (So.)
TE: Jack Tabb (Sr.)
LT: John Ferranto (rSo.)
LG: Caleb Peterson (rSo.)
C: Lucas Crowley (So.)
RG: Landon Turner (rJr.)
RT: Jon Heck (rSo.)

DE: Junior Gnonkonde (rSo.)
DT: Ethan Farmer (5Sr.)
DT: Justin Thomason (Jr.)
BDE: Norkeithus Otis (Sr.)
WLB: Travis Hughes (Sr.)
MLB: Nathan Staub (rSo.)
CB: Brian Walker (So.)
CB: Des Lawrence (rSo.)
RS: Malik Simmons (Jr.)
SS: Dominique Green (So.)
FS: Tim Scott (Sr.)

K: Thomas Moore (Sr.)
P: Tommy Hibbard (Sr.)

(Italics indicate new starter.)

Media prediction: 4th, Coastal

Coach: Larry Fedora (3rd season)

All-ACC:

2013 1st team: TE Eric Ebron, OT James Hurst, DE Kareem Martin, PR Ryan Switzer
2013 2nd team: S Tre Boston
2013 3rd team: none
2013 HM: WR Quinshad Davis, C Russell Bodine, LB Norkeithus Otis, CB Jabari Price, P Tommy Hibbard
2014 preseason: PR Ryan Switzer

(Italics indicate departed player.)

Miami wasn't the only team putting a black eye on the ACC.  UNC's 2012 season was another postseason ban, but they were free of sanctions last year.  They nearly missed the postseason anyway, getting off to a 1-5 start before reeling off five wins to earn a bowl trip, which they won.  That team underachieved without a doubt.  On paper they had plenty of talent on defense, and no shortage of it on offense either.  This year Carolina is projected by the media as just shy of 1st in the division conference, so another 6-6 regular season might not sit well with UNC fans.

-- Offense

After Bryn Renne's season ended prematurely, Marquise Williams took over under center and did a more than passable job.  His completion percentage could've used a little work, but he did throw 15 TDs against only 6 INTs, and is entering his fourth year in the program, so you'd think he'd easily be the presumptive starter.  You'd be wrong.  Larry Fedora is making Williams work for it, and has opened up the competition to include redshirt freshman Mitch Trubisky.  I'd expect Williams to evenutually win the job - there's a smack of motivational ploy to this deal - but Fedora recruited Trubisky and not Williams, so, who knows?  It's probably not a good sign for UNC that Williams hasn't been able to seize the job outright against someone with two fewer years experience.

Carolina also took a hit this month when receiver T.J. Thorpe, expected to be a big part of the offense, hurt his foot.  Thorpe is out indefinitely, but the receiving corps should be alright.  Quinshad Davis, the team's top wide receiver last year, returns for his junior year.  Davis is a really good one and should come into his own this year now that high-powered tight end Eric Ebron is in the NFL.  The Heels will also expect more out of Ryan Switzer, who returned five punts to the house last year.  Bug Howard had a very solid freshman season in 2013, and UNC also expects Kendrick Singleton to make a contribution, though he caught only six passes last year.  Tight end Jack Tabb should also be a reliable target, now that he's out of Ebron's shadow.

Williams was UNC's leading rusher last year, but freshman T.J. Logan came on in the fifth game of the season and never came out of the lineup.  His role got bigger and bigger, and he ended up leading UNC's running backs in carries and yardage, averaging 5.7 per carry.  Logan himself, though, might be fending off a challenge, as UNC adds Elijah Hood to the roster; Hood was a bona fide five-star recruit, a tremendously powerful running back who reportedly squats over 600 pounds.

Lately we've been going over offensive lines that are strong on the left side and questionable on the right; UNC is the opposite.  Landon Turner is a stalwart at right guard, and often played every snap of a game last year while only a sophomore.  Right tackle Jon Heck won the starting job as a redshirt freshman last year and maintained an iron grip on the job, giving UNC a strong right side that should be around both this year and next.

Left guard is also fine, with Caleb Peterson returning as a starter.  UNC is breaking in a new center, though, with Lucas Crowley having appeared in six games as a freshman last year, and there's no depth behind him.  The all-important left tackle spot belongs for now to John Ferranto, who came on in relief of all-conference tackle James Hurst in the bowl game but is battling a pair of freshmen for the job.

