Every year, in the weeks following the conclusion of UVA’s basketball season, I like to do a retrospective, hash out my feelings, do a little introspection on the trends I’m seeing from the program, and look ahead at what’s next for the Hoos. Lord knows it’s never a boring March and April. This year I’m breaking it up into three installments, focusing first on the positives from this past season, second on the struggles, and third on the path ahead. This is Part One. 

As Matthew Cleveland hit the most absurd buzzer-beating 3 pointer to ruin UVA’s Senior Night, even the most die-hard UVA fans realized that was probably the nail in UVA’s “at-large” resume. The Hoos were eliminated from a Top 4 seed in the ACC Tournament (and the associated double bye), meaning UVA had a long, challenging 4-game path to an ACC Tournament Title, even just to make the Finals, to keep our Big Dance streak alive.

And anyone who watched the Hoos this season knew that wasn’t happening. The defense wasn’t tight enough. The shooting was way too sporadic.

Simply put: This just wasn’t our year.

And it’s not going to be “our year” every year. That’s just reality. Even for the bluest of Blue Bloods.

Last year Duke finished 13-11 (9-9). The year before that UNC finished 14-19 (6-14). This year it was our turn to underperform.

How are we supposed to feel about that?

What’s the right balance of disappointment and appreciation? It’s a weird spot for us UVA fans to be in, because in some ways this is new ground, to have been so accustomed to success that an NIT season is considered a major letdown.

At a bare minimum it’s the first time we’ve felt this way in over 35 years. After four straight great seasons (most but not all with Ralph) where UVA finished with a Sweet 16, an Elite Eight, and two Final Fours, the letdown finally came in the 1984-85 season as an underclassman core of Mel Kennedy, Tom Sheehey, and Olden Polynice were not yet ready to carry the team and the Hoos finished with a losing ACC record for the first time in 8 years.

For context, at least, Terry Holland and his successor/protege Jeff Jones got the train somewhat promptly back on track, making the NCAAT 9 of the next 12 seasons. But anyways, that’s history, let’s get back to talking about the present.

I want to start by taking some time to really put things into perspective. Certainly we’ll do a bit of finger pointing. We’ll ask what went “wrong” in Part 2. We’ll talk about where we go from here, what needs to improve for next season, in Part 3. But we’d be doing a major disservice to Coach Bennett, his staff, and his players if we don’t put it all in proper context.

This wasn’t a bad season. It was a good one.

It wasn’t a great one, sure, but by any objective, neutral, fair assessment it at least okay. We won 21 games, which is a win total Dave Leitao only hit in his best year, Pete Gillen never reached, and Jeff Jones only exceeded once.

We finished 12-8 in the ACC (13-9 if you add in the ACCT results), which is still four games over .500 in the country’s premier college basketball conference. Jones, Gillen, and Leitao combined for only two seasons that successful in ACC play.

And recognize the challenge that this roster faced just to get there. This is a program whose success is built upon stability and continuity, developing primarily from within and often only needing to plug a couple of rotation spots in any given offseason. And yet this past summer Bennett had to replace all but two of his main rotation players, Reece Beekman and Kihei Clark the only two regulars returning from last year’s ACC 1-seed. Just to round out a Top 8, Tony had to promote Caffaro to his first regular rotation minutes in his 3 years here, throw Shedrick and Stattmann into nightly minutes after medical issues sidelined both most of last year, bring in two immediately eligible transfers in Franklin and Gardner to start and play 30 minutes a night, and even give regular minutes to a former walk-on in Malachi Poindexter just to give Kihei some time to breathe. And yet, despite this incredible turnover, this team finished 6th in the 15-team ACC. Think about that.

Finishing over .500 in ACC play keeps Tony’s winning conference record streak alive at 11 seasons and counting. It’s the third longest streak in the history of the ACC, better program consistency than anything Roy Williams or Gary Williams or Jim Valvano or many other greats ever put together. The only two coaches ahead of Bennett at this point are Coach K’s 13 winning ACC seasons 2007-2020 and Dean Smith’s never-to-be-caught 33 straight seasons.

The Hoos finished 4-4 against teams that made the Sweet 16. We swept Miami, scored a win in Cameron Indoor, and knocked off Providence back in the Roman Legends Classic in New Jersey in November.

Hoos win an absurd 8th straight Holiday Tourney!

2013: Corpus Christi Challenge ?
2014: Barclays Center Classic ?
2015: Charleston Classic ?
2016: Emerald Coast Classic ?
2017: Preseason NIT ?
2018: Battle 4 Atlantis ?
2019: HoF Tip-Off ?
2020: n/a
2021: Roman Legends ?

