FOV Cavalier of the Year #3/#4

From Old Virginia celebrates its birthday in a unique way: by recognizing one of Virginia's student-athletes as the Cavalier of the Year. What are the criteria for the award? You decide; that's the beauty. I nominate the 12 athletes that I think have been the most outstanding during the latest season of UVA athletics, and provide a short summary of their accomplishments. You choose the winner in a poll that goes up after all 12 have had their moment in the spotlight. The full list of nominees is here.

Over the next few weeks, two athletes at a time will be profiled, and you'll hear about what they've accomplished while representing Mr. Jefferson's University this year. The athletes are presented in a totally random order so as to hopefully not imply any endorsement one way or another. Athletes from all fields are considered; the point is to emphasize that UVA is about excellence across the entire department and doesn't shortchange its so-called non-revenue sports simply because they don't make headlines. The previous winners are Danny Hultzen (2009, 2011), Diego Restrepo (2010), and Mike Scott and Morgan Brian (2012); today's athlete's are Scott McWilliams and Casey Bocklet.

Scott McWilliams - Men's lacrosse - Defense

Team accomplishments:

-- None, really

Personal accomplishments:

-- USILA 2nd-team all-American
-- All-ACC selection
-- Fourth in the country in caused turnovers per game

It was a really rare bad year for UVA lacrosse.  A losing record and no NCAA tournament.  From an individual performance perspective, not a total loss, however; Mark Cockerton reached the 40-goal plateau and Tanner Scales was the ACC Freshman of the Year.  For the first time since Ken Clausen was a senior, though (and Clausen, too, was a COY nominee) a defenseman was the team's best player.

McWilliams was the only ACC defenseman picked to the all-ACC team, for starters, and his 36 caused turnovers were beaten by only four other players in the country (one of whom played 21 games to McWilliams's 15.)  Good enough to get him onto the all-American team, too.  McWilliams is a versatile player, as the coaches have found it possible to move him back and forth between defense and LSM as needed.  Clausen's accolades were higher, it's true....but then, Clausen was a senior for all that, and McWilliams's star is rising while only a junior.  You have to be a pretty good defenseman to be the best player on any UVA team, and we might've complained about the lack of offensive firepower at times, but there was a 40-goal scorer, too.  Scott McWilliams, though, after this year's performance, looks like the heart and soul of next year's team.

Casey Bocklet - Women's lacrosse - Attack

Team accomplishments:

-- Reached ACC semifinals
-- Reached NCAA quarterfinals

Personal accomplishments:

-- IWLCA 3rd-team all-American
-- IWLCA 2nd-team all-South
-- ACC all-tournament team
-- Tewaaraton Trophy watch list
-- Team scoring leader

Yes, Chris's sister, and not a moment too soon, actually.  Casey Bocklet is, as best I can tell, the first FOV-COY nominee to have transferred into the school; she spent her freshman season at Northwestern before moving to Charlottesville to follow in her brother's footsteps.  A good thing she did, too.  The team put her scoring punch to good use, upsetting six-seeded Georgetown in the NCAAs before losing in the quarterfinals (which is more impressive than saying the men's team made it there, because there's an extra round.)  She became almost instantly the team's best player, and as only a sophomore at that.

Much like Joe Harris, profiled earlier, Casey Bocklet wasn't, in the preseason, considered a top threat to UVA's foes; it was her on-field play rather than any preseason attention that got her added to the Tewaaraton watch list.  She played her best when it mattered, too, getting named to the ACC tournament team and scoring seven goals in three games in the NCAA tournament.  Admittedly, when you line up the list of top scorers, Bocklet isn't all that high up - until you pare away all the upperclassmen.  It put's "3rd-team all-American" in an even better light; Casey Bocklet is clearly one of the elite players of her class.  You're forgiven if you're thinking of accusing me of making today's nominees more about the future than the present, but nobody offers hope for the future for no reason.

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There is no weekend review per se this week because only a couple notable things happened.  One was the super regional, which sucked.  But then, before the season we were wondering if maybe we could play well enough to host a regional, so perspective is a beautiful thing.  The announcers kept going on about UVA's fielding miscues, and yes OK, but if you ask me the reason things went downhill is simply because the pitchers all ended up being too hittable all at once.  And it's not like there were that many errors.  Fielders can't make mistakes if the ball isn't being hit.  And Wes Rea hit a ball that I think you can probably find on Klockner's field if you go looking for it.  Anyway, that makes it offically the offseason, so there you go.

Secondly, the ACC released its football schedule rotation, which also sucked.  If you're a football player being recruited to an ACC school, you now know which schools you will never play.  If you're a new season ticket holder and you hold onto that ticket for ten seasons, you will never see us play NC State.  Notre Dame isn't even in the conference and we'll play them more often than any of the Atlantic teams not named Louisville.  We're no longer in the Atlantic Coast Conference.  We're in the Coastal Conference, and our conference has agreed to a loose scheduling arrangement and a championship exhibition against the Atlantic Conference.  Essentially, we're back to the pre-1993 days, when we had seven conference games in an eight-team conference, only now, we've replaced Wake Forest, NC State, Clemson, and Maryland with Pitt, VT, Miami, and Louisville.  That's our new conference.

If we could get ND on board for real and pull someone else onboard for 16 teams, we could actually reduce the madness a little - but that would require good, creative scheduling decisions, and that in turn would be the first time that ever happened.

weekend review

Talk about your eventful weekends.  In fact, that's what I plan to do.

Starting with lacrosse, where the Hoos played a game that's Exhibit A in the case of "why UVA will be considered the bottom of the ACC barrel next year until they prove otherwise."  The good guys looked sloppy, and were bailed out by the mighty power of Steele Stanwick.  Stanwick scored six goals and added an assist to push his PPG average over five.  This dude is something else, and could do no wrong on Friday.  Even his "post up a guy then fake-flip the ball to a teammate" trick, which never works, finally worked.

The rest of the team?  Well, I'll exempt Chris Clements for now, who did a very admirable job.  Clements picked up a short stick again (which is how he started off his career) and filled in at SSDM for Chris LaPierre, who sat the game with a shoulder injury.  I don't think LaPierre was desperately missed (though he will be against better teams) except in the the realm of ground balls.  Ayyy.  There was no sense of urgency in picking up ground balls, not until the fourth quarter.  One Penn goal came about four seconds after a defenseman - Scott McWilliams, I believe - just left a ball sitting on the turf and chased a Penn attackman instead.  Pretty sure he thought that guy had the ball himself.  No excuse for not knowing where the ball is, though.

Even when we had the ball in our possession, we didn't seem too interested in keeping it that way.  Shot selection was lame.  Chris Bocklet is the main culprit that I remember, but he wasn't the only one.  Made some poor decisions that sent harmless beach balls at Penn's goalie Brian Feeney.  And it went both ways: Penn did everything but put up bright neon signs daring Mark Cockerton to shoot with his right hand, and he refused.  Obviously he's not too keen on that side, but this summer would be a very good time to work on that.  Heck, Friday would've been a very good time to work on that.  Even as uncomfortable right-handed as he clearly is, I can't believe a D-I athlete's shot is that bad that he couldn't have potted a goal that way, as open as they left his right side.

Then you had about three or four clean interceptions, way too many.  Rob Fortunato slinged a pass at a Penn rider that was so perfectly executed my only explanation is he brainfarted and forgot we were wearing blue uniforms.  Of course the ball ended up behind him three seconds later.

