game preview: Butler

Date/Time: Saturday, March 19; 7:10

TV: TBS

Record against the Bulldogs: 0-0

Last meeting: Never

Last game: UVA 81, HU 45 (3/17); Butler 71, TT 61 (3/17)

KenPom:

Tempo:
UVA: 61.2 (#351)
Butler: 68.9 (#169)

Offense:
UVA: 118.6 (#9)
Butler: 115.5 (#19)

Defense:
UVA: 91.7 (#4)
Butler: 101.1 (#116)

Pythag:
UVA: .9505 (#1)
Butler: .8233 (#37)

Projected lineups:

Virginia:

PG: London Perrantes (11.0 ppg, 3.0 rpg, 4.4 apg)
SG: Malcolm Brogdon (18.5 ppg, 4.0 rpg, 2.9 apg)
SG: Devon Hall (4.4 ppg, 2.6 rpg, 1.8 apg)
SF: Isaiah Wilkins (4.6 ppg, 4.1 rpg, 1.4 apg)
PF: Anthony Gill (13.4 ppg, 6.1 rpg, 0.7 apg)

Butler:

PG: Roosevelt Jones (13.7 ppg, 6.7 rpg, 4.8 apg)
SG: Kellen Dunham (16.5 ppg, 2.6 rpg, 1.5 apg)
SF: Kelan Martin (16.0 ppg, 6.8 rpg, 1.1 apg)
PF: Andrew Chrabascz (10.2 ppg, 4.2 rpg, 2.0 apg)
PF: Tyler Wideman (7.9 ppg, 5.8 rpg, 0.8 apg)

"Survive and advance" doesn't seem like the right phrase for a 31-point stompening, when a 1 seed treats a 16 seed like they're expected to.  But then you look at what happened to Sparty - which you can just bet that I'm completely sick about.  Torn up inside.**  Nothing is granted you at the Dance macabre.

To drive that point home, this reminder: It's nothing but good teams from here on out.  Even if UVA wins and draws Arkansas-Little Rock in the next round, those Trojans will have beaten both the 4 and 5 seeds.

UVA has never played Butler.  Playing them right after Hampton sounds like the most 1% path through the tournament ever; it's too bad there aren't certain other teams in the tourney we could play next.  We could drive our La Salle to our Citadel in the Hamptons and have the Butler waiting for us.

Matchups matter, team attributes matter, and these preview posts exist to discuss them, but the tao of the tournament is always this: the last game never matters.  Two years ago UVA made it to the Sweet 16 by curb-stomping Memphis, which ran counter to all the expectations after they had big trouble with 15-seed Coastal Carolina.  To get back to those heights this year, UVA has to play a whole new game.

-- UVA on offense

The interesting thing about Butler's defense is that there's absolutely nothing interesting about it.  Most of the time, you have some thing or another that the opponent is good at or bad at.  Butler is slightly good at rebounding and slightly good at getting steals, but there's no crazy good rebounder or ball thief driving those numbers.  Kelan Martin is the top board guy, and he's good, not great - and his likely defensive assignment will be Ike Wilkins, so UVA gets a small advantage by pulling him away from the rim a little on that end.  (It should also be noted that point guard Roosevelt Jones crashes the board much harder than any point guard we've seen, which throws off your blocking-out calculus quite a bit because your own point guard isn't going to do that on the offensive end.)

Butler is much bigger than Hampton, which you'd expect from a comparison between Big East and MEAC teams.  They have good size in the backcourt that can match UVA's; where Malcolm Brogdon went down in the post quite a bit on Thursday and even went back-to-the-basket, he probably won't do that Saturday.  They have enough size in the frontcourt, but not a lot of depth; Andrew Chrabascz and Tyler Wideman are the only players over 6'6".  Neither are great rebounders (Wideman is decent, but not great) and a lineup of Gill and Tobey at the same time will likely dominate the boards and get plenty of second chances.

We go back to those interestingly uninteresting stats, though.  The Bulldogs are the biggest "is what they is" team in college basketball.  They were rarely upset (one very tight loss to Marquette on the road) and rarely upset anyone (beat Seton Hall on the road and Purdue at a "neutral site" a few miles from their home court.)  Both those teams are already out of the tournament, and neither of those wins, nor that loss, really made anyone bat more than one eyelash.  Not only that, but Butler rarely allowed more than a point per possession to worse teams, or fewer than a point per to better teams.  It's hard to figure that UVA won't get its share of points as well.

-- UVA on defense

This side of the ball, Butler has a few things to talk about.  Starting with their 3-point shooting, which is just a shade under 40% as a team.  We all know that's the approved way to beat UVA, although it's also worth pointing out that shooting well from three doesn't guarantee you the win; ask Syracuse.

Kellen Dunham and Jordan Gathers are the top distance shooters by percentage, and Butler has one or the other on the floor at all times - though, rarely both.  (If the name Gathers rings an old bell, it should.  Jordan Gathers is the nephew of Loyola Marymount legend Hank Gathers.)  Almost everyone Butler trots out will attempt a three at some point, except for Tyler Wideman and, oddly, point guard Roosevelt Jones.  The only one who's something less than a threat to hit is Tyler Lewis (and if that name rings an old bell, it should too; Lewis is an NC State transfer, playing tournament games in his old home arena.)

Just because Jones doesn't shoot threes doesn't mean he's a pass-first (or pass-only) point guard; he loves to work off the dribble and has shot more twos than anyone on the team by far, including bigs Wideman and Chrabascz - combined.  (Well, almost - they've taken 342 two-pointers, Jones, 338.)  This is where the game will be won or lost.  Everyone knows you beat the pack-line by collapsing it into its natural tendency to try and cut off drives, then kicking to an open three shooter and knocking it down.  But if the pack-line is at its best, you won't even start that drive.  That's what UVA needs to do, because if Jones isn't driving, the threes dry up quite a bit.  I would guess that the game willl start with Brogdon on Dunham, but Tony will put him on Jones to break up Butler's rhythm on offense.

-- Outlook

Butler is solid.  They were 3-1 against OOC tournament teams, but 2-7 against Big East tourney teams.  They take care of the ball, don't foul much, take good shots, etc. - all the hallmarks of a tough out in the tournament - but also don't play great defense, which sooner or later is going to mean their elimination.  Sooner, it says here.  They didn't succeed in beating anyone you'd consider a national title contender, even an outside one.  What they can do well, UVA can do better.  Never say never to an upset, but now isn't the time to call for one.

Final score: UVA 75, Butler 66

**I am not.

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

road sweet road

This was a rotten weekend to be a Panther.  The Super Bowl did not go their way, the NHL's Florida Panthers lost on Saturday, and so, believe it or not, did most D-I basketball teams of that nickname.

In the case of the Pittsburgh variety, it was cruelly done.  Malcolm Brogdon returned to the building where two years ago he shanked the hopes and dreams of a raucous crowd with a buzzer-beating three, and this time gave them no reason to stay excited for that long.  Brogdon put 21 points on the board and extended his team's winning streak to six.

