Unless I’m mistaking @Raleigh_Hoo for someone else, he’s a legit bracket matrix bracketologist, (maybe one of the better scoring ones?) so very worth paying attention to for this stuff…
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Oh I have that concern too, also speaking as someone who’s never gone through that injury and is by no means a medical expert. One thing that gives me slight hope is that freaky athletic guys have come back from ACL injuries and been even better than before (Adrian Peterson comes to mind) and it very much seems like Gertrude is someone in the freaky athlete mold. But there’s always the risk of him coming back and not quite ever being comfortable jumping off or landing with that leg for fear of re-aggravating the injury.
But I’m mostly bummed about the timeline, I think he was really starting to have his game catch up to his athleticism and now that process is delayed by about a year depending on how recovery goes. I trust nobody in the country more than Mike Curtis to get him fully healthy and back up to game speed, but readjusting his skill set from HS to the college game without that final year of development will take time and plenty of patience. If he’s able to give us quality minutes coming off the bench as a RS Freshman (assuming he redshirts) I’ll consider that a massive win.
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Didn’t know/remember that about AP, that’s encouraging.
Keep in mind that AP in his prime was a superhuman who was apparently ahead of his 9 month recovery schedule one week after his surgery. But he did come back and rush for 2,000 yards the season following his ACL tear, so it’s not impossible.
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JK Dobbins has come back averaging 5.7 yards per carry for the Ravens after his ACL tear (and he had a setback earlier in the season).
He averaged 6.0 yards per carry before the injury (but that was with a healthy Lamar Jackson, who hasn’t played with Dobbins the past four games, allowing defenses to put 8 or 9 in the box).
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Damn, impressive. (I would’ve been bringing the average down)
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Not UVA related but that Shaedon Simpson post grad kid i keep spamming about tore his ACL and after recovery he still has a 41 inch vertical and some serious bounce
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I keep seeing people saying that having Bond, Traudt, and Gertrude available will make the team better. Obviously having Bond and Traudt redshirt allows them to learn the system better, but I think it’s unfair to all of them to expect anything more than maybe 20ppg, 10rpg, and acceptable defense between the three of them. We haven’t seen any of them play, and until we do I’m going to temper my expectations for next year, which I unfortunately think is another rebuilding year.
And that was the whole point of some of us being disappointed that those two are red shirt instead of gaining valuable experience this year
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But who knows maybe redshirting makes them better than if they would’ve played
That’s totally fair. That’s why it is so critical we have 4th year Reece. Need his experience at the point while we break in so many new pieces. And, say what you will about the Dante Harris pickup, but I’m glad he’s going to be with the team and practicing earlier than if he had been a summer pickup.
Maybe next year’s team won’t have the floor of this one but I reckon a lot of us will enjoy watching that team come into its own a lot more than we’ve enjoyed watching this team
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I think that’s reasonable in terms of expecting them to operate in the system.
I think Traudt has shown more pure shooting touch and Leon offers much more athleticism and defensive versatility individually at the 3 spot, from the italy games and the scrimmages.
When I saw Traudt shoot I saw a Guy, Harris, Hauser level shooter Where when he shot it it felt like it was going in. I dont get that feeling with BVP even when he is hot shooting it. The argument for BVP would be veteran experience (although he is also a newbie in UVA language so to speak).
Bond probably won’t have the offensive game of Jayden or DeAndre Hunter in his first few years (he’s somwhere between there) but I think just with his wingspan, athleticism, and having that year in the redshirt season he can give us that akil/Wilkins impact with more athleticism and a higher long term ceiling
I think their immediate individual impacts will be strongly felt, especially with how Tony was talking about how Traudt could contribute this year and how he sounded a little disappointed about the decision to redshirt on Traudt’s end.
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We shouldn’t forget that Traudt and Bond are not redshirting for the year. They were only redshirting for the month, and I’m sure we’ll get a full progress report very soon.
Slightly less snarky: Even if you’re pro redshirt in the abstract (shocker: I’m not), I don’t think redshirting two of our four top 100-ish guys was necessarily such a great idea, but the higher the ceiling of this team, the less you’d worry about the tradeoff. I think after our recent stretch, the tradeoff starts to become more of a question. Earlier, it looked like less of a question. We shall see how we feel about it in a couple of months.
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Unfortunately, due to cost overrides and the higher interest rate environment, we will have to push the timetable a few more months on this redshirt deliverable.
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Yeah, we will need some portal help for sure.
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Oh I completely agree, I think I’m against the boards opinion on who should have redshirted though. Traudt to me makes the most sense for the redshirt, because the 4 is crowded with the addition of BVP and especially since it’s unknown whether he could have played at the 5 and spelled Skedrick/Caffaro. Bond is the real head scratcher to me. He has the athleticism that this team so desperately needs, so I’m guessing the staff saw something that he really needed to work on.
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I both agree with this, and worry about it. We need the portal because we can’t rely on Bond/Traudt because we don’t know what we have because we took a guy from the portal who made them less necessary. You can kind of see the beginnings of a cycle that might not be great for us, especially if you subscribe to my theory that UVa should be focused more on frosh recruiting than portal recruiting, because it seems to be our comparative strength (in the NIL/no-sit-out era).
But also, as someone said above or elsewhere, the biggest swing factor is whether we have 4th year Reece or not. He’s the most important recruit.
Ok, one more thing – when we take guys as transfers, we seem to really really like guys who played a lot as true freshmen – basically everyone except BVP, who RS’ed (starting with AG, and ending with Armaan and Jayden). So it’s not as if Tony is someone who thinks that early PT isn’t a good thing – his actions w/r/t the portal suggest the exact opposite!
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Look on the bright side: if traudt and bond weren’t redshirting (and apparently bought into the idea), then a huge chunk of the ~8 min/game they would get between them would be coming out of Dunn’s ~12 minutes and you’d be sitting here worried about all three of them transferring.
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True - it’s my best skill
This is the thing. Not enough minutes for 1-2 guys NOT to redshirt
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