Virginia returns home from Bubbleville with a surprising loss on its record already, licking its wounds after being outhustled by the sharp-shooting San Francisco Dons. We find another SF awaiting us, the Saint Francis (of Pennsylvania, in the NEC, not to be confused with St Francis of New York, also in the NEC) Red Flash. The computers say this is an easier opponent than the Dons, who were a Top 100 team and hailed from the solidly competitive WCC. But what if I told you St Francis had already gone into an ACC gym and scored an upset once this season?

Game Details:

Date/Time: Tuesday, Dec 1st, 4:00 PM
Location: John Paul Jones Arena, Charlottesville, VA
TV: ACC Network

What ‘They’ Say

Depth Chart:

Starters

Key Reserves

The ABC’s of SFU:

A) Rob Krimmel is a rising young coach. The 43 year old took over the Red Flash 8 years ago and has steadily improved them every year in the Northeastern Conference, going 5-13 in his first season then incrementally improving to 13-5 last year. They’re a little overlooked because Krimmel hasn’t gotten them over the hump in the NEC tournament yet to secure the program the coveted NCAA Tournament bid, but they’re competitive nontheless. They’ve had the NEC’s best offense by KenPom’s metrics 3 of the last 4 seasons, and that kind of consistency tells you it’s more about the coach than just hitting gold with a couple players. They’re expected to contend against this year as one of the NEC’s best programs.

B) They already have one ACC pelt. While UVA is the ACC’s most high profile team to lose to a mid major this first week of the season, Pitt was the first last Wednesday when St Francis came to town. Behind a withering pressuring defense that forced 23 Pitt turnovers (11 live ball), held Pitt to 6-of-24 (25%) 3 point shooting, and aggressive work on the offensive glass (15 SFU O-Reb’s), the Red Flash stunned Pitt. They started fast and had the lead built to 20 points early in the second half before Pitt narrowed it to the final 10 point margin. St Francis won’t worry about playing in another empty ACC gym.

C) They’re homegrown. In an era where rosters across college basketball show drastic effects of the turnover market, both inbound and out, Saint Francis is refreshingly organic. Despite losing three big contributors from last season to graduation, Krimmel trusted in his pipeline, keeping all his incumbents in town and bringing in a cadre of new blood in the form of true freshmen to take over vacated rotation spots. It does mean the Red Flash are a little young, with three freshmen playing big minutes. But with a lot of experience on the roster as well, veterans familiar with Krimmel’s systems, it’s minimized the dropoff and allowed them to be effective out of the gate.

Their season to date:

St Francis (PA) is 1-1 on the year. They opened last week with an 80-70 win over ACC middleweight foe, at the Oakland Zoo no less, before returning home to lose by 15 to *ahem* UMBC.

Keys to getting the win:

1) Get some vintage Kihei. Kihei looked uninspiring in his point guard battle against San Francisco’s veteran floor general Jamaree Bouyea, letting Bouyea score 19 points and dish 6 assists against no turnovers. Saint Francis has their own senior lead guard who’s looked good so far this year in Dixon-Conover, who went for 21 points, 5 assists, and 4 steals as he outplayed Pitt’s junior PG Xavier Johnson last week. We need to see our all-ACC guard play like what we saw the last two years, inspired defense and efficient offense orchestration. His 5 assists vs 4 turnovers between our two games so far are not what we need to see from him; here’s hoping Bouyea’s performance was a wakeup call.

2) Get into the lane. The whole point of running the new 5-out offense we’re all so excited about isn’t really just to have more players out there hitting 3’s (though as we saw vs Towson, that’s nice too). It’s to open up the lane to attack it free of clogging defenders. This goes double against pressuring defenses like (a) we saw from San Francisco and (b) are about to see with Saint Francis. UVA’s downhill offense was okay against San Francisco, but it wasn’t enough, hitting a mediocre 46% on our 2’s. Meanwhile, UMBC against St Francis last week exploited the downhill game with a 22-of-32 performance on their 2PA’s (68%) helping pad their scoring even during a cold 3-point-shooting outing.

3) Don’t let Flagg get going. The senior big man, leading St Francis in scoring thus far, has only missed two shots so far this season. He’s also been one of the NEC’s top 3 offensive rebounder (by OR%) in every season he’s played so far this year. He made Pitt’s John Hugely look silly (though really that’s on Capel for playing a freshman 20 minutes at the 5), and traded buckets efficiently with UMBC’s own senior big man. Obviously Jay Huff is a plus defender and hopefully Flagg won’t go nuts against him, but I’d still expect Tony to deploy his patented post-trap-double at times in this game; Flagg’s a veteran, though, and will look to make the smart pass, and you know Krimmel is coaching for that consideration, so UVA’s rotations off those traps will need to be extra sharp.

Predictions:

Can’t be a good omen that we lose to San Francisco and immediately have to play the Anglicized version of that same name, right? I kid, I kid.

All things considered, though, the loss to San Francisco both demonstrated some things that were troublesome in addition to a few things that aren’t. We’ve got new faces in key roles in Hauser and Murphy, and they were always going to need some games to find their groove wearing a UVA uniform. That goes double for the freshmen we had making their D-1 debuts. But other aspects of the loss, such as Kihei’s lacking defense and a paltry 2 shots for Jay Huff, are things that we shouldn’t see from this team, and they’ll need fixing ASAP. Two have 2 of our big 3 (3 of our big 4 if you count Murphy) go relatively silent in that San Francisco was really disappointing; let’s see if that’s the case this week.

If Huff and Kihei can bounce back with strong 2-way games against Flagg and Dixon-Conover, respectively, it’ll unlock both our offense and our defense to excel and put UVA headed back in the right direction.

Hoos Win – 68-55