This is what a top-ten team is supposed to do, repeatedly.  I also did say, a little while ago, that the ACC is supposed to be this minefield of obstacles, and those two statements don't seem to jibe at first glance.  But you're not one of the top teams in the conference if you keep stepping on the mines.  And if and when you do rise to the top, as UVA has been doing the last couple weeks, you become that top-ten team.  I recall, in the days B.T. (Before Tony), even when UVA had a good team, the elite teams (mainly the Tobacco Road ones) would still come in, generate a lot of buzz around Grounds, and then generally bomb us back to the stone age.

Life on the other side of those trenches is pretty good.  For two successive weekends now, an opponent of perfectly good standing in the conference has welcomed UVA to their gym, packed the house and legitimately fired up the crowd, and then skulked out with welts on their backside.  UVA hadn't held an ACC opponent under a point-per-possession all year, until they did so at Louisville, and now rides a three-game streak of doing so.  That's twice, in case you lost count, in someone else's full and very loud gymnasium.  Should they shut up three road crowds in a row, it would be the most satisfying road win of all time.

Actually, this is just the right week to really get the chemistry perfected.  VT visits on Tuesday and then the Hoos are in Durham on Saturday.  Getting it right against Clemson is fine, but not every win is created equal.  A couple months ago I prematurely declared the chemistry experiment finished, and UVA ready to open up with both guns.  They were not.  This time around, with the defense much more locked in, they just might be.

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

-- One reason I have legitimate hope for the chemistry this time around is the play of the bench in the second half.  During a roughly five minute run with all of UVA's stars on the bench (Brogdon, Gill, Perrantes) UVA stretched the lead against most of Pitt's starters.  I was even leery of seeing them subbed back out - sometimes you just roll with what's working - but the starters came back in nice and fresh and picked up right where the subs left off.

-- I don't think I've ever seen UVA be the beneficiary of such a clearly bullshit call as the offensive goaltending the refs (with Jamie Luckie in charge, natch) slapped on Pitt.  Not only was the ball four inches off the rim, it was part way below it.

-- The Louisville game was even worse in the refs department.  The crowd was clearly pissed, and they mostly had a right to be, except that they were getting their fair share of nonsense calls too.

-- I still can't decide whether Ike Wilkins should develop his big-man game or small-man game.  Is he a really big frontcourt player who can post up and guard down low, or is he a smallish stretch power forward?  Where he plays on defense strongly suggests the latter - but then, look at all the jump shots he makes, or that pass to Gill for the dunk on a fast break.  Evan Nolte has at times been used on both sides of that equation, and Wilkins probably will over the next couple years, too.

-- I'm not very wild about the three-game football series with ODU that UVA just announced.  You can put me in the camp that says we have very little to gain and a great deal to lose.  Lose just one of those games and you hand ODU a great reason to keep all those Tidewater players right where they are.  It's not like we should need to play a game in Norfolk to establish a recruiting presence there.  That series doesn't start til Bronco's third season, though, so hopefully the team has a culture change well on the way by then.  And if I still lived five minutes from the ODU campus, which I did, ten years ago, I'd be all about the idea.  As I'm sure 757 Hoos are right now.  It's not all bad, but I think there are better scheduling ideas out there.

basketball season preview, part 2

Moving on with the second third of the UVA roster, including its two biggest stars.

#13 - Anthony Gill - Sr. PF

Nothing in life is guaranteed, so you're allowed to be nervous about whether this coming season can be as brilliant as the last two.  But you're not allowed to be worried about whether a healthy UVA squad will still be a winning team.  Anthony Gill is half the reason.

Gill is a brute force of nature in the post, and unguardable by the average ACC big man.  It takes a hell of an athlete to keep him in check, because he's one of the most powerfully strong basketball players in the country.  It's fortunate that he's a respectable free-throw shooter, because he draws a ton of fouls.  He averaged almost five free throws a game last year, and that's even with opponents finally realizing that hacking him isn't much of a strategy.  Gill is also a tremendous force on the offensive boards, which, combined with Mike Tobey doing the same, is an incredibly potent weapon - it lets Tony Bennett have his cake and eat it too, with stifling transition defense and second-chance points.

Simply put, Gill is the focal point of the frontcourt and one of the ACC's top players.  He's not a flashy defender like his predecessors Akil Mitchell and Darion Atkins, but regardless he's going to draw the top assignments on both ends of the floor.  He'll have to fight double-teams on offense and take on everyone's best in the post on defense.  Even though he moved into the starting lineup last year, this is still an extra step of responsibility for him.  Worry all you like about that, but your dose of Xanax for that is that the rest of the ACC has to figure out what the hell to do with him.

#15 - Malcolm Brogdon - Sr. SG

Heart and soul of this team, sure - but every team has a heart and soul, or at least, most of the good ones.  (We could all name a few soulless teams.)  Malcolm Brogdon's a bit more than that.  With apologies to Joe Harris, whose journey from Chelan to ACC champion embodied Virginia's rise to the scene, Brogdon is the quintessential Tony Bennett recruit and player.  He doesn't just fit the mold, he is the mold.  Much of this was encapsulated in a Sports Illustrated article that went way, way in depth into what makes Brogdon tick.  His family collects advanced degrees like Halloween candy, and Brogdon himself is unselfish and almost fanatically dedicated to improvement - both on the court and off it.  Never has Tony Bennett betrayed more truth about his move from Wazzu to UVA than when he simply says, "I came to Virginia to be able to recruit players like Malcolm."

Brogdon has enough skills as a ballhandler, enough quicks, enough hops, but unlike most star guards in the sport, none of these are elite qualities.  Where he stands out is - like Gill - his strength.  Brogdon is big for a college guard and probably the most physically strong backcourt player in the nation.  This means he, too, draws a lot of fouls, and his near-elite free-throw shooting makes opponents pay for it.  He's more of an average three-point shooter than his free-throw shooting would suggest, but he's good enough you have to respect it, and he fearlessly shoots two-point jumpers as well - which is nominally a very inefficient shot that Brogdon turns into one of his best.  And on the other end, his on-ball defense is simply terrific - partly because of his strength and partly because he's taken all of Tony's coaching to heart.

Now that he's a senior, what he can do best to help his team is to demand the ball in crunch time and go full-speed angry bull at the rim.  Brogdon lacks much deception in his ballhandling, but he's better than he thinks he is at slashing and driving.  Because, quite simply, he can shoot through whatever you swing at him, and draw and-1s with ease.  Maddeningly, he didn't fully realize this even up through the last game of the year; if he had, the MSU game would've ended up a lot different.  When he figures out that it would take Bill Laimbeer to stop him from scoring in the lane, he'll routinely swing close games his way.

#21 - Isaiah Wilkins - So. PF

Marial Shayok is the player whose second-year improvement I'm most excited to see, but Isaiah Wilkins's improvement is the most critical to the success of the team.  Indisputable, that.  UVA has a tremendously experienced frontcourt just with Gill and Tobey alone, but it won't be a deep frontcourt without Wilkins.