So the break is coming at a good time - mentally, and because of LaPierre's shoulder bangup.  And it seems clear that Stanwick isn't quite healthy either.  Unless he just gets up slowly every time he's knocked to the ground because he wants to.  All that's left is to take final exams and wait for the rest of the conference tourneys to play themselves out, and find out our first-round opponent this Sunday.

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However, while I was gnawing my fingernails over the lax team, the diamond nine was restoring my faith.  Two very nice wins Saturday and Sunday have put the Hoos in position to potentially sweep Miami - at Miami.

On Saturday, Branden Kline had one of his effectively wild outings, walking five and striking out eight.  A 40-some minute rain delay messed with both pitchers; Kline was pulled after 120 pitches in only five innings, and Miami starter Eric Erickson pitched one inning too long; the UVA bats opened up on him in the sixth.

On Sunday, for the second week in a row Shane Halley pitched six innings in relief of Scott Silverstein, leading to the obvious question of why don't we just start Halley if that's how the game is gonna turn out.  Such a decision may be on the horizon, but I don't think Silverstein's time as a starter is quite done yet.  At any rate, he gave up four runs in the second - half of which got on base via walk in the first place - and Halley took it from there, shutting down the Miami bats and giving ours a chance to pull back in the game.  Which they did, in a big way.  Our bats have struggled against good pitching and bombed everything else, so it's nice to see them tee off on good pitching now, too.

Let's not forget Miami's role in all this.  I told you they were crummy fielders and they've upheld that statement beyond my wildest dreams, committing four errors on Saturday and five more on Sunday.  UVA scored seven runs in each of the first two games and of that total of 14, only three are earned runs.  That's amazing.  Not to say we haven't been hitting, but we have been timing our hits well.  Gotta put them together.  (And let's not forget that baseball has nutty rules about what's an earned run; one error can taint the whole thing.  If there are two outs and you commit an error and then give up a billion runs afterwards, they're all unearned on the theory that the inning would otherwise have been over.)

Still: nine errors in two games.  That's a lot of help.  Ain't complaining, though: win tonight and I'll revive my 18-wins goal.  Even better: our RPI is 15th in the country.  That puts us in the back end of the regional-hosting discussion.  Do I think we will?  Still nope.  But the chance is there.  And even if we don't we got a great shot at being that pain-in-the-ass two seed that nobody wants in their regional.  I would not be surprised, for example, to see us trucked to Columbia, South Carolina.  (Unless Tim Weiser is still calling the shots, in which case, Fullerton here we come.)

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-- Phillip Sims is coming to UVA.  Doug Doubt-y says it ain't so, at least not yet, but I don't know why I even mention that because there's no reason to pay attention to it.  We're past the point of no return with this one.  This went from bullshit rumor to actual rumor to actual happening so fast that I barely had time to process it. People have different ideas of what a "done deal" actually is, anyway. This is what I call a done deal.

I'm the last Hoo blogger to mention this, but I've always said I'm in the business of commentary, not breaking news.  (And not even "business", really, since that would imply I've ever made a cent off doing this.) I did write a significant chunk of commentary.  It got to be too significant.  It's now a separate post all its own - tomorrow's.  I'm afraid you'll have to wait til then to read it.  That's what we call a teaser.

-- Virginia Tech has a new basketball coach: James Johnson, the assistant who left for Clemson less than a month ago and who probably, in doing so, helped get Seth Greenberg fired in the first place.  I spent a ton of time on VT basketball last week and I don't want to bother doing so again, so Streaking the Lawn's piece on Johnson is good enough for me.  No sense in me rehashing it, which is all I'd have done anyway.  Go read that.

-- Man, the WAC is completely falling apart.  UTSA hasn't even played a down of I-A football in their lives and C-USA has already poached them.  It's funny how there used to be this 16-team WAC, then it branched out into the MWC and the WAC, and then all the good teams left the MWC and now the MWC is basically the WAC again.

-- Playoff talk abounds.  I'm gonna hold off most of my opinions til they actually settle on something and then I can poke holes in it.  Half of me thinks its funny that we used to have basically a two-team playoffs and now they're adding to two teams to that and saying "look everyone, a playoff!" and everyone's going "yay! (or boo!) a playoff!" as if it's really all that different.  The other half of me says it really is that different, because four teams leads to six and six leads to eight and eight leads to twelve and twelve leads to sixteen and this is the same organization that floated the idea of a 96-team basketball tournament so don't you dare doubt me.

I'll leave you with this thought: I've told you for a long time that most of the playoff advocates are gonna be awfully disappointed with the result, because the same people who bring you the BCS that you hate are the ones who'll bring you your playoff.  So don't expect anything brilliant.  In fact, expect stupidity.  The proof is in the pudding, summed up here and in this one quote:

[BCS director] Bill Hancock wonders if college football stadiums have the infrastructure to host college football games.

game preview: Penn

Date/Time: Friday, April 27; 7:30

TV: ESPN3

Record against the Quakers: 3-2

Last matchup: UVA 11, Penn 2; 4/30/11; Charlottesville

Last game: UNC 11, UVA 9 (4/20); Dartmouth 7, Penn 6 (4/21)

Efficiency stats:

Faceoff %:
UVA: 55.4%
Penn: 46.6%

Clearing %:
UVA: 90.7% (off.), 87.9% (def.)
Penn: 83.3% (off.), 85.2% (def.)

Scoring %:
UVA: 37.1% (off.), 30.8% (def.)
Penn: 29.6% (off.), 33.1% (def.)

O-rating:
UVA: 18.86 (3rd)
Penn: 14.11 (41st)

D-rating:
UVA: 13.28 (21st)
Penn: 14.82 (33rd)

So this isn't really that important of a game.  But it's on TV, so here's your preview.

Aw, scratch that.  It's a thing.  Last year it was even more of a thing; the Hoos limped into this game after being the ACC's scratching post and finishing it off with a blowout loss in the ACC tournament.  This year is better, but not completely different; this time we bring a two-game losing streak into this interlude game, so once again we need something to get the screws tightened and ready for the big show.

The real difference this year is that Penn isn't going anywhere.  Unlike last year when they were a semi-surprise tournament team, this year they're 3-9.  They lost to Dartmouth for eff's sake.  BUT.  They also beat North Carolina.  So the main point here, other than tuning up for the tournament, is to not be North Carolina.  And I think that's always an admirable goal.

-- UVA on offense

Like last year, Penn is better on defense than offense.  It's just that this year, they're worse on defense.  Goalie Brian Feeney's sub-.500 save percentage (.486 to be exact) isn't helping.  That's problem #1.  Problem #2 is having to replace two starting defensemen from last year. 

Overall, though, Penn's defense is almost exactly average; the national O-rating (and therefore, D-rating) average is 14.86 at the moment, which puts Penn closer to the average than any other team.  Which leads us to problem #3: the schedule.  LaxPower calls it the toughest in the country.  By RPI it's 7th-toughest.  It doesn't get any easier on Friday, of course, but the point is there's a lot of good teams on this schedule.  Penn hasn't exactly impressed, but they usually don't get blown out of the water, either.

The UVA offense, meanwhile, needs a little recalibration.  Teams have found the formula for defending UVA's potent attack: aggressive man-to-man defense on the midfielders, who are having a tough time creating their own shots, and pack in tight otherwise.  Let Chris Bocklet do all the roaming he wants outside about eight yards or so, but don't allow that doorstep pass that Stanwick and Bocklet have perfected.

