A predictable thing happened the other night. The Virginia Cavaliers, the winningest program in the country’s strongest college basketball conference over the last five years, won the college basketball national championship. It was a logical outcome, honestly.
It was also the most batshit thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Honestly.
[READ ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON TIMES]
The football team at the University of Virginia is reeling from a third consecutive losing season. The men’s basketball team is coping with a gut-wrenching defeat that kept it out of the NCAA tournament for the fourth straight year. Scott Stadium is losing fans by the thousands. And perhaps scariest of all, many Virginia fans are running out of patience.
Yet Virginia’s athletics program is thriving more than ever before. The Cavaliers closed the 2010-11 academic year with a seventh-place finish in the Learfield Sports Directors’ Cup, which measures the broad-based success of 279 Division I athletic programs. It marked the school’s third consecutive top-10 finish and second-best result ever, trailing only the previous year’s third-place finish.
The achievements behind that recognition are impressive: a men’s lacrosse national championship, a fourth consecutive team indoor championship in men’s tennis, a College World Series appearance by the baseball team, five ACC titles, and individual NCAA titles in track and swimming.
For die-hards in Charlottesville, though, the Directors’ Cup finish conceals a major blemish. Out of the top 25 schools in the 2010-11 Directors’ Cup standings, Virginia is the only one that failed to make a postseason appearance in football or men’s basketball.
Olympic sports accomplishments are important, but a Division I athletic program cannot truly gain national prominence without success in the two arenas that, in Virginia’s case, generate nearly seven times more revenue than all other sports combined on a yearly basis. With new coaches, impeccable facilities and a student body hungry for something to cheer about, can Virginia restore glory to its football and men’s basketball teams?
Continue reading UVa football, men’s hoops teams struggle while other sports thrive
[READ COLUMN IN THE CAVALIER DAILY]
In the world of sports, some things just aren’t supposed to happen.
Lionel Messi is not supposed to miss an open shot on goal. Teams from Cleveland are not supposed to hoist trophies. Virginia Tech is not supposed to make the NCAA Tournament. And basketball players are not supposed to morph into arthritic invertebrates upon touching a ball in the waning seconds of a game.
Virginia’s late-game collapse against Miami on Thursday was no mere choke job; it was a meltdown of epic proportions. It was the stuff of legends. Down by 10 with 40 seconds to play? That would require a comeback beyond the capacity of the Chicago Bulls playing against Charlottesville High’s JV squad.
But somehow, some way, it was not out of the question for a Miami team that seemed to have completely forgotten how to put the ball in the basket. The ice cold ‘Canes missed 17 of their first 19 shots in the second half and had accumulated only 12 points in 19 minutes of play.
Then they scored 10 points in a span of 24 seconds.
Even Jerry Ratcliffe, a reporter for The Daily Progress who has been covering Virginia basketball for decades, admitted he had never seen anything like it. Continue reading Absurdity is reality for Virginia basketball
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DURHAM, N.C. – About 45 minutes prior to Saturday’s tip-off against Duke, I was doubled over on the side of the highway, ceaselessly puking out what appeared to be the remnants of several vital organs.
If you hadn’t seen what I had so desperately consumed an hour earlier at Subway — some pre-cooked egg whites slapped between a pair of time-worn, brick-hard bread imitators — you might have guessed I was just unreasonably nervous about the daunting task lying before my school’s youthful basketball team.
The Cavaliers had to face Duke that day. Not the Duke of the Greg Paulus/Josh McRoberts variety, mind you, but the one with guys like Kyle Singler and Nolan Smith taking the court. This Duke team was ranked No. 1 in the country. Even worse, this Duke team — along with all its self-righteous fans who view winning as their special right rather than a happy outcome — was pretty angry. Following a bitter road loss to unranked Florida State, the Blue Devils were ready to unleash their anger before thousands of blue-and-white-painted crazies on their home court, where they had won their last 29 games.
Indeed, beating Duke Saturday would be about as easy as convincing Dickie V that Coach K is a mere mortal. Continue reading Lessons from Cameron Indoor
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Everything was going great. Thousands of white-clad fans yelled happily at their beloved Cavaliers, who were zipping from one end of the field to the other with the ease of fleet-footed cheetahs bounding across the African savannah. Players in navy and orange high-fived each other left and right, reveling in their God-given athletic talents on display against a displaced band of Floridian football players. Under the gentle glare of the October sun, the Cavaliers’ confidence was sky high.
Then the game started.
The Seminoles stormed into Scott Stadium and unleashed a ruthless assault on the ill-prepared Cavaliers, whose shell-shocked fans promptly fled for the exits as their team discovered the searing brutality of a unit spurred by desire and self-belief. On this Saturday, the grass between the goal posts ceased being a football field and welcomed its new identity as a bloodbath. Warriors in golden helmets tore through their enemy’s gossamer lines of defense like cannon balls piercing glass walls, effortlessly pummeling them into the earth if they ever impeded their warpath.
Florida State was a team on a mission. Virginia was but a team on a field. Continue reading A step backward for Virginia football
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It’s late on a Saturday night, and Mike London sits quietly at home, trying to wake himself from a dream.
His weary mind bristles with the image of himself galloping down the Virginia sideline, inching ever closer to the end zone as the deafening noise around him washes away any trace of fatigue in his 49-year-old legs. Running stride-for-stride alongside him is Chase Minnifield, whose unlikely odyssey across the field, at least from his point of view, has taken up the better part of 10 minutes.
When Minnifield’s gutsy 65-yard interception return is finally brought to a halt, London stops to gaze up at a scoreboard that reflects his team’s sizable fourth-quarter lead. His frenzied players can’t stop jumping up and down; orange-clad men and women in the stands brace themselves for yet another rendition of the Good Ole Song; the Hill remains chock-full of bright ties and sundresses; and perhaps most amazingly of all, the Cavaliers are going to win their first football game of the season.
But no matter how many times he pinches himself, London can’t seem to wake up. Could this be real after all? Continue reading Mike London’s fevered dream sequence springs to life
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The thought of Thanksgiving always makes me smile because it reminds me of my senile old uncle, Col. Shelton Haybasket. At every Thanksgiving when I was growing up, Uncle Shelton would gather all the children in the family together and tell us the captivating story of how Thanksgiving came about. He would always begin the story the same way:
“Go get me a beer, dag nabbit!”
But Uncle Shelton is currently off in an infirmary somewhere, so allow me to relay the classic tale in his stead.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Pilgrims, tired of Europe’s annoying tolerance for chain smokers and French people, set sail for America. According to history buffs, they arrived sometime between the 12th and 18th centuries, the “Age of Not Knowing Where America, or Even Asia for God’s Sake, Is.” Continue reading Thanksgiving story