In last year's season opener, Wilkins was all the rage - eight points, five boards, three assists, two blocks, and two steals.  Unfortunately, there was no repeat performance, though in large part because of the emergence of Darion Atkins.  Offensively, Wilkins struggled the rest of the way, and he was clearly a step slower than the veterans in the complicated defense.

Best-case, Wilkins can be the player he was against JMU.  He's got potential to be a terrific shot-blocker, and he's put on a few pounds which should help his defense as well as keep him from getting shoved out of the lane on offense.  He can shoot the occasional three - in fact he was two-for-three last year - so in an ideal world he's a matchup nightmare, able to stretch the floor and be comfortable on the outside and yet do all the dirty work required of a big man.  We've seen him do all of that, but only in flashes.

How consistently he's able to play like a true power forward will help to dictate usage elsewhere.  It's a problem if Wilkins isn't putting it together, because it means playing Mike Tobey in less-than-ideal matchups.  It's too much to expect for him (yet) to be the high-flying defender that Mitchell and Atkins were, because he's only a sophomore.  But take that JMU performance and turn it into 12-15 minutes a night of that, and UVA's frontcourt instantly becomes one of the most formidable in the conference.

#31 - Jarred Reuter - Fr. PF

Not much is expected of Reuter this year.  He'll be at the back of the bigs rotation.  It's not likely he'll redshirt - Tony is limited to eleven scholarship players because of the commitment to redshirt Mamadi Diakite and the requirement to redshirt Austin Nichols.  Reuter should get some minutes mainly to spell the starters, probably those ones in the first half about two-thirds of the way through where we usually see the back-of-the-rotation players.  Some games he might not play at all.

He won't be counted on to generate offense.  Reuter's game is to bang and crash down low.  Just rebound, occasionally put a hammer on someone trying to score, and set good screens.  As time goes on we'll see how his game develops, but for now, this team doesn't yet need him to play a featured role.  Some contributions here and there on defense and a few bruised opponents is all he'll need to make his mark.

hoops in review, part 2

The much-coveted hoops review continues with the second half of the roster.

#11 - Evan Nolte - Jr. SF

Preview quote: "Nolte's an interesting case. It's very fair to say that other than the freshmen who we haven't seen at all, he has the least predictable role on the team, and even then, it's not like we don't know what Devon Hall or Jack Salt are here for."

In the preview I labeled Nolte a power forward after some deliberation.  Here he's a small forward.  That about sums things up, really.  Nolte was an odd duck of a player this year, with no particular defined role and lots of minutes regardless.  He was the only player to cross over between the frontcourt and backcourt, playing about a quarter of his minutes as one of two bigs rather than one of three guards.

Those minutes were weirdly situated, too.  Nolte's playing time was circling the drain midseason, with a stretch of four games where he played six or fewer minutes.  He was down to three against UNC.  Then Justin Anderson broke his hand, and Nolte immediately jumped to 24 that very game.  He would play almost two-thirds of his season total minutes in the final one-third of the season, starting every game but the last and regularly topping 30 minutes on the court.

This was to the consternation of quite a few fans.  Nolte's most readily apparent role was to shoot threes, which was supposed to be the thing he did best.  Instead he had a completely horrible year in that area.  The whole deal was eerily reminiscent of Sammy Zeglinski, who caught way more heat than he deserved because he wasn't shooting as well as people thought he should.  (I should've anticipated this.  Nolte also took totally unwarranted heat for his sweet choice of shirt during summer run-from-the-cops shenanigans.)

Me, I get irritated at fans who act as if the only thing that matters is shooting.  Nolte was in the game for so many minutes all of a sudden because he was getting it on the defensive end.  I also wrote before the season that Nolte was due for a big jump in play, and though nothing he did on a stat sheet would've indicated such a leap, his defense was, somehow, outstanding.  They don't hand out defensive all-conference honors for stubbornly staying in front of people, but one thing you hardly ever saw was Nolte getting beat on the ball.  It involved the adoption of a really goofy-looking defensive stance where Nolte made himself much shorter than his 6'8" frame and stuck his hands out palms-forward, but that right there was your leap ahead: on-ball defense and the invisible game.

I don't think we'll see 30 minutes a game for Nolte next year, but then I also don't think he'll shoot under .300 from three again.  It didn't look like there was anything wrong with his shot; they just didn't fall.  But what he did do is establish himself in Tony's mind as a player well within the circle of trust; up til the last month of this season, you'd have wondered about that.  Last year the prediction was that Nolte was one player in danger of seeing his minutes dwindle if he didn't develop a dependable skill set.  Like it or not, he did that.  It showed a bit late, but he did that; next year, as a senior, the minutes will be there.

#13 - Anthony Gill - Jr. PF

Preview quote: "[H]e should find himself in the conversation for some all-ACC recognition if all goes well."

All did go well, and this is the simplest, most straightforward assessment we'll do on the whole team.  Gill moved into the starting lineup this season and had little trouble with the transition.  His efficiency probably exposed some vestiges of pacism among the all-ACC voters; he was KenPom's #7 player in the country (a rating admittedly heavily influenced by team quality - but then, so is all-America voting) but only third-team all-ACC.

Gill was actually UVA's most efficient offensive player, nosing out Justin Anderson.  Like a lot of the players on this team, he's terrifically strong, and he used that muscle to be a terror on the offensive boards; draw copious fouls; and make 58% of his shots.  He was at his best going straight at the rim.  He liked to try fallaway shots as well (especially, and very maddeningly, against MSU) and they weren't nearly as effective as a simple bull-rush at the rim.  Gill has enough quickness to start the move, and then use his strength to finish and/or draw the foul.

Not much to overanalyze here, really.  Gill was the offensive centerpiece of the frontcourt, a role he stepped into like a pair of slippers.  Darion Atkins had such a tremendous year that he was the clear focus on defense, but next year that'll probably be Gill too.  He'll be one of the conference's top returning players next year.

#15 - Malcolm Brogdon - Jr. SG

Preview quote: "[T]here's every reason to expect him to become not just UVA's marquee player, but one of the ACC's as well. ... [F]irst team all-ACC is the expectation."

Mission accomplished.  Brogdon was one of four players to be a unanimous or near-consensus pick for the media's first team (the others were Jahlil Okafor, Jerian Grant, and Rakeem Christmas.)  Brogdon was also on the all-defensive team, making him and Christmas the two best all-around players in the conference.  Scoring is what usually gets you a lot of attention, but Brogdon was rightfully recognized as an elite on-ball defender.  He's really big for a guard, so going around him was difficult, and he's quite probably the strongest guard in the conference.  Best example of his skills: Wake Forest tried to use Codi Miller-McIntyre to break him down one-on-one for the game-winning basket, and Miller-McIntyre never made it past the key.

Offensively, Brogdon is actually even better than he thinks he is.  To be specific, his ballhandling and driving.  He doesn't lack at all for confidence in his jump shot, and in fact has the really maddening habit of shooting them with his toes on the three-point line.  He'll come off a curl, or he'll take a step-back jumper, and it'll be from a distance that might as well be a three if you're gonna shoot from out there, but isn't.  Next year I hope he starts his move six inches further from the basket.