Fortunately, Penn's probably been more busy scouting the Ivy League than us.  It's UNC's job to figure out how to stop us; Penn has other fish to fry.  And less athletic defensive midfielders, too, most likely.  There might be some new wrinkles - this is the perfect game to try some dry runs on a few things, if the coaches have such adjustments - but I think the old ones will work just fine.

-- UVA on defense

Penn's offense in a nutshell: balanced but thin.  Really thin.  Penn's got 94 goals on the season; all but 12 have been scored by the starting six.  (The same numbers for UVA: 158 and 46, in case you're wondering.)  Those six players have taken almost 85% of their shots.  Few teams in the country - if any - rely so heavily on their primary scoring.  There practically is no second midfield.

The dangerplayers are attackmen John Conneely and Tim Schwalje.  Conneely is a converted midfielder who's taken over the starring role on the team, and has 19 goals and 13 assists.  Schwalje is also a well-rounded guy with 17 and 11.  But, 12 games into the season and no 20-goal scorer for the Quakers.

This is a team that shows flashes of quality - but only flashes.  Good teams shut them down more often than not.  13 goals against Harvard is a solid showing.  11 against Cornell and 10 against UNC, also good.  Not so good: four each against Lehigh and Princeton and three against Bucknell.  All those are good defensive teams, but still.  Perhaps even worse: only seven goals against Villanova and six against Dartmouth, both below-average teams defensively.

So it's a good test for our defense, in that, if we're on, we can shut them down similar to last year.  One-on-one defense has been a problem lately, particularly closeouts.  The Penn midfielders play mostly a supporting role with the attack bringing most of the production (this is a team that's really desperate for midfielders considering they barely even have a second line) so it'll be the close-in defenders on the spot again.

-- Outlook

No need to get too fancy here: we should beat this team, and probably by more than twice their goal count.  Penn's lack of depth will probably be even more of a hindrance in the altitude.  Like last year, this is a good tuneup for the NCAA tournament; let's hope the result is the same, from here to Memorial Day.

-- Final score: UVA 13, Penn 6

recruiting board update

Hello and welcome once again to the weekly recruiting board update.  We've got a great show for you today in which we do the same shit we always do: update the recruiting board.  So, the changes:

-- Moved CB Tim Harris from blue to orange.  Huzzah.  Harris is one of the top pickups of the class and will remain so regardless of who else signs.  The hope is that more guys like Harris, I'm thinking of ohhhh let's just toss a name out there, Taquan Mizzell, who are "strongly leaning" UVA, will make it official relatively soonish and create some momentum, in order to make someone like Micah Kiser, who likes UVA but has a lot of suitors, take notice.

-- Moved OLs Parker Osterloh and Braxton Pfaff, and DE Wyatt Teller, from green to blue.  In the case of the two OL, it's becoming clear that it's UVA or VT.  50/50 is good enough for blue.  I see both as guys who'll slowly and methodically work their way up the food chain, rather than leapfrog anyone on the depth chart.  But, they are the top two linemen in the state.  We're not in any state of major need there, except for my rule that you should take at least three every year - but VT is.  They've been swinging and missing on linemen for a couple years now.  Just keeping either or both of these guys away from Tech so as to make the future Hokie front five look like a paper fence would be worth it.

As for Teller, I have read nothing, either outside or behind a paywall, that makes me think he should definitely be in the blue section vice the green one.  It's just a spidey-sense thing, I guess.  I think Teller will eventually choose UVA.  Now go light some candles and offer some goat sacrifices to make it happen.

-- Added WR DaeSean Hamilton and CB Kirk Garner to green.

-- Added DT Maurice Hurst to yellow.  I hope we get him so I can call him Maurice Hurts.

-- Moved LB Alex Anzalone from yellow to red.

-- Removed LB Dorian O'Daniel from yellow - committed to Clemson.  Bummer, because O'Daniel was the best Good Counsel player that we had even half a legit shot at, but we're after a lot of good linebackers and I gotta feeling it's going to be a very solid linebacker class.

-- Removed CBs Kendall Fuller and Desmond Lawrence from red.  Lawrence committed to UNC.  Fuller, yes, we're giving up on him, or I am; he listed a top six that didn't have UVA in it (fifth bullet from the top) and was full of schools that would be almighty tough to overcome.  Given his obviously well-known connections to VT, it's time to put this one aside.

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Piece of news: the all-ACC lacrosse team came out, and has on it Steele Stanwick (obviously), Chris LaPierre (good to see his work be recognized), and Colin Briggs.  Excellent choices, all.  And that's all well and good, too, but - somehow, the ACC's leading goal-scorer (whether you want to use total goals or goals per game) didn't make it, and I refer to one Chris Bocklet.  I would put Bocklet on before Briggs, for starters, but what in the blue Hell is Maryland's John Haus doing on that team??  10 goals and 8 assists in 10 games is Haus's stat line.  He's a sub-.300 shooter.  There are like 10-12 midfielders in the league, at least, who can do what Haus does - he's a solid player but not, like, all-ACC caliber.  Off the top of my head I can think of several players in the league, and not just on Virginia, who'd be more deserving than Haus.  Think UNC's Jimmy Bitter or Joey Sankey, or Duke's Josh Dionne, or a defender like Maryland's LSM Goran Murray or even their second-best scorer, Owen Blye.  Anyone but a guy with 1.8 points a game (and just 12 in 8 games since the first two), and 2 goals and 0 assists in three ACC games.

Bocklet has managed eight assists of his own despite being known as a finisher, which he does spectacularly well - he is the Marvin Harrison to Stanwick's Peyton Manning.  Haus isn't even the second-leading scorer on Maryland let alone the conference.  Stupid vote.  Bocklet got jobbed.

Oh, but speaking of voting, you still have to do so for Steele Stanwick.  Don't let the Dookie win.

game preview: Duke

Date/Time: Friday, April 13; 6:00

TV: ESPNUVA

Record against the Blue Devils: 49-26

Last matchup: Duke 19, UVA 10; 4/22/11; Durham (ACC tournament)

Last game: UVA 15, UNC 10 (4/7); Duke 11, Marist 10 (4/7)

Efficiency stats:

Faceoff %:
UVA: 56.4%
Duke: 57.4%

Clearing %:
UVA: 89.6% (off.), 85.8% (def.)
Duke: 82.1% (off.), 86.7% (def.)

Scoring %:
UVA: 39.7% (off.), 29.4% (def.)
Duke: 37.8% (off.), 30.9% (def.)

O-rating:
UVA: 19.78 (#2)
Duke: 18.39 (#5)

D-rating:
UVA: 12.88 (#13)
Duke: 13.53 (#21)

It's one of those big weekends.  Tomorrow, the Duke game, and the UNC baseball series begins as well.  Saturday, more baseball and the spring football game.  And then there's the Anthony Gill visit (about which Whitey Reid has some excellent info.)  I suspect the Friday scheduling of the lacrosse game is because of the football game, which is too bad because I thought the combination football-lax extravaganza was a big step in the right direction toward the sort of all-out fun-time festival the spring football game should be.  It rained last year, which sort of soured things, but I'd still enjoy seeing all these things treated as part of a larger whole instead of getting in the way of each other.

Tomorrow we'll talk spring football.  Today, Duke.  We got good news this afternoon when it was announced that Ryan Benincasa will be available after sitting out the part of the UNC game that happened after he was hit in the bean.  It could have cost us the game; Benincasa looked as though he'd figured out something on UNC's R.G. Keenan and was winning a lot of faceoffs all the same way.  Having him ready for Duke will be big.

