🏀 2025-26 In-Season UVa Basketball Thread

Oh, don’t get me wrong. If my choices are Michigan, Arizona, or UConn I’ll absolutely take UConn. I watched Michigan play at Purdue last night. They look borderline unbeatable right now. If it’s Michigan vs. the field to cut down the nets, I might take Michigan right now.

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We will see how Michigan does vs. Duke. Agree they are well above us right now but i think Duke has the goods this year. I hope I am wrong.

I think you are wrong but I havent watched much of either

I think Michigan is impossible to beat

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They start 6’9”, 6’9”, and 7’3” on their front line, and one of the 6’9” guys was picking up Brayden Smith full court. They demolished Purdue on the glass.

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With today’s win, Virginia has officially clinched a first round bye in the ACC Tournament.

Fun fact - since the ACC Tournament expanded to five days in 2014, Virginia is the only school to have never played on opening day.

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I guess I should clarify that this fact excludes the teams that joined the conference just last year

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According to the media mock bracket thingy, Virginia is currently a four seed.

https://twitter.com/mattnorlander/status/2024598453007905061?s=46&t=vkjgQUekzGC7z44tIfnIRQ

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I’m so freaking tired of Gonzaga. They can underperform in OOC, have by far the worst loss of any 8 seed or better, and still be given a 3-4 seed because they get to beat Georgia Tech caliber teams by 20-30 15 times a year.

Edited: they didn’t underperform in OOC, rather their OOC was not as tough as anticipated.

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Feels like we will be the last 4, or first 5. Right on the edge.

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I think a top 3 seed is significantly more in play than this board seems to believe. UVA is currently 16th in WAB and about 0.5 wins behind #12. Vandy dropped to 17th after last night’s loss and Toppin’s injury likely knocks 15th TTU out of contention for a top 4 seed, so UVA should really only need to jump 3 teams.

If (and I know it’s a big if) UVa wins all the games it should then I think they will be a 3 seed. All remaining games for UVA should be Q2 or better and some of the teams ahead of UVA will take some losses worse than Duke x2.

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The problem we have is that we have like 2.5 WAB max to gain the rest of the season (and can lose more) and teams in the big 12, SEC and B1G have like double that. And Duke is like 40% of that upside.

If we beat Duke or make the ACCT Final, yeah lots of room for advancement, but just not a ton of meat on the bone for us in the remaining regular season.

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I’m not sure the computer rankings were as much a factor, but I seem to remember UVa fans thinking we were a 3 or 4 seed about this time in 2013-14, and we ended up a 1. Not saying it’ll happen but you never know if we’ll stay hot.

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If UVA wins out theyre likely a 2. 2014 didnt have anywhere near the strength at the top

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Yea I think it was a lot easier to make a move in RPI than it is now with seven distinct metrics factoring in

It has to be more than that. @ Duke must be like 0.9+ and Duke on a neutral court is probably ~0.8.

There’s probably more than 1 available between the ACC QF + SF, and then probably a bit over 1 from the four remaining non-Duke regular season games.

Total for the season so far is 5.2 so adding 2 would be pretty significant.

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I was exaggerating the gap between us and other teams, but Torvik (slightly different formula) has remaining WAB available to us at 2.31 with .91 (39%) of that being Duke. Vanderbilt right behind us has 2.95. Arkansas behind them has 2.66.

But theirs are a little less concentrated and they’ll likely get better opportunities in their tournaments.

Agreed they’re more likely to pick up a loss down the stretch though, but that just keeps us at a 4 seed, hopping another seed line will take a lot more than holding serve against them.

We can probably hop TTU and Gonzaga, but cracking the top 12 is pretty tough. MSU is currently at 12 with a half WAB lead over us and 3.14 still available to them (their WAB is pretty concentrated with Michigan like ours is with Duke though). If you knock out our Duke and their Michigan opportunities, they still have like a full WAB worth of opportunity to open up even further on us plus a half WAB lead already in case they slip up plus a decent gap on us in other metrics.

This stuff all gives me a headache and I’m far from a bracketologist, but I’d bet on us being a 4 seed unless we beat Duke or make the ACCT final.

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I assume none of this is counting conference tournaments. Some of these teams are likely to play each other in the semis or quarters.

Also having lots of WAB available means difficult games and probably some losses. Alabama, Arkansas, Vandy, and MSU probably have 2 losses each remaining in the regular season.

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Correct, no conference tournaments factored in.

But we’re looking at getting UNC or Louisville in our first tournament game. Both of those are very loseable for us too, so I wouldn’t bank on too much of a conference tournament bump as a certainty for us.

(Fingers crossed it’s UNC, I don’t want to see healthy Mikel Brown. But Wilson could be back healthy by then too.)

I’m also not sure we won’t split the NC state and Miami games. Which with Duke means we’re also looking at 2 more likely losses in the regular season. And Miami and NC State at home for us would probably be more punitive than the losses these other teams would take.

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Now that they’ve proven they can win a lot in March, they get the benefit of the doubt every season. The really good seed certainly helps the winning in the tournament. I think it’ll take a couple early tournament losses for them to be handled differently

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