But I digress.  Brogdon doesn't have a lot of deception in his driving game, but he's so strong he doesn't need much.  The guy can finish through a ton of contact.  He has it in him to be that clutch scorer who's there when you absolutely, positively need a bucket, and he's flashed that ability.  If he figures that out, UVA might not lose a close game all year.

#21 - Isaiah Wilkins - Fr. PF

Preview quote: "In his commitment profile I called him a Swiss Army knife of a player; he doesn't blow you away with shooting range or power and strength, but he's athletic, long-armed, and energetic, and should do a nice job on defense as long as he's got the system down enough to be out there."

I think that sums up Wilkins's season awfully well, actually.  He started off against JMU with a game that drew a ton of praise for its all-around contributions: 8 points, 5 boards, 3 assists, 2 blocks, and 2 steals in 19 minutes.  Almost all those numbers were season highs, as it turned out, but Wilkins had far too much depth in front of him to be in for 20 minutes every night.

His usage was a little erratic - he played 14 minutes in a tight one against Notre Dame after sitting the last three completely out, for example.  And his offensive game wasn't well-developed at all.  But he sported - with small-sample-size warnings applying - an 8.7 block percentage, and had 2.7 blocks per 40 minutes.  The fewer the minutes, the worse the extrapolation, so that's a number to be taken with many grains of salt, but even so, he had 18 blocked shots - which was two more than Anthony Gill in less than 1/3 the playing time.

So I think he had a perfectly acceptable year, which I don't mean as damnation with faint praise.  Playing the one spot where a freshman would've had the hardest time standing out, he managed to at least carve a niche.  Tony and the staff are starting to work on a real nice track record developing big men - just look at Mitchell and Atkins - and Wilkins should be due for a big increase in responsibilities next year.

#32 - London Perrantes - So. PG

Preview quote: "The bottom line is, UVA has as veteran a point guard as you'll find in the league - and he's a sophomore."

The narrative was that after the electric scorer and deadly shooter broke his hand and had to sit, the normally pass-first point guard starting take a more assertive role in the scoring department, helping to shore up the business of getting points for the scoreboard.  It sure seemed that way.  It wasn't quite.

Perrantes did do that, a little bit.  He took about two shots more per game post-Justin-injury than he did before it.  But his three-point shooting percentage took a nosedive from last season - which surprised me, because, again, it didn't seem like it.  He made up for it by being a better shooter from two and upping his assists, but the overall numbers picture doesn't line up with the narrative.

Which is why we rely on numbers, but we're not a slave to them.  Point guardery isn't always about the numbers, not even the assists.  Perrantes did assert himself more than last year.  He made himself more visible, more available.  He was more active without the ball.  There wasn't, on the stat sheet, a huge difference in his play from last year, but he developed all the same.

#33 - Jack Salt - Fr. C

Preview quote: "The likely contribution is as a practice body."

Which was the case; Salt, as expected, redshirted.  Details on how that year went depend on who you ask.  I've seen reports ranging from "not progressing as hoped" to "Tony absolutely loves what he sees."  With Mike Tobey a senior next year, I think Salt's career will continue to be on a slow start.  But we'll at least get a few chances to see what we have in the big Kiwi.

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So, a quick look at the rotation for next year.  The Hoos have to replace about 28 minutes in the frontcourt and 24 minutes in the backcourt.  It's tempting to say we already saw what replacing Justin Anderson will look like, but Tony, like most coaches, had settled into a rotation he liked by the late stages of the season, and simply extended a few players a few minutes each and gave Evan Nolte the rest.  Next year is a bit of a clean slate.  Devon Hall will have a chance to reassert himself, and Darius Thompson (who some reports say is easily the quickest ballhandler on the team and a great candidate to add a slashing dimension that wasn't really there last year) will have every opportunity as well.  And Marial Shayok could see a large boost from his 14.6 minutes as well.  It's a crowded situation.

The bigs don't have it any easier.  Gill is the only one with a guaranteed allotment.  Mike Tobey will play, of course, but he might stick around 17 minutes or he might get ten more.  Wilkins should become more of a regular, and Salt and Jarred Reuter, who even knows?  It's a surprising amount of unknowns for a team that returns most of its players.  The fact that there are so many possibilities is a showcase for the remarkable depth.

first impressions

If the Hoos are gonna do anything this year that even remotely resembles last year, it'll take important contributions from freshmen.  We knew that going in; the exciting thing was finding out who could do what, and who would step up the highest.  Tony Bennett likes to keep things under heavy wraps during the fall, so this weekend was our first really good look at how he planned on using these guys and what they could do.

Obvious and screaming caveat about quality of competition remains.  Neither JMU nor NSU provide anything resembling a real test.  We might be able to make better predictions a week from now, with the GW game in the books.  But this post is going to be largely about comparing the freshmen to each other, so this is still plenty useful.

The rotation is the most important thing, and it has very little to do with the competition.  Tony gave us a lot of info after the Norfolk State game.  Still figuring things out, yes, of course - Tony has always used the early part of the season to figure things out, and doing so is a feature, not a bug.  Basketball teams are chemistry experiments, especially with so many new ingredients.  He always manages to have things right by the time an ACC opponent rolls into town.

Second, he mentioned a 10-man rotation, at least for now.  Jack Salt didn't play a minute, even when the bench was emptied, so it don't take a rocket surgeon to riddle that one out.  B.J. Stith got a few minutes, but some of them came with the walk-ons, and the rest of them in that mid-first-half area where the back-end guys go in sometimes.  With a 10-man rotation, and 10 scholarship players getting double-digit minutes and the other one getting a handful, it shouldn't be hard to figure that out either.  Stith is the odd man out of the rotation, at least for now.  He'll almost certainly pick up a bagload of DNP-CDs this year.

(Tangent: I don't mind this, by the way.  Most everyone's instinct is to say that if he's not going to give us meaningful minutes, he should redshirt, end of discussion.  Yes, it makes sense to want that fifth year out of him, but keep in mind this, too: basketball players transfer at the drop of a hat, and always think they should be playing.  Most programs try to keep everyone happy by juggling 13 players, and sometimes that works and usually it doesn't, and players leave.  Coaches tend to over-promise when they're recruiting.  Tony's never anything but up front with these guys, and doesn't redshirt anyone who's not OK with it.  If someone tells him they don't want to redshirt and they'll take their chances with whatever minutes Tony dishes out, and Tony redshirts them anyway, well.... five years is better than four, but four is better than two.)

So that leaves three newcomers to the rotation: Hall, Shayok, and Wilkins.  Hall appears to be following the lead of London Perrantes a bit, by which I mean he looks for his own shot about as often and at similar times.  But I think there are signs he'll be considered the superior defender by season's end.  One of those signs is probably the "5" in the JMU game steals column.  He's more aggressive than Perrantes, who's one of the team's more conservative defenders.  Getting five steals while only fouling once, that's outstanding.

Shayok, now.  Main thing I thought he showed off was an ability to score a lot of different ways.  He wasn't afraid to launch a three, and he looked comfortable going to the rim too.  "Versatile" was the word on him, and he looked it.  Everyone from Tony on down warned against falling in love with the three-ball after the NSU game, but the fact is, it's nice to know they might actually be able to shoot it.