This offense, once again, has plenty of talent to get it through.  If the quarterback battle isn't an ominous sign, then UNC should be in very good shape at the skill positions.  The offensive line is on the thin and inexperienced side once you get past the prospective starting five, but there's useful talent there; Turner could end up as an all-conference pick himself.  The line does need to gel some, and there's always uncertainty with a new center; still, it should be adequate at a minimum.  It's likely the offense that has the media excited about the Heels this season.

-- Defense

That said, a closer look at the defense may have been warranted.  First, the strong points, particularly safety.  UNC runs essentially a 4-2-5, using what they call the Ram safety as a hybrid S/LB.  With Tim Scott moving from corner to safety, UNC has three quality, experienced players at the position.  Dominique Green picked off three passes last year, and Malik Simmons made a successful move from corner to the Ram position.  Though UNC may want to see more production out of Simmons (47 tackles in 2013), they'll have good players here.

At corner, Brian Walker looks ready to step up to a starting role, but Des Lawrence had less extensive playing time, and the rest of the cornerback roster is a bit thin.  Alex Dixon should at least play a decent-sized role as a backup - for the third straight season - but the rest of the depth is mainly freshmen and one converted receiver.  You expect that UNC at least has confidence in their starters if they feel comfortable moving Scott, but there isn't a ton of experience at the position.

At linebacker, UNC returns Travis Hughes and Jeff Schoettmer, who had 76 and 85 tackles last year, respectively.  Coming out of spring, though, Schoettmer was listed as Hughes's backup on the weak side after starting most of 2013 as the middle linebacker.  UNC may return to Schoettmer in the middle, or they may hand the job to the relatively inexperienced Nathan Staub or the even more inexperienced Dan Mastromatteo.

UNC is looking at some conundrums up front though.  Already thin at tackle, UNC lost a prospective starter to academic issues, and now leans on Ethan Farmer as the lone returning DT starter.  Farmer is a solid player, and Justin Thomason should be serviceable at a minimum.  To alleviate the depth issues, Carolina is also working out DE Jessie Rogers in the middle as well, and will likely expect him to work both positions.  Rogers up til this point hasn't done much in his career, totaling 14 tackles in two years.

That leaves the strongside DE position to the still-developing Junior Gnonkonde, who has some potential but is still only a sophomore.  On the other end, the Heels do get back Norkeithus Otis, a productive player who registered 7.5 sacks last year.  Otis will have to produce this year while being the focus of opposing defenses, however, now that Kareem Martin has moved on to the NFL.

Is this defense worthy of a team that's expected to contend very strongly for the division title?  It's got pieces, but it's a little underwhelming, and lacking experience in many places, particularly cornerback and DT.  The whole D-line, actually, other than Otis.  It wasn't a great defense last year (against the run, mainly; it was better against the pass) and it lost quite a few key pieces.  Essentially it's a rebuilding unit, and could struggle.

-- Special teams

Ryan Switzer dazzled last year as a punt returner, getting to the end zone five times.  Very impressive.  Difficult to reproduce, but impressive nonetheless.  Tommy Hibbard is a strong-legged punter boasting a 43-yard average.  Thomas Moore's hold on the placekicking job isn't 100% solid, as he doesn't possess a lot of range and missed two extra points.

-- Outlook

I confess, I'm not as enamored of this team as the media is.  I like the offense if they can nail down a quarterback, but redshirt juniors aren't usually in a dogfight with freshmen.  But the defense has a lot to prove, I think.  This is the Coastal, of course; anything can happen as there's really no favorite here.  And UNC is, at least, a likely bowl team; it'll be an upset if they don't get to six wins, but it's not totally out of the question, either.  I do think, however, that this season will end up somewhat disappointing, unless the defense does a lot of growing up in a hurry.

weekend review

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

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

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

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

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

More baseball in brief:

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

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

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

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

**************************************************

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

series preview: North Carolina

Date/Time: Fri.-Sat., April 18-20; 6:00, 1:00, 1:00

TV: Cavaliers Live Friday and Sunday; RSN and ESPN3 on Saturday

Record against the Heels: 100-176-4

Last meeting: UVA 2-1 over UNC (10-4. 5-8, 8-7); 5/16-5/18/13, Chapel Hill

Last game: UVA 11, W&M 2 (4/16); UNC 5, Elon 4 (4/16)

Last weekend:
UVA 2-1 over Clemson (3-2, 1-7, 1-0)
UNC 2-1 over WF (9-0, 4-3, 5-6)

National rankings:

