Ugo is a great object lesson in the importance of finding the right fit, the right style of play, the right coachā¦ and not ONLY the biggest paycheck. I think most players completely get this, but I also wonder how well their agents advise them.
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Iād love some agent-focused regulationā¦these college-only agents that are taking double digit percentage cuts on revenue sharing can GTFOH, as mentioned more politely here: Know Your Percentages for NIL deals
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This is what Odom should be trying to do with our 2 bigs every possession
https://x.com/NIKNBAYT/status/2033724271298589172
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Moving Boozer out top was a great move by Scheyer. Probably the difference in the game.
I havenāt went back and watched it, but it seemed like somewhere between the 5 and 8 minute mark of the second half, UVA really had Duke on their heels and could have pulled away if they had just drained some open 3s. Seems like we missed 4 or 5 where we had really good looks.
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Slightly surprised
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The football game was up against IU/tOSU. Probably still a bit surprising
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We are still a basketball school. One semi-good year in football does not erase who we are. If football had won that game against Duke to get into the CFP, with a massively favorable schedule, it would have been a huge momentum builder for the program. But we STB and it sucked. We are, and will always be, a basketball school. But football was fun this year. We just ruined it at the end.
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Iām referring to national viewership not UVA fan sentiment. Kinda figured any football conference title would beat out any basketball conference title. Obviously the football number is suppressed by being up against OSU-Indiana but Big 12 football did 6 million more, Big Ten football did 13 million more, SEC football did 13 million more. Also helps this was apparently the 2nd most views ACC basketball title game ever
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Most of us know that Ralph holds all the UVA records for blocks. He held the top 4 season records until Ugo moved into 4th this year with 101 (current). Ralph had two years at 103. But the crazy stat is his freshman year when he had 157. Thatās insane.
Well, I just looked at a minutes comparison - if Ugo had played as many minutes as Ralph did his freshman year, he would have 163 blocks. Thatās fucking nuts. And Ugo is second in the country this year in blocks, but at 10 min/game less than the #1 guy. If you normalize minutes, nobody comes anywhere close to Ugo. What a season.
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Who has that chart handy of UVA block leaders per season? I know people have shared it recently because I saw Ugo in the 4th spot the other day. But not finding it now
I think Duke basketball outweighs Duke and UVA football, plus basketball was the only game on
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ACC basketball has much more of a following than ACC football.
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I realize this is a way way preemptive 2026-27 question. But is there some place where someone has begun to assemble UVA opponents for next year?
At Maryland
That NIL thing in Vegas
ACC-SEC challenge
ā¦
I think most of the OOC scheduling is done over the summer, so itāll be a while.
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Ugh that Maryland game sucks. Might not even be a Q1 game.
Has anyone heard anything about the Vegas tournament? There was some talk of teams not getting paid this year, the event blamed on the NCAA, but no matter whose fault it is if the money stops flowing I imagine that event could collapse. I assume they figured something out or otherwise there would be an update?
I havenāt heard anything, but it was terrible timing to start a new tournament. Was all the rage a few years ago but these days players who arenāt in the NCAAT want to get on with their portaling and whatnot.
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Hollinger likes him some Ugo:
Ugonna Onyenso, 6-11 C, Virginia
Oh, like I wasnāt gonna mention him, after he repeatedly stuffed Dukeās star Cam Boozer in the ACC championship game on Saturday. Onyenso blocked nine shots in 22 minutes in Virginiaās defeat, capping off a week in Charlotte where he swatted away 21 attempts in 79 minutes. In the semifinal game against Miami, he also shot 7 of 7 on 2s and made a 3-pointer.
Onyensoās story is so interesting because he hardly played for Kentucky and Kansas State for three seasons before posting a 17.7 percent block rate ā yes, really ā with my Wahoos this year. He does this with a relatively low foul rate of 4.2 personals per 100 possessions.
What might keep him from getting drafted is ā¦ everything else. Onyenso is a limited offensive player, although heās been more effective as a rim runner this year and added a nascent 3-point shot (10-of-35) and has always been a decent foul shooter. He also has a thin frame that bigger NBA centers can push around.
Can shot-blocking alone keep him in the draft? I would have said no before last weekās fly-swatting exhibition, but now Iām starting to wonder. Heāll get another great test if Virginia draws a second-round matchup with Tennessee, a big, physical team that likes to play in the paint.
Article is a good read overall because itās making the point that I think the general fan hasnāt fully internalized, which is that you will not see underclassmen staying in the draft without a first-round grade.
As our draft expert Sam Vecenie has already noted on about 25 different occasions, the rise of NIL dollars has made the decision of any player ranked outside the top 20 on draft boards to return to school a relatively easy one. They can likely make more money staying in college than they could on a late-first-round or second-round pickās salary in the NBA, and might improve their draft stock at the same time.
This also has implications for those whose job it is to model the draft on the team side. If youāre just looking at historical comps, youāll quickly see that most fifth-year seniors have turned out to be awful pros, or at the very least underperformed their draft slot.
That premise, however, does not carry forward to the present era for a very simple reason: It is based on pre-NIL logic. In the past, seniors graded out so poorly in part because of a phenomenon called sample-selection bias. Put simply: If they were any good as prospects, they probably would have left for the pros sooner, because financially, there wasnāt a great reason to stay. The mere fact that they showed up on campus for their senior year was a red flag.
All that has changed in the last few years, to the point that scouts and execs expect most underclassmen rated outside the top 20 to return to school.
All those players eventually become seniors and, unlike their four-year collegian predecessors, a lot of them are enticing pro prospects. One-and-dones will always be the lifeblood of the lottery, and thatās likely to be the case again this year, but the final 30 to 40 picks could be a parade of seniors ā¦ and theyāre likely to be much better pro prospects than the seniors of years past.
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Anybody? The search feature on here isnāt much help, nor is Google. I saw it just the other day, shouldāve saved it