Shayok looked pretty good on defense, too, but so far my favorite of the three main newcomers is Wilkins.  And defense, of course, is the reason.  Wilkins shot down two NSU attempts in one possession, but that wasn't my favorite play - an NSU player attempting to drive met with a Wilkins shot-block without Wilkins even having to move his feet.  Yes, it was my imagination, but I swear I saw Wilkins give the guy a "really?" look before tossing the shot back where it came from.  This is to say nothing of his JMU stat line, one which made the Swiss Army knife characterization look awfully prescient.  Wilkins could be a big piece of the replacement puzzle for Akil Mitchell.

The missing link in all this analysis is that nothing the Dukes or Spartans did was able to expose any real weaknesses on these guys.  It's easy and unfair to get swept away in expectations.  But the truth is, Tony was able to use his freshmen and not see a scary-looking drop in quality of play.  That's reassuring.  Shayok and Wilkins looked the best of the bunch, but they all looked like they belonged.

2014 hoops preview: players, part 2

It's a bye week in football, so we get to talk basketball all week long.  Don't act like you're not excited.  I'll have a couple quick things on the FSU game at the end here.  Today we'll continue the series on each player.  Tomorrow, the OOC schedule, and on Wednesday or Thursday, another look back at the ACC itself.  Stuff gets real on Friday, but sadly that game isn't televised, so most of us will have to wait til Sunday to get our first look.

#11 - Evan Nolte - Jr. PF

Nolte's an interesting case.  It's very fair to say that other than the freshmen who we haven't seen at all, he has the least predictable role on the team, and even then, it's not like we don't know what Devon Hall or Jack Salt are here for.

I even hesitated as to whether to call him a power forward or a small forward, but based on his usage during the tourney last year, power forward it is.  Nolte basically spent most of the season living up to the preseason expectations of reduced usage and a hazy role; his minutes were cut down to less than half of what they'd been the year before.  Then the tourney rolled around and all of a sudden it was like he'd never left.  Clutch shots against Coastal, posterization of some Memphis dude, and major-league defensive responsibilities against MSU, in which he looked like he'd been doing this power forward thing all his life.

Did we see a true metamorphosis, or just a well-timed hot streak?  Hard to say.  Nolte is one of the classicest tweeners you'll ever see, and what still remains to be seen as he goes into the second half of his career is whether he's on the good or bad side of that description.  Both his defense and offense are part of that equation.  We know he can shoot from deep, and he'll probably never be a back-to-the-basket player, but he's also flashed an occasional midrange game that would come in awfully handy if he develops it.  And on defense, we know he's not all that quick, but if he can defend in the post a little, he can be one of those really frustrating floor stretchers on the other end.  What he can't do is get knocked around on defense and expect to float to the edges on offense.

We'll see if he's hit the weight room.  Against MSU he played harder than we've seen him play in two years, and the results were a really pleasant surprise.  I think the most likely outcome for Nolte is that it takes him all year to really be comfortable as a banger and as an elder statesman on the team, and that his senior year is when he really hits full bloom.  But Tony has a way of coaxing development out of his players, and you shouldn't be surprised to see that timeline accelerated.  Mark these words: if UVA has another really stratospheric season like last year, it'll be in no small part because Nolte became a whole new ballplayer.

#13 - Anthony Gill - Jr. PF

On a points-per-minute basis, Gill was the most efficient scorer on the team last year, and it's no wonder.  He turned out to be just as advertised from his redshirt season, and usually got to go up against second-stringers, which was never a fair matchup.  Better yet, you could see his defense improve as the season wore on, and his minutes saw a parallel uptick.

The obvious question here is how well he handles the near-certain move to the starting lineup.  He'll be asked to guard all those guys that Akil Mitchell guarded so well last year, and score on them too, in a way that wasn't asked of Mitchell as much.  He's not the athlete Mitchell was, but he's quite a bit stronger, and his defensive style will definitely reflect that.  

It's a really simple equation: all that stuff you did last year, do it against better players.  But Gill is entering his fourth season in a college program, and there's little doubt he can handle it.  He could see up to an extra eight minutes a game (though about five is more likely); we may not see a corresponding increase in all his numbers, but they'll still go up, and he should find himself in the conversation for some all-ACC recognition if all goes well.

#15 - Malcolm Brogdon - Jr. SG

Pacism is slowly evaporating from national analyses.  Maybe not so slowly now that Tony's choke-you-to-death style has proven capable of elite results.  Proof: Malcolm Brogdon is 22nd in ESPN's countdown of the top 100 players in the country.  "No weaknesses" is their blunt assessment.

So a lot is expected of him.  With Joe Harris gone, this is Uncle Malcolm's team.  Like Gill, he's entering his fourth year of college ball, and has developed into one of the physically strongest backcourt players in the league, maybe the strongest.  He'll be asked to score from everywhere, with the focus of the defense squarely upon him.  Considering that he made some cameo appearances in KenPom's top ten rating - as in, players in the whole country - there's every reason to expect him to become not just UVA's marquee player, but one of the ACC's as well.  He doesn't wear the right shade of blue, so his path to ACC POY is steeper than for certain others, but first team all-ACC is the expectation.

#21 - Isaiah Wilkins - Fr. PF

Wilkins has a unique challenge among freshmen, in that he has more established players in his way than the rest of them.  Some of them (Stith/Shayok) are in each others' way, others (Hall, Salt) have a defined position with only one other player (albeit a core rotation member) in front.  Wilkins is a power forward, which means that Gill, Atkins, and most likely Nolte are all squarely in front of him in the pecking order.

The good news for him: Jack Salt is a likely redshirt, and Tony's nine-man rotation tends to prefer four backcourt and five frontcourt guys.  Makes sense.  Last year's five-man frontcourt rotation saw three players (Mitchell, Gill, Tobey) get the lions' share of the minutes, and Nolte and Atkins pick up a few each.  Well, now there's 25 of Mitchell's minutes to figure out, and I think you can count on Wilkins getting a few of them.

Probably at first it'll be one of those mid-first-half deals where you toss a guy in where it's not really crunch time and you need to keep your starters fresh.  In his commitment profile I called him a Swiss Army knife of a player; he doesn't blow you away with shooting range or power and strength, but he's athletic, long-armed, and energetic, and should do a nice job on defense as long as he's got the system down enough to be out there.  There's a lot of veteran experience in front of him and he'd have to pull a shocker to start chipping into their playing time significantly this year, but I think there's a little bit of an Akil Mitchell to him, and we know how that turned out.

#32 - London Perrantes - So. PG

The surprise of the season last year, for sure.  It was almost immediately apparent, the effect Perrantes had on the offense when he took it over, and from the beginning it seemed like he belonged - largely because he acted like it.  He didn't even make a single two-point shot in any of the first eight games and he still was making the offense run smoother than it had in a long time.  And even when the offense changed after the Tennessee beatdown, it didn't faze Perrantes or his ability to make it go.