— Hoos Place (@HoosPlace) November 24, 2021

That Roman Legends Classic, by the way, was UVA’s eighth straight Holiday Tournament title, a win streak dating all the way back to 2013’s Corpus Christi Classic.

And let’s also not gloss over that Cameron Indoor win. UVA went 23 years between road wins at Duke at one point, going back to Cory Alexander’s 22 point night in 1995. And even then, that win was *just* over the Pete Gaudet Blue Devils, no Coach K on the sideline, and in that instance a UVA team that would make the Elight Eight would still need double OT to beat a Devils team that would finish 2-14 in the conference. But like Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile, Ty Jerome ended UVA’s mental block in Cameron, and four years later this imperfect UVA team would go back there and hand Krzyzewski one last loss to UVA. And no asterisk next to that win like in ’95; Reece Beekman iced a Duke team that’s now in the Final Four and will possibly have six players drafted, Jayden Gardner locking down Lottery Pick Paolo Banchero to his worst performance of the season.

The season had other highs as well. It was fun watching Tony Bennett end Chris Mack’s Louisville tenure in January, a Cards loss at JPJ being the final straw before his firing. We saw UVA players have great seasons, with Gardner, Beekman, and Kihei ending up on All-ACC teams. Beekman even finished 2nd in ACC DPOY, and hard a strong argument he should’ve won had Mark Williams not been wearing a Duke jersey.

Beekman set a UVA single-season record for steals with 73, beating out Othell Wilson’s 1983-84 total of 69 takeaways. (Personal note, it was really satisfying to be the guy to edit the UVA Records Wikipedia page and put Reece on top this week!). Reece’s 181 assists was also the 7th best single season mark for a UVA point guard, topping teammate Kihei Clark’s best year of 176 in the 2019-20 season.

Kihei Clark made his own mark on the UVA record book, his four-year assist total at 539, which ranks 5th all-time at UVA, behind only greats John Crotty, Sean Singletary, Jeff Jones, and London Perrantes. He’s only the 5th player in UVA history to exceed both 500 assists and 1,000 points (Jeff Jones never scored that much, but Donald Hand joins the rest in that exclusive club). If this is indeed Kihei’s swan song as a Cavalier (as of press time no formal announcement has been made re: his remaining COVID freebie year), I hope it’s an opportunity to celebrate a storied career from a player no one saw coming four years ago. He was the X-Factor on a title team, and a veteran presence and key leader on three teams since, earning All-ACC honors and keeping UVA in the thick of the conference chase year after year as he mentors Reece Beekman into a similar role going forward.

And rim-protector Kadin Shedrick broke out, notching 67 blocks on the year. It’s the 6th best single-season total for a Hoo ever, but more impressively it’s the 2nd-best non-Ralph Sampson season (Ralph has each of the Top 4 seasons, and by a wide margin). Only Kris Hunter’s 88 blocks in the 1998-99 season is better than what Kadin accomplished this season, and Shedrick edged out career best seasons from recent elite shot-swat leaders Mamadi (63 in ’18-19) and Jay Huff (66 in ’20-21).

And let’s be honest, we finished 6th in the 15-team ACC. And while five of those teams made the Dance and we didn’t, there were still 8 league schools that didn’t have any postseason whatsoever, and would’ve loved to have had the season we did. Think of FSU, who often gets mentioned along with UVA in terms of the ACC’s top two upstarts of the last decade, who finished just 10-10 in the conference. Jim Boeheim at Syracuse giving all the shots to his kids took a losing conference record. Fallen royalty Louisville was a trainwreck. There are a ton of entitled and spoiled fan bases feeling MUCH worse than we are right now.

So, you know, perspective…

At the same time, there’s a reason we feel this way. Compare our collective emotions to this time 9 years ago, when we ended the 2012-13 season also at home in the NIT quarterfinals. That year, we’d also started the season with a pair of bad losses to midmajor teams. The 2012 club lost at home to Delaware and on a neutral floor in Richmond to ODU. At first glance those are comparable losses to this season’s L’s to Navy and at JMU. In both cases those were millstones tied to our season resumes that were ultimately difference makers at Bubble time. Both those seasons also had big Duke wins, and both those seasons saw UVA still finish with a winning ACC record.

But in many ways, that’s where the similarities end. The 2012-13 team was part of the program’s growth trajectory in Bennett’s early tenure. He was still establishing culture. Recruiting was a work in progress. That team dealt with injury issues, starting with Malcolm Brogdon sitting out the entire year to rehab his foot, and being complicated with stretches of in-season missed time for Jontel Evans, Teven Jones, Darion Atkins, and Mike Tobey. It was also a team overly reliant on freshmen like Tobey, Justin Anderson, Evan Nolte, and Teven Jones. That team, you could tell, was simply in a transition / growth year. They were very clearly a team that was a season away. You could walk away from that NIT loss to Iowa and say, “alright, great effort, great things ahead with the freshmen getting experience, Brogdon returning, Gill coming, etc.” And at that point, we weren’t so accustomed to annual NCAAT berths that an NIT appearance was anything other than a pleasant postseason opportunity, an appropriate stepping stone for a young club.