-- UVA on offense

When not playing a man down, Duke has a fairly stout defense, a fact made even more impressive when you consider the streaky play of goalie Dan Wigrizer.  On the whole, Wigrizer isn't a great goaltender, with only a .519 save percentage.  And just when you think you're comfortable with that and you like the idea of Duke having a sieve for a netminder, Wigrizer stands on his head and stops like eight shots in a row.  If you can get off a good shot, you can probably get it past Wigrizer....except when he's in one of his moods, and then he's a wall.

Duke's got some big guys at close-in defense, which is the sort of thing that gave us trouble at times against Hopkins.  Michael Manley is an experienced senior, and the smallest of the bunch, too.  He's not actually small, it's just that sophomores Henry Lobb and Chris Hipps are each 6'4".  But the leader of the defense is LSM C.J. Costabile.  Costabile also takes faceoffs (making him, as a long-stick guy, a rare breed in that department), and has earned a number of honors over his career, including being a finalist for the Lowe's Senior Class Award, which by the way Steele Stanwick is also a finalist for that so go vote for him if you don't want the Dookie to win.

So it's a solid defense they have, and it'd be even better if they were good at man-down defense.  They have to play it a lot - Duke is one of the most heavily penalized teams in the country.  They average five per game, and they're led by reserve defenseman Luke Duprey (by the way, he's 6'5") with 10.  Mostly of the 60-second variety.  Manley is a close second with nine.  And when you get the ball, you just might score; Duke allows a 47% conversion rate on man-up chances.  This translates to two goals a game.

I doubt we'll get a lot of one-on-one chances against Duke's close-in defense, given their size, and it won't be possible to force the ball into the doorstep if it's covered.  Even less than usual, that is.  Lord knows we try, sometimes.  Duke's just too big for that.  But the chances will come like they always have.  They're good, but not fearsome - much like our other two ACC opponents.  When we get man-up chances we must - and probably will - capitalize, and it's worth knowing that a lot of teams have scored on Duke that shouldn't be able to.  Double-digit goals for Marist, Georgetown, Syracuse**, eight goals apiece for Brown and Penn - all teams with below-average O-ratings.  So I expect to keep on finding the back of the net.

**It's really weird to be putting Syracuse in that group, but there they are, right between Delaware and Jacksonville in the O-rating department.

-- UVA on defense

We've got a pretty formidable offensive lineup.  Duke is one of the few teams in the country that can match it.  There's a trio of sophomore attackmen - Jordan Walsh, Christian Walsh, and Josh Dionne - that make a case for the most productive attack in the country, and senior midfielder Robert Rotanz has always been an extremely dangerous player too.  Dionne and Wolf are the guys making the case that five-foot-single-digits is just fine; neither are 5'10" and between them they have 48 goals.  Wolf in particular is dangerous; playing the X, behind the net, he has 24 goals and 20 assists.  Rotanz is an excellent one-on-one dodger, and he leads the team with 26 goals.

Those four are the names you'll hear the most.  Beyond that, it gets thin.  There are capable players, but complementary parts at best; Justin Turri has 11 goals and the third starting middie, Jake Tripucka, has nine, but the thing is this: practically nobody after the top four has a shooting percentage above .300.  Consider this: Rob Emery and Matt White put about the same percentage of their shots on net as do Turri and Tripucka, but the Duke players' shooting percentages are .212 and .205, respectively; Emery and White have a much more normal .352 and .382.

Still: the top four.  And you'd think with all that offensive talent, Duke would have a scary man-up unit, but they're merely 11-for-51, a conversion percentage of .216.  That's..... pretty bad, actually.  Here's a little mental exercise: Duke's opponents have handed them 47 minutes' worth of penalties in 13 games.  Duke themselves have committed 56.5 minutes' worth of penalties.  Let's subtract those from the 780 minutes of game time they've played.  That leaves 676.5 minutes.  (I know that penalties usually end when a goal is scored; just bear with me.)  Divide the 676.5 minutes in half to approximate the time that Duke spends on offense and we get 338.25.

So in our theoretical world, Duke has played 47 minutes a man-up and 338 minutes of even-strength offense.  With 11 man-up goals, that's a goal for every 4:16 of man-up time.  (We'll pretend you spend every second of man-up play on offense, even though you don't, because you should.)  They've scored 138 even-strength goals, or one for every 2:27 of even-strength offense time.  Duke gets worse when you give them an extra man.  With as easy as it is to score on their man-down defense, theoretically, then, the best game plan is to spend the whole game trying to beat them into submission and hoping maybe they retaliate once in a while.

(In case you're wondering, the same tortured mathematical calisthenics when performed on UVA's stats give us a goal for every 1:44 of man-up time and a goal for every 2:22 of even-strength offensive time.)

This is kind of a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, of course - obviously I don't want to actually break their players over our sticks in hopes of earning a parade to the penalty box.  I want to break them legally.  The point here is that Duke probably needs a new special-teams coach.

-- Outlook

It's Senior Night, and it's Duke; you shouldn't need any more reason to want to win by 13.  In the standings there is none; thanks to the way the tiebreakers work, the ACC tourney pairings are already set.  We got UNC, Duke has Maryland.  Duke lost to Maryland in the regular season, but I don't see it happening again, which means there's a decent likelihood we'll match up in another week's time, same teams, same field, just like last year.  That's no reason to look ahead to a rematch that might not even happen, of course, but we lost twice to these guys last year, and we can't flip the script without winning the first one.  I know these Dookie bastards are our kryptonite year in and year out, but we've got Steele Stanwick and Chris Bocklet making opposing fans go "please hurry the eff up and graduate" and a machine of an offense and I'll be damned if I predict this team to lose.

-- Final score: [redacted to appease the fickle lacrosse gods]**

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-- Did I mention Steele Stanwick?  I did, but I must again.  He is mere tenths of a percentage point ahead of Costabile the Dukie, and trailing two guys from Siena(!) and Ohio State.  Siena has three fans and Ohio State is the devil.  Steele Stanwick : lacrosse :: Danny Hultzen : baseball.  VOTE FOR HIM DAMMIT

-- This was too fun to wait til Monday's weekend review: UVA got a shout on the Colbert Report the other day.  We are a school that is Doing It Right, at least in the mind of Colbert's smart-sounding interviewee, who was not kidding even though Colbert usually is.  We're also the only school that Colbert heard on the Doing It Right list and earned a cheer instead of a snarky reply upon mention.  (Colbert's wife is a Hoo.  He is not stupid.)  Click, then, to hear Wahoowa, Stephen Colbert style.

**OK, OK....13-12.  Shhh!

weekend review

I've been afraid to start writing this because the biggest news of the weekend might break AT ANY MOMENT.  (AAAAAAAAA)  I'm sure what'll happen is, I'll have this nice big writeup about how we're still waiting on pins and needles for point guard T.J. McConnell's imminent decision between UVA and Arizona, and by the time I get done writing it I'll have to erase it and start over.

Yes, we're still waiting, despite some Arizona site (Point Guard U, they're called) jumping the gun and reporting a McConnell commitment to the Wildcats late last night.  No such commitment has yet occurred, of course.  These people at Point Guard U have been more or less "reporting" McConnell will be a Cat for a couple weeks now, so there's no good reason to consider them the definitive source.