Baseball America: UVA #1; UNC UR
Collegiate Baseball: UVA #2; UNC UR
NCBWA: UVA #1; UNC ARV
Perfect Game: UVA #1; UNC UR
Coaches: UVA #1; UNC ARV

Pitching probables:

Friday:
LHP Nathan Kirby (7-1, 1.23) vs. RHP Trent Thornton (7-1, 1.50)

Saturday:
RHP Josh Sborz (3-2, 2.91) vs. RHP Benton Moss (2-1, 3.62)

Sunday:
LHP Brandon Waddell (5-1, 2.78) vs. RHP Zac Gallen (3-3, 4.99)

The Hoos are riding higher than they have all season, a near-consensus #1 in the rankings and sporting a shiny 14-4 record in conference play.  Normally that'd mean this was one of the biggest series in the country this week, but the Heels aren't holding up their end.  UNC's low point so far this season is probably a sweep at the hands of Duke, and they've also provided lowly Boston College with one of their three conference wins.

The pressure remains on UVA, though; despite the lofty rank, they're at risk of not even leading their division at the end of the week.  There'd be no shame in a 2-1 series win over UNC, even if they are struggling, but Miami hosts Notre Dame this week, and it'd be a shock if they didn't sweep the Irish.  Even with a good showing, UVA could be looking upwards in the Coastal, and very much needs to avoid giving away two games on the weekend.

UNC scouting report:

-- First base: Adrian Chacon (.264-1-8).  Let's start this off by saying, right off the bat, that UNC's lineup has been really fluid this year.  UNC coach Mike Fox has been letting things go for two to three weeks and then shuffling the batting order, and by that pattern UNC is due for another shuffle.  First base has been a place where the shuffle is most evident; three different players started here against Wake Forest, and UNC went through another stretch where they started four different players in five games.  Joe Dudek started the first 21 games, but his .218 batting average dissuaded Fox from giving him any further regular role.  Dudek is a lefty hitter while Chacon is a righty, so if Dudek plays it'll be on Saturday; otherwise, first base tends to be a place where UNC moves someone from another position for a game so as to get an outfielder off the bench or a DH some field time.  Chacon, for his part, will occupy one of the spots in the bottom third of the order, depending on who else plays.

-- Second base: Wood Myers (.307-0-17).  On the other hand, this is the picture of stability.  Myers is a freshman that the Heels really like; he handles himself well at second, and his lefty bat gives him the ability to turn some singles into doubles.  He's second on the team in doubles despite lacking any semblance of power - he's yet to hit a triple and probably will never homer.  Myers is one of two Heels that have started every game at the same position - their double-play combo is the only thing they've kept completely intact - and typically bats second.

-- Third base: Landon Lassiter (.266-0-11).  A freshman all-American last season with a BA of .358, Lassiter has definitely hit a sophomore slump this year.  Opening the season near the top of the lineup and spending a time as the leadoff hitter, Lassiter has been bumped to fifth in the order, but without the power hitting that often implies.  Despite a propitious drop in batting average and collecting only two extra-base hits out of 34, he has a keen eye and a knack for getting on base in general - he's collected 26 walks, second on the team, and leads the Heels with 9 HBP.  His slump may be attributable in part to his move to the field on an everyday basis, as he's started all but three games at third base after being primarily the DH last year.  It's been a rocky road; Lassiter has piled up 12 errors for a fielding percentage of .852.

-- Shortstop: Michael Russell (.338-3-25).  This junior and second-year starter at shortstop is undoubtedly the Heels' top offensive threat.  Russell is tough to pitch to; he hits the ball all over the field and draws plenty of walks, and once on base, is also the top base-stealer on the team, with a 10-for-11 success rate.  He spent most of the season batting third or fourth, as you'd expect of a hitter of his caliber, but lately has been in the leadoff spot.  I read this as a sign that Mike Fox is trying anything to stop the offense from sputtering, and figures he might as well maximize the appearances for his best hitter.

-- Left field: Parks Jordan (.257-0-15).  UNC definitely has its share of guys whose first name is really more of a last name.  Seems like more of a lacrosse phenomenon, but whatever.  Jordan is a left-handed hitting senior who's never been a major offensive threat but also never been terrible; his career average is .256.  He packs very little power and has a slugging average of just .286, a mere three points below Lassiter to claim the bottom spot among regulars.  Jordan is a high-quality fielder, however; he committed his first collegiate error just this season.