Now, nine seasons later, UVA not making the Big Dance is a let down. Such is the double-edged sword of raised expectations.

But as mentioned above, aside from the Kansas Jayhawks, even the Blue Bloods suffer from down years, as evidenced by Duke and UNC the last two years. Looked at the prolonged funks both Louisville and Syracuse are in. Tom Izzo and Michigan State went 15-13 (9-11) last year, while at the same time Kentucky went 9-16 (8-9).

To some degree, UVA’s down year this season feels like the latest in a gradual decline from the 2019 Championship high, but while the last two seasons lacked the March punch, we need to be reasonable about those two seasons. In 2020, before the pandemic ended the season at the ACC Tournament, UVA was on an 8 game winning streak, 2nd in the ACC, and projected a 7-seed or better. Playing its best ball of the year, there was some chance it could’ve at least made a Sweet 16 run. And last season UVA won the ACC regular season, was in prime position to win the conference tournament, and to my dying day I’ll blame the 4-13 loss to Ohio on a quarantine week stuck in a hotel room killing the team’s ability to stay loose and practice. Had COVID not struck and the team been able to adequately prepare, the team had the offense to once again get out of the first weekend.

So yes, the two preceding years may not have been Top 10 good, but they were still damn good by historical UVA standards, two ACC-contending seasons with NCAAT berths, just that each was unfortunately cut short in one way or another by COVID.

Which means that really, this is our first subpar season in nearly a decade, and even then it was still not that bad, as we’ve mentioned above. Fans who want to piss and moan about it to a large degree need to appreciate things for the bigger picture. One missed Dance out of the last 8+ is not the end of the world.

But some might ask, “what if it’s just the start?”

That’s the million dollar question. I talked about down years from Duke, Michigan State, Kentucky, and UNC. The key for each of those programs was bouncing back a season later to an appropriate level. Those were one-season aberrations. You can wave those away with just the wrong recruiting class or injuries or some other perfect storm. On the other hand we’ve seen former Top 10 stalwarts like Cuse, Louisville, Maryland, and even Pitt (yes, young’uns, Pitt under Ben Howland and early Jamie Dixon was an annual powerhouse in the Big East before realignment) slowly slide back to mediocrity or worse over the last decade or so. Those declines started as just one down year, but that became two, then more.

So how do we know what we’re looking at here? Or more accurately, how do we prevent it from becoming the latter and ensure it’s only the former? We’ll look at the answer to that in Parts 2 and 3 of this series, where we’ll next break down what exactly has gone “wrong” to put us here, and then finish by looking forward at next season and beyond in the hopes of a return to dominance.

But for today, for this first piece, I really wanted to take the time to take a deep breath and appreciate this completed season for what it was, rather than for what it wasn’t. I don’t want 2008 me to come through a time machine to yell at me for being ungrateful or spoiled. Nor do I want 2019 me to remind me how I said after the Title that the championship banner was going to keep me warm for many years to come, even if the team had rough seasons following.

I love watching Bennett teams play, and I love watching them win. Did we win as much this year as we have in some great years past? No. But just like you can’t win ’em all, I’m not going to get upset about the details in UVA missing the Dance for the first time in ages. The Hoos finished in the top half of the elite ACC and earned a postseason tournament spot for the 11th straight season, and this is still the Golden Era of UVA basketball. Let’s remember our Thankfulness Pillar.

Let’s be thankful for the heart and resilience of this club. For the dedicated careers of Kody and (as of now, still a maybe) Kihei, who gave four years of class and hard work to this program. For the emergence of Papi and Shedrick from little-used reserves to capable starters with even further room to grow. For Reece Beekman stepping up into an All-ACC caliber point guard in his second year. For Jayden Gardner and Armaan Franklin for transferring to UVA to take on the whirlwind of picking up Bennett’s complex systems on the fly and jumping right into major starting roles with no complaint. For the young players who added their contributions through hard practice, vocal support, and off-court dedication whose brightest days are still ahead, even if those days aren’t at UVA. For the Green Team guys who are forever the backbone of this program’s Servanthood culture. For the team’s Unity in adversity, never letting setbacks break the team, continuing to fight all the way up to the final buzzer last week.

This team only returned two, TWO, main rotation players from last year’s team in Clark and Beekman. And yet somehow put together the pieces to finish in the top half of the league, take down a number of top teams, and never fold against tall odds. That deserves our appreciation.

I’ll see you all back here for Part 2.