So we wait.  Arizona is full enough on scholarship guys that they've stopped recruiting a late 2012 guy by the name of Amadeo Della Valle, but not so full that there's no longer any room for McConnell.  (Sean Miller isn't that dumb.)  If this didn't happen to be a guy whose family knew Miller from way back, it might already be over by now and we'd have us a point guard.  But for now....we wait.

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And we talk lacrosse.  The Hoos opened one up on North Carolina this week, in what I think was the best three quarters of defense they've played all season.  (Not so much the fourth - they looked a little complacent and it's fair to also mention that the offense plays differently when it's desperate.  And being down by 7 qualifies as desperate.)  I wasn't kidding when I said UNC's offense was dangerous, and the Hoos held them to five goals in the first three quarters.

That means a yeoman effort by the defense, of course, and also by Rob Fortunato.  (Let's just come out and say right now what we've all been thinking but not wanting to say: Fortunato has been better than Adam Ghitelman at stopping shots.  Unlike with Ghitelman, I'm still a little nervous when Fortunato makes a pass longer than about fifteen yards, but Fortunato has been damn impressive in net.  He's making saves that I don't think Ghitelman would've.)  But the guys I want to single out this time are the SSDMs: Chris LaPierre and Bobby Hill.  An excellent game by both, and Rob Emery has been playing a little two-way ball as well and showed us why when he went coast-to-coast for an early transition goal.

The offense hummed like the proverbial well-oiled machine.  Steele Stanwick racked up the numbers as usual, but nevertheless the game wasn't all Stanwick all the time; in fact it was Matt White who made a Stanwickesque pass to Bocklet for the first man-up goal.  Offense came from everywhere, and it broke down the UNC resistance; their goalie Rastivo often made the first save but couldn't make the second one.

I think - I am not 100% sure but I think - that we have locked in another date with Carolina in the ACC tournament.  If I'm right, it works like this:

-- If we [redacted to appease the fickle lacrosse gods] on Friday, we would be the #1 seed with a 3-0 record, and they'd have to apply a three-way tiebreaker to deal with the 1-2 teams down below.  I think the applicable tiebreaker will be goal differential in games between the tied teams, in which Maryland is +2 and the other two are -1.  That would give Maryland the two seed, and Duke beat UNC so they're the three, and UNC the four.

-- If we lose to Duke on Friday, then we'd be the two seed, with us and Duke at 2-1 and UNC and Maryland at 1-2.  And UNC beat Maryland.

I could be wrong about this, but I'll let you quote me anyway.

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In the baseball world, we watched a thrilling sweep, particularly on Sunday.  Saturday was a thing of beauty, with Prince Fielder and Miguel Cabrera each going yard (and then going yard again), but Sunday was the real happy time, as the good guys twice came back from a multiple-run deficit in crunch time to broom away the hated.....oops.  You want Virginia baseball.  I'm kind of puffed-up and happy about the Tigers, too.

Well, it's still going on, as I type this, because of the TV schedule, but it started off just fine.  A much-needed series win against Wake Forest is already in the bag, and the Hoos are up 3-2 in the not-rubber game as I write.  We'll either be 9-6 or 8-7 in an hour or so, and 9-6 would be interesting because that's the same record as UNC, who happens to be the next opponent.  A huge series.

For all the angst over losing three games in Tallahassee, it's worth it to remember that a break or two the other way might've sent us home with a series win - and FSU is now 14-1.  They're, uh, good.

But they're also in the other division.  Now I don't want to get expectations too high, but finishing off the win tonight and then a good result against UNC could put the Hoos in an outside position to steal the division title from current leader Miami.  But a lot would have to go right and I'm not getting my hopes up.  Yet.

The bottom line is that a regional 2 seed is still the minimum expectation.  The main question remains the bullpen.  Artie Lewicki was pulled in the fourth inning tonight, and he's never going to be a guy who goes eight innings anyway, which means they'll be in for plenty of innings in the upcoming weeks.  They were excellent yesterday, limiting Wake to 1 run all day after Silverstein was pulled in the fifth.  In the end I don't think this team has the pitching to pull off an extended tournament run (meaning: make it to Omaha) but that's a concern for a month from now, not right now.

A final interesting note: this week's Wednesday opponent is George Washington.  Perhaps this year one of their players will get to experience Davenport Field from the perspective of a baserunner.

Look at that, I made it all the way to the end of the post and T.J. McConnell hasn't made (or at least announced) his decision.  All my worrying for nothing.  The conventional wisdom is that the longer it takes after the Arizona visit is a good thing for UVA.  I see no reason to question the conventional wisdom.  It means the Charlottesville visit stuck.  We shall see.

game preview: North Carolina

Date/Time: Saturday, April 7; 1:00

TV: ESPN

Record against the Heels: 48-24

Last matchup: UVA 11, UNC 10; 4/9/11; Charlottesville

Last game: UVA 12, Md. 8 (3/31); UNC 13, JHU 9 (4/1)

Efficiency stats:

Faceoff %:
UVA: 57.3%
UNC: 59.9%

Clearing %:
UVA: 90.2% (off.), 85.4% (def.)
UNC: 90.0% (off.), 79.0% (def.)

Scoring %:
UVA: 38.9% (off.), 29.4% (def.)
UNC: 33.6% (off.), 33.9% (def.)

O-rating:
UVA: 19.66 (3rd of 61)
UNC: 18.26 (6th of 61)

D-rating:
UVA: 12.90 (15th of 61)
UNC: 14.35 (26th of 61)

(Stats explanation: Faceoff and clearing percentage: self-explanatory. Scoring %: percentage of offensive possessions (faceoff wins + successful clears + opp. failed clears) that result in goals. O-rating and D-rating are my own special sauce based on the above numbers. D-I average for each is currently about 14.80. Ratings ARE adjusted for strength of competition.)

Is it bad that we only have a three-game ACC season and my first thought in trying to type the opening paragraph here was, "man, it's kind of the doldrums of the season right now"?  Yes, probably.  It is the main slog of the lacrosse season, sort of the equivalent of early February in basketball, but the way lacrosse goes, what you've got is the gauntlet of basically equally difficult games in the middle of the lacrosse world spotlight, so I really should stop whining.  It's much better than in basketball where we have to keep toggling our thinking between "we're gonna get killed" and "we should smoke these clowns but OMG what if we don't."

-- UVA on offense

What jumps out on the stat sheet here is UNC's pedestrian D-rating, which makes them a defense that's only slightly better than average.  It comes from things like allowing 10 goals each to the likes of Penn and Dartmouth.  The latter is 47th of 61 teams with a 13.17 O-rating; remember, the average is about 14.80.

UNC has a fairly good ride, but the problem is Carolina is actually below average in the scoring-percentage department; they're allowing goals on 33.6% of opponents' offensive possessions, which is actually slightly worse than the national average of 32.7%.  Not up to the usual standards of an ACC team.  Opponents have gotten 63.7% of shots on cage against the Heels (compare to 58% for UVA's opponents), and goalie Steven Rastivo saves only 53.1% of those; all these numbers add up to a defense that's only about average nationally.

Their defense hasn't been 100% all season; Charlie McComas,a team captain and generally considered the best UNC defender, missed time early on while healing up from an injury.  UNC also tends to do a little more substituting and shuffling at close-in defense than most teams.  McComas's injury doesn't explain some of those more questionable results, though.  The other two defensive starters are Kieran McDonald and Jordan Smith, and they're OK.

