2020-21 College Basketball thread

I liked Tony Bennett at Wazzu, he brought the Cougs back from the dead. I like him at Virginia. But does any good-to-great coach have as many bad losses as he does?

 

Preston didn’t even play well. If he had, Ohio beats UVA by double-digits.

 

Ohio may have also been underseeded. They wiped out the MAC Tournament by 22, 7 (vs. top seed) and 15 (vs. 2 seed Buffalo in the final).

But I picked 'em.

 

I have thoughts:

UVa won a fucking national championship. They’re coming off a COVID pause and the opponent had the best player on the floor. If you think Tony Bennett is somehow flawed as a coach, I don’t know what to tell you. And I’m a grad of UVA’s biggest rival.

The VCU thing just gutted me and has almost ruined the entire tournament for me. Also, I really fucking hope Roger Ayers is OK because he’s a super good dude and fuck this stupid fucking virus.

 

The pieces didn’t fit together on this UVA team. They had finesse shooters at 3-4-5 and the most misfit backcourt imaginable - the highest-usage guy is probably 5-7 and the only guy who could shoot even a little was basically useless at everything else. It’s the first Bennett team I can remember that wound up being less than the sum of its parts.

A weird roster made weirder by the circumstances everyone finds themselves in.

 

Virginia is this generation's Syracuse. They play a strict style that drives conference rivals batty, but it also leaves them susceptible to being on the business end of a mid- or low-major's first-round haymaker. Given that 'Cuse went to five Final Fours and won a title with the 2-3 matchup zone and UVa won it all with the pack-line defense, the 'Hoos are doing just fine.

My brother is a VCU alum who was a COVID-19 long-hauler before he finally had negative tests recently. Considering how much he's been through, I was stunned with how gutted he was over tonight's news ... but maybe after his ordeal, seeing his school's season torpedoed by it hit a nerve I can't fathom.

 

Oh, and no fucking way were they staying within 25 points of Gonzaga had they gotten there. The loss sucks, but I’m finding it easy to move on.

 

Put differently: ugly, effective basketball that has championship potential when played by NBA talent.

 

Having good perspective on your team is never a bad thing. The ceiling for Virginia Tech was winning one game. I’m happy the Hokies played Florida tough but I had zero expectations of them getting to the second weekend.

Also, I hope Florida fans don’t think tomorrow is a gimme. You take the seeds away and just watch that game yesterday and Ohio State was lucky to be in that game. Oral Roberts was the better team by far.

 

The champions of the FCC run an eight-second delay offense and aren't afraid to air it out, although they rely too heavily on the right wing and are terrible when it comes to equal time.

 

Maybe not. But he's got the best eight-year run of any ACC team not named Duke or UNC in the league's history. No ACC program other than those blue bloods has had the combo of regular-season winning percentage, league tourney titles and NCA championship that Virginia has enjoyed. NC State fans will find this implausible, but if they take the time to look it up, they'll see it's true.
On its face, his system should never work. It never, ever gets easy baskets because it doesn't press, doesn't run and doesn't go to the offensive glass. It should never be able to recruit anybody with NBA talent. Yet several Bennett alumni are playing well in the league.
It can result in losses to double-digit seeds and the resulting contempt from Twitterati. But to think that Virginia has been in the national conversation since 2014 is amazing to those of us who are familiar with the program's history.
March creates heroes and goats, the designations disproportionately crafted by one great game or one bad one. It's the only sport that plays more than 20 games a year and is defined by one-and-done tournament results.
So while TruTV or whatever the fuck spent two hours desperately pining for the upset that it got, I ask more than 300 Division I programs: What's in your trophy case?

 

I was looking forward to turning off the basketball and enjoying a good SNL rerun but the possibility of both Ohio State and Texas faceplanting in the first round of the same tournament was just too much to pass up.