The mask excuse also doesn’t work because Phog Allen fieldhouse is packed and they are all for the most part masked (two phog allen references today; it’s such the ideal college basketball environment)
UVA has a ton of die hard fans as we see on the sports forums here with y’all and elsewhere and twitter but also has a huge portion of the base which is pretty apathetic to sports in general/fair weathery.
Again, along with JPJ’s set up. (always thought it was weird. Students on court level pls)
I’ve been to tons of games at JPJ that were louder than the only UVA-VT game I’ve seen at Cassel. This is such a weird take based on the broadcast from one night
Lets also not forget what has happened to our home arena and the fan attendance. Has a lot to do with required vaccination and other Covid related arena mandates.
My opinion is some are underselling the atmosphere at JPJ at its best, but I agree that it’s not a great atmosphere when the team isn’t great.
Interesting conversation going on here. This is still the same team that beat Duke. VT had a good game plan on the defensive side. They simply took away the mid range game of Franklin and Gardner. The refs assisted by allowing VT’s players to hold/ grab Franklin around every screen. They crowded the paint and simply made UVA try and beat them with an outside shot and well we all now how that usually works out for us. This team still has plenty to play for and I believe we are still in for some surprises.
Part of why we beat Duke was their horrendous defensive planning. I think there was a breakdown by someone on twitter showing that whomever was guarding Kadin, for example, was respecting him all the way out to the 3pt line instead of sagging and helping clog the paint which let us attack the rim more effectively. Kadin has shot one 3 this year and it was a bad miss (of course he is capable from HS film and his smooth jumpers). Why is that part of your defensive gameplan? lol. It reminds me of 2019-2020 when we played FSU both times. Neither Casey nor Kihei were notorious 3pt threats and yet they were still playing pressure defense out of habit, which let us attack the rim with ease driving those closeouts despite their athletes. Also their zone defense was horrible. Coach K has just been a horrible/lazy defensive coach (and arguably coach in general) the last few seasons. He has the experience and intellect to make adjustments but his players just don’t have those systemic fundamentals you need to play as a group of 5 on defense.
I haven’t rewatched the game but it really did seem like Franklin was getting grabbed a lot off the ball. I’m also very biased so I would need a more relaxed rewatch to confirm.
I think there’s some correlation between die hard fans and raucousness, but not that much. I haven’t been a raucous fan for any sport since my mid-20s or so (and I’m pretty far removed from that), with some exceptions (mostly relating to arenas serving hard liquor). I live in NYC and haven’t been inside JPJ since the 2016 Blue White game. I try to go to the tristate hoops games, but I mostly wear a collared shirt and crack jokes with my buddies/fam.
Compare that to those Texas Tech fans when Beard came back to town. Most of them can date their fandom back about 3 years or so, and I suspect they mostly don’t live and die with that hoops team, but when Beard was there? Pretty darn raucous.
Part of K’s post game comments talked about the short turnaround after the UNC game. He made 2 points about this, that it was an emotional victory and they hand them had time to recover, which most people dismissed as silly. The other part was that the coaches didn’t have enough time to put in a gameplan and get defensive reps in it. Which I sort of buy. Youngish team where most of the main contributors have never played us before and those that did played against the frontcourt 3 point shooters version last year. We had the same excuse, but I think Duke plays a standard enough offense that we don’t tweak our base defense as much game to game.
Talent alone wasn’t enough for Duke to beat us. This is why I’m not optimistic about next week’s game.
I buy it. Duke seems to have installed a special defense for us in the past, and they didn’t in this game. I also think K might have gambled that they didn’t need to do it this year.
I also think K, at this point, says “ok we are switching everything Go!”. Was obvious watching Duke against us that they havent been drilled on this things (which take time to be good at anyway) and just blanket statements if “we didnt do it well” is kinda lame. They rely heavy heavy on their athleticism to cover up what I think is unrefined defense so as to not say lazy at times
Being said I thought his comments in press conference were very respectful of what UVa basketball has become (and was back in the day wink wink)
Back to the crowd stuff…
I attended the Wake game. A lot of empty seats but at one point Wake called a timeout after a UVA run and the PA had the crowd on their feet getting loud during the timeout.
As soon as play resumed (and the PA instructions ended) the entire arena sat back down in their seats. Unfathomable. Poor fan IQ? Is JPJ too comfortable?
I think it speaks to the nature of the fanbase. Even at it’s most raucous JPJ isn’t that’ type of ear splitting insanity you see. Some of that is due to the layout who sits where. JPJ is also modeled after the Cintas Center at XU and they have similar issues with layout. It’s also the overall inherent nature of the UVa fanbase, it’s quieter for better or worse. And we can blame mandates all we want, but that’s chasing ghost. This was an issue that reared it’s head in the 19/20 season but the team was still strong enough and riding the Nati wave to hold on to some semblance of daunting.
Now all that said, while I do believe a crowd can get into a players head, it takes a pretty extreme situation to create that. And even at it’s loudest JPJ is not what made the Hoo’s great 15–19. It’s also not the reason the team can’t throw a rock into the ocean on most nights. Last I checked no one in the crowd was responsible for rotating on a pick n roll.
But can they hard hedge to the halfcourt line!
Like Jay Huff as a first year.
I have to disagree with this notion that JPJ isn’t raucous. Fairweather? Sure I agree. But from 2014-2019 it was raucous for any games that were somewhat big and absolutely insane for the big UNC and Duke games (amongst others). If we had played yesterday’s game at JPJ, I’m confident we would’ve had our loudest game of the year. I don’t know how to compare noise levels since I’ve never been to Cassell, but I feel pretty confident in saying that it wasn’t louder than some of our bigger games from 2014-2019. That being said, it was an impressive atmosphere for a Monday night between a couple fringe bubble teams but it’s also been dead there in past games when VT was bad and we were top 10 level.
I rewatched the whole thing and charted. Franklin was clearly grabbed off ball on 3 possessions - 1 foul called and the other 2 not - but neither would have resulted in FT’s at the time. What I noticed is that he’s not very strong and they had our curls scouted to a tee - they were waiting for both wings to come to the outside of the pin downs - they literally weren’t staying between their man and the basket because they knew how robotic we run our offense, and not once did Clark or Franklin attempt a back door cut… Tech’s defenders were just waiting on the wings for our guards to come to them. And they did over and over.
UVA did not have a sub in the last 16 minutes of the game… sheesh.
@HGN has mentioned Franklin’s quiet improvement as the conference season progressed - the Duke and GT wins have masked the fact that over the past 3 games, Armaan is 10-34 from the field (29.4% - 9-20 from 2PT (45%)), 1-14 from 3 (7.1%), 4-9 (44.4%) from the FT line and has 6 assists to 5 TOs. During that stretch, as a team Virginia is 6-39 from 3PT (5-25 excluding Franklin’s 3PTA), a whopping 15.4%.
That’s a huge sucking wound for the team, especially when AF should reliably be our #2 scorer. The two Ws covered it up, but he has been really, really bad the past 3 games. I know, plenty of blame to go around yesterday, but this is why I believe Isaac M gets more run next year than many may forecast.