UVA will be the best team the Heels have faced on offense this year; the closest approximation is Duke, which took a 9-3 halftime lead enroute to a 13-goal performance.  Carolina's win over Hopkins was impressive for their offense, which scored seemingly at will, not for their defense; Hopkins is a good but not great offensive team, so allowing nine goals is about par for the course.

There's potential for some fun plays, too; almost three-quarters of opposing goals against Carolina have been assisted, which is a high numbers.  You've seen our guys try this season (sometimes too hard) to make the tic-tac-toe pass for the easy goal; opportunities to do so on Saturday should be present.  You have to like our chances to get a few goals on this team.

-- UVA on defense

On offense is where UNC is really dangerous, and they'd be even more so if Nicky Galasso were healthy.  Galasso is a well-rounded attackman and was UNC's top player last year, but underwent surgery in November and fortunately for UNC's opponents has not been at full strength since.  He's mostly been coming off the bench as he slowly gets healthy, and scored a goal and an assist last week, but the attack has been led by others this year.

Marcus Holman (16 G, 23 A) has taken over that role for the Heels this year.  As much mixing-and-matching as coach Joe Breschi has done on defense, he's done even more on offense; Holman is the only offensive player to start all 11 games.  A pair of freshmen, Joey Sankey and Jimmy Bitter (yes, Billy's brother, how many other families named Bitter do you know?) are the next two guys to watch for.

It's a very attack-heavy offense, by which I mean the midfielders are not heavy participants.  The top five scorers all play attack, and they've all started games this year and will rotate in and out.  You have to go to the sixth slot on the stat sheet (freshman Chad Tutton, 9 G, 6 A) to find a midfielder.  Obviously this puts pressure on the defensemen, who'll also have to communicate their assignments with all the substituting going on.

UNC has lost a few questionable games, but their offense makes them a highly dangerous team.  I watched their game against Hopkins and they broke down the Blue Jay defense like it was nothing.  13 goals on that Hopkins team is a hell of an accomplishment.  Carolina's got an excellent faceoff man in R.G. Keenan, and offense plus faceoff prowess equals can beat anyone.  UVA will have their hands full.

-- Outlook

As long as the Hoos can deal with the Heels' offense, we should be fine.  That's a tall order, of course.  But remember: they also have to deal with ours.  Stanwick to Bocklet is the deadliest combination in the country, and a few of our other guys have figured out how to score too.  If UVA wins this game, we'll be assured, at a minimum, of the right to wear white jerseys in the first ACCT game.  So that's something, because I don't really like the blue ones, not with the neon orange shoulder stripe.  I promised myself I'd refrain from saying anything about revenge for basketball, and I got this far but screw it: let's get revenge for basketball.

-- Final score: UVA 14, UNC 12

game preview: Cornell

Date/Time: Saturday, May 21, 12:00

TV: ESPN2

History against the Big Red: 7-3

Last matchup: UVA 11, Cornell 9; 3/12/11; Baltimore, MD

Last game: UVA 13, Bucknell 12 (5/15); Cornell 12, Hartford 5 (5/14)

Last time these two teams matched up, about two months ago, here's what I wrote about Cornell:

If anything, they're a little down this year with a loss to Army and uninspiring wins over Hobart and Canisius and a decent one over terrible Binghamton. ... Cornell's goalie, A.J. Fiore, is in his second year of starting in net and hasn't started off well. And their starting defense is ever so young - all sophomores, two of them also in their second year of starting and one in his first. UVA's wily veterans on offense should be able to find plenty of ways to put the ball in the net. As long as Pannell is shut down - more than doable, as our defense has been relatively stout - this game should be a good national-TV bounceback from last week.

At the time it was perfectly true, but it sure looks silly now.  UVA did indeed win the game - it wasn't easy, but we got the win.  That's the last time this season Cornell has landed in the loss column, a schedule that includes the Ivy League regular season and tournament, and a win over Syracuse to boot.

It's probably a good thing they did that, since UVA's fortunes went south real quickly not long after this game.  Beating the eventual #2 seed in the tournament helped assure a home-field game.  But about the only true word about Cornell in that paragraph is the unflattering assessment of goalie A.J. Fiore, whose .516 save percentage is a tad pedestrian.  (Never fear.  We'll improve that by taking shots three feet from the net, which, as with our basketball team, we never seem to score on.)  It doesn't matter, though, because Cornell's defense is outstanding; opponents only score on 25% of their cleared possessions, good for third in the country, and they're 10th in the nation in caused turnovers per game.

In light of the continued absence of the Brattons and the terrible UVA defense, Dom Starsia is adopting the underdog strategy this week and working on slowing the game down.  You've seen them doing so in the past, too; several times against Bucknell the announcers clearly expected UVA to take a quick shot at the goal in transition and were surprised when they didn't, and set up in a half-field offense instead.  This is a good thing; I also spent most of that game exhorting them from afar to do just that and I'll probably do so again on Saturday.

Obviously, Cornell is the Rob Pannell show; with 86 points he's the runaway favorite for lacrosse's Heisman, the Tewaaraton Trophy.  In the past UVA would've handed Pannell off to Ken Clausen or whoever was the top defender on the team and told him to be on Pannell like his shadow and that would've happened all game long.  If we do that this game it'll be a complete disaster, so that strategy's out.  Pannell is their Steele Stanwick - he can run the show from anywhere, and he'll score if you let him and if you don't let him he'll pass to someone who will.  His version of Chris Bocklet - the finisher - is Steve Mock, who's got 36 goals and three assists.  I'm glad I'm not the guy who has to figure out the defense; it'll probably be a roughly 50/50 split of man and zone again.

I hope when the coaches say they'll be slowing the game down, they mean really slowing it down, because I think that's what it'll take.  Yes, that's an acknowledgement of majorly underdog status.  I wouldn't be as worried, but the defense, you know.  When the offense has the ball they need to be extra-patient.  They'll probably earn a stall warning or three if they're doing it right.  The key to scoring will be a lot of tossing the ball around and waiting for an opportunity to throw a lightning bolt of the kind that Stanwick and Bocklet hooked up for several times against Bucknell.  The other thing they'll need to do is dominate on faceoffs.  I know that's not something you normally associate with UVA lax, but it's possible.  Cornell's top faceoff guy is sub-50% on the season, and our three face-er off-er FOGO types have shown the propensity to beat subpar opponents.  Success has come in streaks, but the coaches need to ride the hot hand, whoever that is, and it might just result in more possessions instead of make-it take-it lacrosse for Cornell.

I won't bore you with What's At Stake, since it's pretty clear, but I'd have to say this: it feels a little fortunate, the way this season has gone (not to mention how the Bucknell game went) to be sitting one win from another Final Four trip.  Let's hope for a little luck and a little lightning in a bottle tomorrow.

comeback to the future

Good enough to bump normal weekend review programming to tomorrow.  That's how good the lax game against Bucknell was yesterday.

There've been bigger comebacks in the history of sport, sure enough, and it's not going to qualify as one of history's favorite games when a superpower in a down year scrapes out a win against a small-fry, high-school-sized school having its best year ever in lacrosse.  Admittedly I even felt a little bad about it, since you know Bucknell fans will remember that one a lot longer than we will.  But not bad, like, "I wish we hadn't done that," bad like, "I wish we had done that to Maryland."