This is Brogdon's team, but with just the one year in the program, Perrantes is assuming a leadership role.  (Though, one does wonder what on earth he did to get suspended for the JMU game.  It's a little reminder that he's still not quite a finished product.)  That leadership should also translate into a little more assertiveness with the ball.  He's obviously a huge piece of the equation, but KenPom's algorithms credit him with the offensive impact of Taylor Barnette because he finishes so few possessions and shoots so little.  Partly that's good - it means limited turnovers - but Perrantes was a .437 three-point shooter last year and ought to fire away a bit more.

He'll also need to improve his game inside the arc; his two-point percentage was an utterly dismal .319 and he wasn't much better at the rim, going just .355.  I don't think he needs to take it to the rack more - the offense doesn't revolve around that - just better.  But the bottom line is, UVA has as veteran a point guard as you'll find in the league - and he's a sophomore.

#33 - Jack Salt - Fr. C

Salt is considered the most likely player to redshirt, which is no surprise at all; he's a center, bigs are always behind the curve as compared to guards, and his New Zealand upbringing means he's had only a smattering of experience against the kind of competition his peers have faced.

So the likely contribution is as a practice body - and an awfully helpful one, because if half the reports of his physicality are true, our bigs will find the games a lot easier than practice.  Reputation has it that Salt seems to think he's playing rugby out there.  I'm OK with giving him a year with the strength and conditioning guys, maybe learn a little bit about what he can get away with.  If by chance he does play this year, I still wouldn't expect much - heavy physicality isn't easily noticed on TV and not that useful in small doses.  But I'm looking forward to the day a couple years down the road when he and Jarred Reuter team up to bludgeon opponents into handing over any and all potential rebounds.

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Guessing at the rotation is probably a stupid thing to do, because the season has a way of really messing up predictions like that, but let's do it anyway.  Minutes are in parentheses after the name.

Starters:

PG - Perrantes (30)

SG - Brogdon (35)

SF - Anderson (25)

PF - Gill (25)

C - Tobey (20)

Reserves:

Hall (13)

Shayok (12)

Atkins (15)

Nolte (15)

Wilkins (5)

That leaves Stith and Salt to redshirt.  It also only adds up to 195 - spread the rest of the minutes around the back of the bench to account for blowouts and such.

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Quick bullets on the FSU game:

-- Sending 260-pound Jack English out to play left tackle against Mario Edwards - it's amazing Greyson Lambert didn't get beaten into a fine powder.  Nothing against English - but he's like the 8th-string tackle if we had an ideal roster, a converted tight end, and all in all the unfortunate poster boy for Mike London's abject failure to build an offensive line.

-- I like the fact that there's a wildcat play for David Watford, and kinda want to smack people who think that because he did a lousy job of throwing the football last year, it means he should never get on the field again in any capacity.  I'm more than OK with finding a role for a guy who has probably earned it with attitude.  But do the coaches take into account important details like, I dunno, down and distance, time on the game clock, or any kind of situational detail at all, when they call a play?  Steve Fairchild has designed a good offense but I swear that if he played chess he would draw up these elaborate twenty-move gambits to capture the opposing bishops, and wouldn't save his king from check if the rules didn't require it.  When he plays golf he probably has really nice clubs and drives off the tee exclusively with a sand wedge.

-- All three of Greyson Lambert's touchdown throws were beautimous, but the second one - to Darius Jennings - was really incredible, NFL stuff.  FSU had them all covered well, except that the DB's backs were turned the whole time.  On the throw to Jennings, Lambert spun it off to Jennings's outside shoulder and put it where Jennings could just go down and get it, and the DB, even had he realized the ball was coming, would've had an impossible time trying to twist and break it up.  Levrone's catch was mostly just awesome work by Levrone; the Jennings one was all Lambert.

-- That said, I defended Lambert on the UNC screen pass interception, but I'm not gonna do it for his one pick this time.  The poster child for a throw that should never have been made.

Prediction review:

- No UVA running back tops 50 yards rushing.  Kevin Parks had 43, the most of any Hoo.  Easy prediction to make.

- Both Lambert and Johns toss an interception.  Johns didn't play, so I can't take credit for this one.

- Lambert has better stats across the board - yardage, completion percentage, yards per attempt.  But I sure can for this.

- Winston throws for over 300 yards.  Nope - Winston was limited to 261 yards and a pretty pedestrian (for him) 7.5 yards per throw.  He outplayed Lambert, but - not by much at all.

- Greene absolutely torches the Hoos, with double-digit receptions.  Greene literally had a career day, his 13 receptions being a career high, and that's saying something for the all-time receptions leader at FSU.

Pretty good day on the predictions here, going 3-for-5.  Stats for the season:

20-for-50 on specifics (40%)
6-3 straight up (W)
4-3-1 ATS (L - the Hoos covered when here I thought they'd get blown out.  Nice job taking advantage of turnovers, but otherwise nothing to speak of on offense.)

hamm it up

Everybody loves a good Cinderella story.  And I love watching dominant running backs.  That makes Daniel Hamm the obvious topic du jour.

If you'd ever heard of Hamm, you are a teammate, a relation, or lying.  His existence flew under every radar that's tuned on Charlottesville.  He doesn't have an entry in most recruiting databases and he never received any scholarship offers to speak of, not in football.  He showed up on the field and people probably tried to remember if Khalek Shepherd wore #22 or some other number, until his name was announced.  Now his name is on all the headlines.

You have to admit, that's pretty cool.  It might be for just this one week, and might've only been VMI, but the entry in the record book is just as permanent as any other.  And it made something interesting out of an uninteresting game.

Also, it leaves some questions, or at least, one big one.  Namely, does this mean we have a new running back?  Well, the quality of competition looms large over everything positive we can say about Hamm's future.  Except for the first couple drives, VMI had no chance against the blocking, and Hamm always had a hole to run through.  When he broke a tackle, it always came with the question as to whether a player on a better team would've brought him down; when he ran past someone, you always wondered if another team's players would've been faster.  There's no way UVA's running game will generate 357 yards again this year.

Even so, a couple things look to be really in Hamm's favor here.  First and probably foremost, it's got to be really bad news for Kye Morgan, hasn't it?  That Khalek Shepherd and Taquan Mizzell are both hurt, and the next guy out is a true freshman walk-on, instead of Morgan who redshirted last season - that's a surprise.  Morgan's got more than three-and-a-half seasons left in his career, so it's not like you just write him off, but what didn't he show last year?

As for Hamm himself, some of those runs - particularly, I thought, his second TD run - were nice runs regardless of opponent.  He looked strong in his running.  Some of the holes he hit weren't very big, and the truth is, a lot of guys might have considered them too small and stepped around them, looking for a home run elsewhere.  And against most teams, that's how you run for two yards.  Hamm was content to take the five-to-seven and come back and do it again.  There's only one Barry Sanders, so give me the north-south, workhorse stuff all day long.  I loved watching a guy who would - oh, fuck it, Hammer the defense - carry after carry.

