I’ll easily take the ACC regular season championship and first-round loss. Pitt’s season was better in only one way: they beat Iowa State. Okay, yawn.
But: I’m sympathetic to the notion that it’s psychologically easier to root for a middling team that sometimes makes the tournament only to lose in the first round as a 10-to-12 seed. (That’s about 30 years of my UVA fandom right there.) There’s no expectations, no pressure, it’s all upside. The last 10 years of Virginia basketball we’ve been WAY better than that… but high expectations bring high stress and the chance for humiliating losses.
We beat Wake on the road by 9 on Jan. 21 — Wake’s first ACC loss at home in more than a year. Then destroyed BC and took care of Cuse in the dome on Jan 30. Slipped up for VPI’s Super Bowl, but crushed NC State the next game and did enough to beat a talented Duke squad at home on Feb. 11.
That’s when the struggles to put anyone away started — the last minutes of the Duke game when one or two made FTs ends the game in regulation. But we didn’t make it easy and something changed — they got tight, and shots stopped falling.
I think you can argue we were still decent past that january 16th date. I dont think anyone Looked at UVA post Las Vegas and thought “This team could win the national title.”. Of course many had though as much as well (we were called arm chair generals for pointing out our pgs have no floater game or heavy 3pt shooting/dynamic aspect noted in march madness guards and that we lacked defensive versatility and athleticism on top of our 3pt shooting trending downards) regardless of the win accomplishments.
Eh. You know who was an utterly fearless dawg all season, a guy whose confidence never wavered and was always fearlessly willing to take the big shot when the game was on the line?
Caleb Love
You live by the dawg, you die by the dawg. We hate it when we turn the ball over because people keep deferring to each other or we only get off a desperation heave at a key moment. But in terms of overall performance, having a dawg who isn’t one of your most efficient offensive players probably costs you more games during a season.
The only people on Feb 1 who thought we weren’t contenders were anonymous posters on our boards. National pundits said any one of about 15 teams could win it, UVa included.
Neither proves you— or them — right.
It would have been nice to play the tournament with our full rotation.
VPI and State (first two Feb games) were really sticking to Franklin and McKneely and not giving them any room, and you saw Franklin in particular curl into the lane on the catch. Beekman and Clark were going into the lane more too.
Perhaps the physicality wore on them and took a toll on their legs?
Seems by the Louisville and Notre Dame games we had made slight adjustments to free up shooters, but they weren’t hitting — anything. And that affected the offensive sets; like in 2021, it’s hard to run the middle triangle without the guys planted in the corners hitting from outside, and the 4-out and 5-out sets seemed stagnant, but at least allowed angles for penetration.