Still, it qualifies as one of my favorite games.  Whenever you reach the point where you are convinced you're going to lose, and you don't lose, that's "epic comeback" level.  It's a fuzzier feeling about the game than it would've been had UVA blown a big lead and then rescued the win in OT.  It shouldn't be, but it is.  Being down 10-6 is a pretty bleak situation, but that's what you have superstars for, and Steele Stanwick and Chris Bocklet got busy, put the offense on their shoulders, and got to work.  When they were done working UVA had only its second lead of the game, and if you're going to lead just twice in a game, overtime is a fairly good choice for one of those.

So UVA survives a dangerous first-round matchup that many said they couldn't and looked like they wouldn't, and now gets to jump on board the "nobody believes in us" motivation train.  It's a hackneyed motivator that college kids are real suckers for, often to the point of obnoxiousness, but dammit it works.  Cornell is the next opponent as we run the gauntlet of the 'nells to try and get to the championship, and the fortunes of both our teams have been awfully divergent since last we met.  (Thank God Cornell turned out to be any good because without them rising to near the top of the heap, maybe we don't host that first-round game.)  Cornell will be righteously motivated by losing to UVA in March, and they have the best player in the country, but the combination of our talent with an underdog us-vs.-the-world attitude could be a deadly combo.  Other than Maryland we're the lowest remaining seed in the field (upset bids went nowhere all weekend), but if I were Cornell, there're several higher-seeded teams I'd rather be staring at this weekend.

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- That said, there's a laundry list of things that need to get better next weekend.  Things that aren't game-killers against Bucknell but will get you destroyed against Cornell and other top-level teams.  Defensive pressure was lame most of the day, even at distances 12 yards and shorter.  Short-stick defense was especially poor.

- Speaking of short-stick defense, any questions as to whether reinstating Rhamel Bratton might have a negative effect on chemistry ought to disappear now.  They were legit after the Penn game; now it's clear that even if "chemistry" takes a hit with him out there (and I suspect it will not) it doesn't outweigh the necessity of having him on defense.  There was only one SSDM I was happy with yesterday (more on that in a bit) and having Rhamel's athleticism and defensive smarts will probably be critical against Cornell.  If Rhamel's gotten his stuff together and is ready for reinstatement then I want to see him at SSDM for most of the game, and put in on offense sometimes to mix up the looks we throw at Cornell.  And please don't announce it until 11:59 AM on Saturday.

- The aforementioned good-playin' SSDM is Blake Riley, who's been doing a great job of making his presence felt in the past few games.  It was Riley's aggressiveness that led to the Bucknell turnover in OT: taking advantage of his man slipping to the turf, checking him, and scooping the resulting ground ball.  Riley also led the team in GBs for the game.  The rest of the short-stick defense was unwatchable.

- No, seriously: Steele friggin' Stanwick.  I hope he's not actually healthy yet because eight points is ridiculous and eight points on a bad wheel is unbelievable.  Matt White scored the game-winner because Bucknell's defenders were deathly afraid of Stanwick having the ball, and his feeds to Bocklet were precise and too pretty for the naked eye.  They required replay to appreciate.

- Much is being made of the referee's decision to award UVA the ball after a Bucknell player heaved it in the direction of the empty net on their late clearing attempt when UVA deployed the 10-man ride and sent Adam Ghitelman out of the net.  Was it a pass?  A shot?  A Bucknell player was closer to the end line but was he actually closer to the ball?  Watching it live I assumed it was a shot and that the referee's angle led him to wrongly believe UVA was closer to it as it went out.  I reflected for all of half a second on the injustices of refereeing and another half-second on those times we get scrooged instead.  And then I stopped worrying about it.  Upon replay it's actually really hard to tell who's closer to the ball, but the Bucknell guy was positioned such that if he was closer, than the ball was so far away from the net that it couldn't plausibly have been a shot in the first place.  It sort of demonstrates an inherent problem with the rule about shots going out of bounds, but on final reflection I decided it was a 51-49 kind of call that the referee got right but couldn't have been greatly faulted for getting wrong.  And the larger issue, if I were a Bucknell fan, is that it shouldn't have been in the ref's hands at all because putting the ball in the air like that was a really bad idea.

- In fact, it's really hard not to acknowledge the role that Bucknell's awful, awful decision-making played in this comeback.  Much like UVA against UNC, they should've been sitting on their lead and not shooting with two and three minutes to play.  It came back to bite them.  And most of their shots were at defended nets.

- Even so, the very gambly style - 10-man ride, double teams with two and a half, three minutes to go - was a lot of fun to watch.  Largely because it worked, but hey.

- Bring on Cornell.

- That last bullet will probably bring on the jinx instead, but whatever.

game preview: Stony Brook

Round Two of the reunion tour commences on Sunday. Stony Brook is the lacrosse team's next hurdle between them and the national championship, and because the NCAA values saving travel money over the usual fundamentals of competition, the game will be at the designated neutral site: Stony Brook. This doesn't seem like the way things are supposed to be done, but whatever, we're the ones with the big budget and they aren't.

Last time out, we were playing our first home game of the season, and field conditions (there was a lot of snow on top of it) forced the game over to the Turf Field. It was a comfortable UVA win, if not exactly a blowout. Sort of like how the first Mount St. Mary's game went. Good Adam showed up in net, and Chris Bocklet and Steele Stanwick did their thing with hat tricks.

Two things stand out about Stony Brook. One, they have the most prolific offense in the nation after Robert Morris. And two, they have an outstanding faceoff guy. Adam Rand was the top guy in the nation last year and he's third or fourth this year, winning over 60% of his faceoffs. During the game in February, he was killing our guys at the faceoff X until Ryan Benincasa was sent in to deal with the situation, and deal he did: Benincasa won 12 of 16. So I think we both know who's going to take the faceoffs on Sunday.

As for that offense, it's extremely top-heavy. Three players account for basically all their scoring: attackmen Tom Compitello and Jordan McBride and midfielder Kevin Crowley. That right there is 60% of their goals - 49, 36, and 48, respectively. Those are, to put it mildly, big numbers. McBride carries a .495 shooting percentage - in other words, he basically scores every other time he shoots. So don't let him shoot. All three of those guys are above .440, which is pretty much outstanding; for UVA, only Chris Bocklet is above .400.

The catch for Stony Brook is that they haven't really beaten anyone. Until last week's first-round game against Denver, they hadn't knocked off a top-15 RPI team all year. The best skins on the wall were Towson and Delaware. They lost close to the quality competition on their schedule (UVA and Cornell) and otherwise fattened up their record and scoring numbers on small-time competition. You can't blame them for that schedule, really: until this year, Stony Brook was small-time competition, not the type of team you'd expect should be loading up the non-conference slate with nothing but ACC and Ivy teams. But they're kind of built for 2010 and didn't lose any key pieces from last year.

After watching the ruthless dismantling of Mount St. Mary's last week, you shouldn't have any doubts about the team's mental state any more. They're ready for some lacrosse. So I don't expect the outcome to be in doubt for long. There won't be any 14-point leads this time; the combination of a sharp faceoff guy and sharper offense is a dangerous one and can lead to sudden runs on the scoreboard. But the Seawolves have yet to prove they can really score against top competition. Another comfortable if unspectacular win should be in the offing, followed by a Baltimore rematch next weekend against another familiar opponent.

game preview: Mount St. Mary's

Moment of truth. Saturday night, under the Klockner lights, UVA fans and a curious nation get their first look at the men's lacrosse team since....well, since the Robert Morris game actually, because it wasn't even 48 hours thereafter when their world went spinning upside down. The women don't play until Sunday, so this is the first chance for the loyal, the casual, the curious, and the voyeuristic to get a peek into Virginia Lacrosse since the news cycle hit full blast.