Whether Hamm has or will unseat Shepherd or Mizzell this season, nobody can say except those who aren't telling.  Whether that performance will translate to success against actual opponents, nobody can say at all.  But I'm looking forward to finding out.

Other stuff in short:

-- That was the good story of the offense.  The bad story: the passing game.  The numbers are good but the eye test was definitely not.  So many of those yards were YAC, and not like with Mike Rocco where the YAC was often the result of a very well-timed ball.  Watford threw a swing pass behind Kevin Parks and Parks was still able to pick up a ton of yardage; no ACC team will let that happen.

Watford's interceptions were the result of locking in on a receiver to absurd extremes.  Especially the first.  Some blame goes to Miles Gooch for running his route and then stopping, but he was so thoroughly covered that Watford had no business throwing that thing at all.  Watford had some nice throws, too - the one to Tim Smith for a touchdown was gorgeous.  Both his touchdown throws, actually, were excellent.  Even then, he was watching nobody but Smith all the way.  Until he learns to go through his second read he's not going to be a productive QB.

It would help if his receivers gave him a little assistance.  Gooch has been mentioned; Dominique Terrell was also guilty at least once.  Watford was scrambling and Terrell ran to a point on the field and simply stopped moving.  I can't believe this only happened the two times I noticed it.  Marques Hagans has got to impress on these guys that the route doesn't stop where the little arrow ends up.  Of all former quarterbacks - a guy who kept a ton of plays alive with his feet - he ought to know this best.

-- I love the defense, though.  When the announcers talked about how VMI had us "on the ropes" in the first quarter, well, OK, the offense didn't produce, but the VMI offense gained 15 yards the whole quarter.  I mean, come on.  The defense just crushed the fightin' Vimmies.  No contest.  If the offense had played as good a game as the defense it would've been 105-0.  I'm not going back through the annals to find out the last time UVA allowed so few yards (79) but the notes tell us that they allowed 84 to Akron in 2004.  So it goes back further than that.  I would go so far as to say that even with as bad as VMI is, the defense outperformed expectations.

Time for a prediction review:

-- Mizzell and Shepherd combine for at least five more carries than Parks.  The point here was that Parks was going to get a nice light day, maybe not show up in the second half.  I could null it out since nobody knew about their injuries, but I'm giving it to myself, actually, because Hamm by himself had four more carries and then the fourth quarter was turned over to the backups.

-- Watford averages 10 yards per attempt, enough to double his seasonal passing yards if allowed to throw 28 times.  He was at 8.2, which isn't enough for this.

-- At least five new redshirts are burned, two on the O-line.  The grand total is seven: Hamm is one, along with LaChaston Smith, Eric Tetlow, Sadiq Olanrewaju, Eric Smith, Max Valles, and Donte Wilkins.  Most are defensible; LaChaston Smith is the one I have to question.  That hurdle was cool, but couldn't Morgan have just gotten those carries?  Five deep is plenty.  It's doubly screwy because of the very strong possibility that Smith might move to a whole new position eventually.

The rest are fine.  I actually saw someone complaining that Hamm's redshirt had been burned.  Lordy.  You wouldn't have known he was even remotely good if you'd gotten your way.  Besides, Hamm is a walk-on; it's exceedingly wrong to essentially tell a walk-on "for the good of the team we're going to ask you to pay your very expensive way for a fifth year."  The offensive linemen almost had to play; the first-stringers can't take every snap of the season.  And we'll almost certainly see more of Wilkins, too.

-- Defensive tackles account for at least two sacks.  No, but they still dominated.

-- So does Eli Harold.  No, but Trent Corney did, probably against VMI's second-string tackle, although I didn't look to see.

-- Urban bats down at least two passes.  There was actually a lot of very good pressure on Eric Kordenbrock, but VMI did a nice job of keeping his release time short.

I only get two of six, which adds up to 6-for-16 on the year.  Full game prediction, with a win against the spread and a gimme on the straight-up, makes me 2-1 and 2-1 ATS.

We'll cover the rest of the ACC as part of tomorrow's weekend review.

the recruit: Jack Salt

Name: Jack Salt
Position: C
Hometown: Auckland, New Zealand
School: Westlake Boys School
Height: 6'10"
Weight: 230

24/7: N/R
ESPN: N/R
Rivals: N/R
Scout: N/R

Other offers: None

I don't routinely cover basketball recruiting, preferring almost exclusively to wait until someone actually commits before I say anything.  There's a very long list of reasons why, but one of them is this: Months, even years, can pass, with nothing happening, and then everything you thought you knew goes out the window in two days.

Case in point: Two weeks ago, four-star and top-100 prospect Martin Geben, who liked UVA but liked Notre Dame more, was scheduled to visit Charlottesville for a trip that would hopefully flip-flop the two in his mind.  Then the visit was cancelled - mutually, as it came out shortly thereafter - and Geben committed to the Irish.

The reason for the cancellation, as it turns out, is named Jack Salt, a name that lends itself to too-easy puns and - I think - sounds like something out of Mother Goose.  ("Jack Salt could drink no malt / His wife could drink no gin / And so betwixt them both, it made / The barman quite chagrined.")  Several times a year the recruiting gurus will say "there is a mystery recruit whose name I can't reveal yet."  Rarely are they so adamant about saying positively nothing.  Salt is a guy that Tony Bennett personally identified (it was his New Zealand connections that made this one possible), personally scouted, and personally recruited, and this was definitely one of those deals where the coaching staff wants CIA levels of secrecy lest someone else find out about the prize.  Salt visited this past weekend, and that put the bow on top so that the secret could finally be let out.

We can go ahead and list Salt's resume - he played one season for the Super City Rangers of the NBL, New Zealand's professional league, but that's OK because his team is actually 100% amateur.  He's played for the U-18 version of his national team, but sparingly, whereas for the Rangers, he's a starter.  (Given that the Rangers don't pay their players, they're terrible, though.)  And for the Rangers, he averaged 8.6 ppg and 5.4 rebounds in 18.5 minutes.

Doesn't tell us much about the quality of the competition, though.  It's probably not much; the NBL requires all but two players on each team's roster to be native Kiwis, and the FIBA rankings place New Zealand 18th in the world, ahead of several countries (like Italy) that have no such rules.  One of the teams in the NBL plays in a high school gym.  We're talking about a league that's well below the competitiveness of the professional leagues in Europe and China.

That said, Bennett has a track record of finding players way down there.  Kirk Penney played for him when he was an assistant at Wisconsin and later went on to a short NBA career; at Washington State, he brought in a player named Aron Baynes, who put up 12.7 ppg/7.5 rpg as a senior, and then took the long way to the NBA, where he appeared with the Spurs just this past season.

As we discussed with Isaiah Wilkins, there won't be much need for a freshman big in the rotation in 2014-15.  You'll have Tobey, Gill, and Atkins playing major, major minutes.  Wilkins might get a few minutes here and there; Salt may just redshirt.  Even in his sophomore (or redshirt freshman) season, Tobey will be a senior and probably a major workhorse if things develop right, but that'll at least be when Salt starts to show up in the mix.  Make no mistake, Bennett's rolling the dice a little on an investment in the long term, but he found a gem for Wazzu in Baynes, so he knew what he was doing when he shut the door on Geben.