-- Center field: Skye Bolt (.250-1-17).  Like Lassiter, Bolt was a freshman sensation last year - probably more well-known than Lassiter due to a combination of his name and playing in the field - and has hit a sophomore wall this year.  Bolt is a speedy player, a good fielder, and his 27 walks and 14 strikeouts indicate a good batting eye - he's just not collecting base hits.  Nevertheless, he's been batting third lately and hits in the top of the lineup most games this year.

-- Right field: Tyler Ramirez (.311-1-17).  Despite having some of the top numbers on the team, Ramirez is one of the players more likely to be bumped from the lineup, and his typical spot in the order is 8th or 9th.  One wonders if the next lineup shuffle from UNC moves him nearer the top.  Zach Daly (.258-2-5), usually used in a pinch-hitting role, gets an occasional start here, as does the very light-hitting Adam Pate (.176-0-2), whose main role is as a pinch-runner.

-- Catcher: Korey Dunbar (.248-3-25).  Early in the season this job belonged to Adrian Chacon, but Dunbar took over two weeks in, and when Chacon eventually returned to the lineup it was at first base.  Dunbar doesn't get much rest, starting all but three games since then.  He doesn't hit for a great deal of contact and he strikes out a ton, and is generally a bottom-half hitter, but he does at least have a little pop in his bat when he does make contact.

-- Designated hitter: Tom Zengel (.329-4-25).  Fox has used this spot this year to get a variety of players some time in the lineup, but that's getting harder and harder to do since Zengel is basically the second-best hitter after Michael Russell.  He's having a big breakout year as a senior after not hitting much in his first two and sitting as a junior.  Lately he's been batting cleanup, an appropriate spot for the team slugging (.565) and HR (4) leader.

-- Pitching staff:

Friday: RHP Trent Thornton (7-1, 1.50).  Thornton is a high draft pick in the making, and his matchup with Nathan Kirby promises to be a must-watch.  He's got three plus pitches, maybe four depending on his slider, and started the season as Carolina's Saturday starter but didn't need much time to show he deserved the role of Friday ace.  His average outing lasts into the 8th inning.  His numbers are eerily similar to Kirby's, and he's only allowed three extra-base hits all year.

Saturday: RHP Benton Moss (2-1, 3.62).  A veteran workhorse in his third year in the starting rotation.  He's been consistent but not spectacular his whole career; his excellent freshman-year numbers are mainly built on weekday competition.  Moss has started twice against UVA in his career; in 2012 he earned a win and in 2013 a no-decision.  He was outdueled by Scott Silverstein last year but Carolina came away with the win when Kyle Crockett inexplicably melted down.

Sunday: RHP Zac Gallen (3-3, 4.99).  Gallen comes in as a very highly-rated freshman, with stuff that the scouts really liked, but has been very hittable this year so far.  That ERA is just a shade under 5, and he's allowing a BA of .288.

Bullpen: Carolina goes very deep in the bullpen, and should be able to match UVA stride for stride here.  RHP Chris McCue (0-0, 0.77) is a tough customer as the closer, with 7 saves in as many appearances.  UNC leans very hard on righty Reilly Hovis (5-1, 2.09), allowing a .196 batting average, and righties Spencer Trayner (2-2, 2.25) and Trevor Kelley (0-1, 2.40) are trusted options as well.  There aren't many lefties; if UNC wants one they'll turn to Zach Rice (1-2, 3.52), usually for only a batter or two.

Bottom line: Carolina has good pitching, as they tend to usually do, but they're frustrating their fans with poor performance at the plate.  Sound familiar?  The difference between us and them is we were bursting at the seams with options for the rotation and they've had trouble getting consistency from Gallen and have no other options they fully trust.  Also, this is a fairly young team; usually, the backbone of a good team is your junior class, but UNC has only five, and only Michael Russell is not a pitcher.  They have a couple seniors too, but the team is mostly underclassmen, and in too many cases for the sanity of UNC fans, highly underachieving sophomores.

Despite all that, UNC's lineup is outperforming UVA's on the stat sheet, so the advantage we might have is not great.  Friday promises to be a terrific battle between two terrific pitchers, and could easily be won 1-0 by either team.  UVA will have the advantage on the mound from then on, though Moss is a very capable pitcher and shouldn't be discounted.

Prediction: UVA 2-1.  The Hoos aren't batting well enough that they're likely to hit both Thornton and Moss hard enough to win.  Just like last week, Sunday should set up as a rubber match which UVA should then win.