The overarching question, obviously, is what kind of mindset the team will be in when the whistle blows. Because the players have been rightly veiled under a shroud of protection and Coach Starsia has rightly spoken very little and said even less (and with one of his charges in jail and his father passing away in the past two weeks, it's not been an easy fortnight) every fan is anxious to see what transpires.

Fortunately, though it's the NCAA tournament, UVA took care of business with a vengeance in the regular season and earned a very pedestrian first-round opponent - and one they've seen before. Mount St. Mary's hosted the Hoos in our second game of the season and their opener; not only that, but the Mount's only other trip to the NCAA tournament ended after one game, also right here in Klockner.

The game back in February was a 15-7 triumph for UVA, and other than a shot total more than twice MSM's, UVA didn't blow the Mountaineers away on the scoring sheet. They simply won the faceoff battle, won the ground ball battle, went a perfect 18-for-18 on clears, and let the scoreboard take care of itself. Starsia also took his foot off the gas in the fourth, emptying the bench and getting backup goalies Fortunato and Eimer some burn as well. Chris Bocklet officially announced his presence as a goal-scoring machine with 4 tallies, and Connor English had a hat trick too.

Any discussion of Mount St. Mary's starts with their standout goalie, T.C. DiBartolo, who leads the entire country in save percentage at .606. The difference between Mount St. Mary's, MAAC champ and Mount St. Mary's, MAAC 6th-place is DiBartolo. They get outshot fairly heavily, especially for a tournament team, and if they had an average goalie with a .540 save percentage, they'd allow more than three extra goals per game.

For scoring, MSM relies heavily on attackman Cody Lehrer, whose 48 goals and .471 shooting percentage outpace anyone on UVA's roster. Lehrer is a sophomore, and that makes him not at all unique in the Mount's lineup: their top seven scorers and entire starting attack and midfield are all freshmen or sophomores. The Mount even has their own version of the Bratton twins - they call them the Schmidts, and not only do they look identical, they score identical. Bryant is a midfielder and Brett plays on the attack, and they each scored 36 points. Big bro Justin is a reserve defenseman who's also played in all 16 games.

Overall, they have an offense to be concerned about. Very accurate shooters. When they have the ball they're dangerous, but they do a poor job of getting the ball. They cause fewer than six turnovers a game, good for just 7th of 9 in their conference, and they're a poor clearing team at just 79%. This makes them a really great matchup for UVA, a good team at taking care of the ball and one of the very best at going to get it - particularly on the ride, where opponents enjoy just a 76% success rate on clears.

The recipe for a win on Saturday, therefore, is the exact same as it was in February. Win the battles on the ground and the goal-scoring will take care of itself. A little overaggressiveness won't hurt anything - in fact, this is the time and the opponent for it. A young team, most of whom will be playing in front of the largest crowd of their lives, under the lights on the biggest stage of their lives. A team not particularly good at the gritty stuff like ground balls or clears. Minus silly penalties - probably the biggest concern of the game - this is the right team to get aggressive against. And this time it's for keeps, so there won't be any lifting off the gas pedal in the later stages. Finally, it's time for some lacrosse.

3's and 7's

Good things come in threes, goes the saying. Like wins over Maryland by the baseball team. Like goals by Chris Bocklet and Shamel Bratton in a streak-busting win over Duke lacrosse.

Like ACC championships.

Or if you want to get all big-picturey, like "years in a row UVA has won more ACC championships than any other school." Yup: the men's lacrosse, women's crew, and men's tennis teams ensured that no ACC school can catch UVA in the championships department this year, and the seven total championships is a post-expansion record. Stand tall, Hoos, and give this statement of fact some thought: For the third year in a row, the University of Virginia has the ACC's premier athletics department.

Another heady phrase: 100 ACC championships. That mark was reached on Saturday by the crew team; Sunday brought the total to 102. The official site has the awesome breakdown here.

And let's not forget: there's still some baseball (as well as softball) to be played. And some of it was played this weekend, too, although calling what happened on the College Park diamond "competition" is a stretch. Maryland is a doormat when it comes to baseball with one respectable pitcher and few bats, and they were treated as such. I did expect a sweep; I did not expect 27 runs to be posted on Saturday, though it comes as something less than a complete surprise.

Coastal Carolina's pitchers will give us much more trouble than Maryland's, and they're not even throwing their weekend guys. If you follow college baseball, you've heard of Coastal Carolina; if not, you might have anyway, as they're basically baseball's Gonzaga. Coastal's already beaten five ACC squads this season, which is more than Maryland can say, and they're probably the toughest test we'll see until the season finale series against Miami. I think Branden Kline will take the mound, and neither of our top relievers (Arico and Wilson) pitched at all against Maryland and will be available on Tuesday as well. A win tomorrow would do wonders for bringing a super-regional to Charlottesville.

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But if I had to pick the best part of the weekend, hell, it wouldn't even automatically be the lacrosse team's ACC championship, although a trophy is a very shiny piece of validation. Frickin' finally beat Duke! For the first time since I graduated. Adam Ghitelman is your tournament MVP, although if that award wasn't cemented when he flung the ball into the open net from 60 yards out, then it ain't worth shit. Goalie goal! That alone is MVP stuff - 16 saves against 6 goals versus Maryland is just gravy. Just my luck it comes in the one part of the year that isn't on TV in these parts, because that would have been the best highlight ever.

(Sheesh, listen to me. Here, true story: it's not that I paid no attention at all to lacrosse while I was at school, but my actual, active fandom dates from the 2006 championship - the semis against Syracuse, specifically - when I turned on the TV just to see what might be on and it literally just happened to be UVA lacrosse. I made it a point to also tune in to the UMass game and since then I've been hooked. I had had no idea they actually televised it; here I am four years later bitching that some of it still isn't. At least there's lousy-res streaming video online.)

Anyhoo. It certainly helped that Maryland sat Will Yeatman, who stands six-foot-seventeen and weighs at least 400 pounds and is the only Terp who can consistently score goals on us without having them waved off. Still, holding a fellow ACC squad to six goals is an accomplishment no matter how you slice it. Really, five, since Maryland's final goal came with 11 seconds to go and Ghitelman probably already trying to decide where to put his MVP trophy.

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Other stuff from the weekend:

- Jeff White, as usual, is on top of his game. Indispensible breakdown of maybe UVA's most successful weekend of the past decade.

- White did miss one thing: Chris Cook was the only Hoo taken in the NFL draft, but he went before every Hokie. Tomorrow I'll have the full rundown.

- He missed one other thing, though as a mouthpiece of the school he's really not allowed to talk about it: the Jordan Lomax commitment. Yup, even football had an awesome weekend. I'll update the recruiting board shortly.

- The post-spring depth chart is out, too. Interesting bits: 1) Marc Verica is clearly listed as the starting QB. 2) Perry Jones is the starting tailback - though that comes without competition, yet, from Dominique Wallace. 3) Steve Greer isn't the clearcut starter at MLB. (I expect that to change, though.) 4) LaRoy Reynolds is the starting Sam - and is listed at a meager 215 pounds. 5) No kicker is named.

Now that spring practice is over, I'll be updating the depth chart on the blog here within the week, and pushing the graduated seniors off the edge into the wide world.

- Steps to happiness: 1) Take this Sporcle quiz. 2) Cackle with glee. (You'll figure out why once you've completed the quiz.)