Which, by the way, brings us to one final point: I'd been noting, in profile posts of recent years, that Tony appeared to be going over future scholarship limits, and the gurus dealt with this by telling people "the numbers will work themselves out."  But here, the signs point to Tony being done with 2014 if he gets good news from Robert Johnson (or if not, and he goes after a consolation prize in someone like Jalen Hudson) - otherwise he wouldn't have shut down the pursuit of Geben.  One more player will fill up the limit for 2014-15, and one more player is all it looks like Tony will take.  I take this as a sign that Tony is no longer getting I-might-transfer vibes from his players.  That can only be good news.

the recruit: Isaiah Wilkins

Name: Isaiah Wilkins
Position: PF
Hometown: Atlanta, GA (area)
School: Greater Atlanta Christian
Height: 6'8"
Weight: 200

24/7: 88, three stars; #38 SF, GA #12, US #176
ESPN: 69, two stars; #63 SF, GA #17, SE #95
Rivals: three stars; US #107
Scout: three stars

Other offers: Florida State, Miami, Clemson, VCU, Memphis, Wichita State, Mississippi State, Auburn, SMU, Charlotte, Richmond, Murray State, assorted other mid-majors

A little apprehension about the state of UVA's 2014 recruiting class is understandable; typically you see more than one commit before football season.  And in UVA's case that commit was a semi-slam dunk that came two years ago.  (Wow.)  Tony Bennett has some lines in the water, but he's also fighting some of the big boys and that tends to slow down the decision process.

So Isaiah Wilkins's commitment last week came as a little bit of a relief.  Wilkins probably popped up on UVA's radar while watching Malcolm Brogdon play at GAC; Wilkins would have been a freshman during Brogdon's senior year.  (By which time he'd already committed to UVA, yes, but it's not like they would've ignored him til signing day.)

It's totally understandable, too, if the first thing that pops to mind is "a 200-pound power forward?"  Wilkins is listed even skinnier than that in some places; as low as 185 by ESPN, which could help explain their outlier ranking.  Admittedly, Wilkins will probably never develop into a pure post banger a la Travis Watson, or Mike Scott before he developed his devastating mid-range game.  Wilkins also doesn't have the range or ball skills for the three.

However, he's otherwise a well-rounded player.  Wilkins isn't a prodigious scorer, but he does get his share of buckets.  He averaged 16 points in his junior season, which is nothing to turn your head in a high school basketball prospect.  However, he puts up good, power-forward-like numbers everywhere else: 11 rebounds a game, and nearly 5 blocks as well.  Quality numbers.

Wilkins has one other skill that's decidedly non-power-forward-like: he's a very good passer.  His 2.7 assists per game are evidence, and Rivals stated this summer that "There just aren't many forwards in the entire country that see the floor and pass the way Wilkins can."  Plus, he does have that mid-range game that can create floor-stretching matchup issues for opposing defenses.  It's not totally refined, and Wilkins himself has stated he'd like to improve his finishing.  But it's not a common skill, either.

Combine this with a 7-foot wingspan and you get a Swiss Army knife of a player.  Wilkins, naturally, has the work ethic and attitude that Tony Bennett always wants - he never takes a chance on anyone that he thinks will be a sulky locker-room issue - and comes from a state-champion program which will try to defend that title in his upcoming senior year.  He's not a major candidate for early starters' minutes as a freshman; Darion Atkins will still be around, and Anthony Gill as well, for two years.  If Wilkins develops into a starter (which is going to require extensive time in the weight room) it'll be as a junior, most likely, and it's possible he could be recruited over, too.  I do consider it a little bit of a negative that the two major instate programs, UGA and GT, didn't offer, though a large number of southern schools did.  But his sophomore year ought to see him start to carve his niche in the rotation, and truth is, there are so many players in the graduating class of 2016 (six, to be precise) that by the time Wilkins is a junior, there really won't be that many upperclassmen on the team.  If he's one of them (I hate to say "if" but transfer attrition these days, throughout college basketball really, is at absurd levels) then he'll probably be a vital piece as a junior and senior, even if he's still coming off the bench.

the recruit: Donta Wilkins

Name: Donta Wilkins
Position: DT
Hometown: Dumfries
School: Potomac
Height: 6'3"
Weight: 315

24/7: 90, four stars; #24 DT, VA #15
ESPN: 74, three stars; #71 OG, VA #32, Atl. #132
Rivals: 5.5, three stars; VA #25
Scout: three stars; #60 DT

Other offers: Virginia Tech, Penn State, Miami, NC State, North Carolina, Boston College, Mississippi State, Maryland

How would it sound to have a little beef on the defensive line?  Right now the only 300-pounder in the rotation is Justin Renfrow, who for now is seeing his time gradually dwindle in favor of Chris Brathwaite.  The guys we have now are perfectly good players, but perfectly good players with 20 or 30 extra pounds each would also be nice, and that's what we'll get in pairs with Wilkins and Tyrell Chavis.

The various recruiting sites don't agree exactly on Wilkins's weight (they never do) but there's one thing they do agree on: he's 300 pounds, easy.  That size is likely a big part of the reason why so many ACC schools went after Wilkins despite a general consensus among the recruiting sites of a lowish three-star rating.  Wilkins carries that weight well and there's little doubt in my mind he'll end up with a playing weight in the same general range.  He's got the thickness, and, despite a good height of 6'3", looks to have a low center of gravity that'll make him damn hard to move off the line once he converts some fat to muscle.

Wilkins committed in June at the front end of a one-week commit-apalooza, shortly following a visit to Charlottesville during which it was widely thought he wouldn't.  Now, is that commitment solid?  Yes; I don't think Wilkins will change his mind, but the question is fair - Wilkins maintained even at the time of his verbal that he'd take official visits to UNC, PSU, and Michigan State and hasn't changed his mind three and a half months later, although for reasons which are easy to guess, he's replaced PSU with Miami.  (I suspect, by the way, that the Mississippi State offer listed by most of the sites is actually that Michigan State offer - "MSU" has a way of getting lost in translation at times.)  Whether these visits take place remains to be seen; London sometimes has a way of dissuading them.

Right now, UVA has a nice little conveyor belt setup at DT, which is a good situation.  Will Hill graduates this year, Renfrow and Brent Urban next year, Brathwaite the year after that.  As they move on, guys like David Dean and Vincent Croce will start to take over.  There's enough talent here that Wilkins can take a couple years, much like Dean and Croce are doing, to get himself conditioned and ready.  But the nice thing about DT is that it requires a lot of bodies, so Wilkins can play right when he's ready, but no sooner.  Between he and Chavis, Wilkins projects a little closer to three-tech than Chavis does, but both could play nose tackle.  And no, despite ESPN's scouting report claiming Wilkins would make a better offensive guard than defensive tackle (they're very lukewarm on Wilkins, which based on his offer list I don't agree with), I don't see him getting moved to that side.  If that were the plan, the coaches wouldn't be casually chasing a few other offensive linemen to join the class.