The Virginia Cavaliers will take the floor tonight against the Red Raiders of Texas Tech to battle for a national championship with last year’s colossal defeat exorcised from their psyches.
Last March, they became the first number one seed to lose to a 16thseed, the UMBC Retrievers coached by Ryan Odom. The death threats on social media, the endless jabs, the anxiety that debilitated their star guard for weeks in the aftermath will all be erased at tip off.
A few weeks after that loss, I attended an event in Baltimore where Coach Odom spoke. My dad, an assistant at UMBC in the late 70s was being honored by the Baltimore Catholic League.
Odom had hit rock bottom three years before after losing an assistant’s job at UNC Charlotte and had climbed all the way back as head coach of UMBC to take on a team that he had grown up with.
His dad, Dave Odom was an assistant when Virginia last went to the Final Four in 1984. Virginia’s head coach at that time, Terry Holland regularly employed “the smart take from the strong” philosophy coined by Princeton’s Pete Carril. Virginia nearly toppled the Houston Cougars in the national semi-final led by Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde “The Glide” Drexler. Ryan Odom loved the Virginia Cavaliers as a boy, biking to practice to watch seven-foot four Ralph Sampson perfect his aircraft carrier techniques. I remarked that Terry Holland had a dog named Dean Smith back when I was in school there and Ryan told me that he had spent a long time with the canine Dean.
“It was 2015. My newborn son was diagnosed with an illness and my family had no health insurance,” said Odom. “Fortunately, my dad came down to Charlotte to be with me. We watched Virginia lose to Michigan State that year. We both like Coach Bennett and who he is. Then I got a job at Lenore-Rhyne and two years later we were back in Charlotte to face the Cavaliers.”
He found himself in a locker room down the hall from Coach Bennett.
“What you just heard,” he told the audience, “was my pre-game speech before the 2018 game.”
Odom’s Retrievers unraveled Virginia’s slow-down offense that night like a ball of orange and blue yarn. He loosened their death grip on the tempo of the game and their suffocating defense by spreading them out with five quicker players capable of beating them to the basket. Virginia look tired and sluggish—having just submitted their resume of 31 wins and 2 losses. Their Achilles heel is that they are not built to play from behind. They panicked and lost by twenty points.
Under Tony Bennett’s cool command, Virginia has lost only six games in the last two years. Odom’s formula has been used by Duke to beat the Cavaliers twice this year. Bennet continues to mine the UMBC experience--calling the UMBC loss “a painful gift” in a recent article.
The loss still resonates. The Twitter avatar of Virginia’s star guard Kyle Guy still shows him slumped over with UMBC players celebrating in the background. Kyle endured months of mental anguish and went public with his anxiety struggles on social media.
An Indiana native, Guy is right out of central casting for a Hoosiers remake. He’s affable and tough and can shoot from anywhere. All pure shooters are drama queens--they live and die by their stroke which comes and goes according to the whims of the basketball gods. He struggled early in this tournament and has factored prominently in Virginia’s last two come from behind victories.
This NCAA tournament has not been easy for Virginia. Their gauntlet through the Caves of Mordor has been fraught with Orcian perils. They faced 16thseed Gardner-Webb in the opening game and were quickly down 14 points. The UMBC curse had struck again, for at least for one half. Laying bricks from the outside, Guy went inside and muscled in rebounds to bring his team back.
Virginia faced certain extinction against Purdue. The play that saved them can only be referred to as “The Assist.” Fueled by 42 points from Carsen Edwards, Purdue led by three with less than ten seconds remaining and Ty Jerome on the line shooting two shots. Jerome hit the first. The second shot was short and seven-footer Jack Salt tapped it towards half court. With three seconds remaining, Kihei Clark ran it down and rifled a one-handed football pass to Mamadi Diakite who swished a ten-footer as time expired to send the game into overtime. The Cavs prevailed.
I was a third-year student at UVA when Virginia last went to the Final Four—taking a poetry writing class with Charles Wright and Gregory Orr. In the dark ages that followed Virginia had been the Chicago Cubs of the ACC. Then the Cubs won a World Championship.
Tony Bennett has built the program back to national prominence. He rarely berates the officials and focuses instead on his players and the details needed to win games. He makes great adjustments at half-time to counteract what the opponents are doing. The basketball team and the university are fortunate to have someone of his caliber on the sidelines. This year he is proving that luck is also a necessary ingredient.
Virginia should have lost to Auburn in the semi-finals. Floor general Ty Jerome committed a stupid fourth foul with less than four minutes remaining. UVA had squandered a ten-point lead. Auburn took the lead 62-60 with 1.5 seconds left.
Pure shooters will always seize the moment. Somehow Kyle Guy came open in the corner. He caught the ball and went up for a clean look at a game-winning three-pointer. Samir Doughty, Auburn’s star guard nudged Guy back and his legs splayed out from under him. The ball hit the side iron a tad short and Auburn had seemingly won the game.
The whistle blew and Guy went to the line for three shots. Kyle Guy—the face of the Virginia squad—avoided any contact with his teammates before he stepped to the line. He calmly poured in three free-throws to once and for all expunge the ghost of UMBC.
Twitter erupted with conspiracy theories. How could Guy get that call? The refs had missed calls against Virginia—including a crucial double-dribble with only seconds remaining.
The reason Guy got the call in my estimation was because he flashed open. It wasn’t a desperation heave but a clean, straight up and down look at the basket from beyond the arc. That call is made regularly and this time at the end of a game. I’ve watched forty years of Virginia basketball and can honestly say that we have not been known for being favored by the referees--ever.
College basketball has become more like the NBA in recent years with commentators slipping in things like, “he’s a lottery pick” during introductions of the players. Double-dribble and traveling calls occur often and are not called. It’s like the NBA in the 1970s--the referees don’t know what they are anymore.
The dunk and the ESPN Sportscenter highlight are more important than minor infractions. Calls are missed with regularity. Virginia lost to Duke when Grayson Allen traveled a few years back on a last second shot.
To win the national championship, Virginia must defenestrate its most formidable opponent yet. Unheralded Texas Tech at 31-6 is a steroidal JUCO-like juggernaut of long, athletic and experienced talent including Jarett Culver and Matt Mooney. Their starting five averages close to 23 years of age and poses many problems for Virginia. As I write this, I can hear Virginia coach Tony Bennet’s pencil on the page as he scrawls out his schemes.
For Virginia to win, they will need a strong, Keith Smart-like performance from sophomore guard De’Andre Hunter who has yet to find himself in the postseason. The Cavaliers defense will need to take center stage against a team that made Michigan State look pedestrian. Guy will do his thing along with Jerome—and Clark will need to control the tempo amidst a forest of Red Raiders. Look for sophomore center Jay Huff to provide a spark.
Tonight’s match-up should be a low-scoring, smash-mouth affair. It will not be an AAU basketball track meet to one-hundred points. It will not feature the one-and-done players like Zion Williamson whom the sponsors wanted to see in the Finals. It will be a possession-by-possession battle. Every dribble, pass and shot will not come easy.
As the son of a former coach, that’s the way I like it.
Dean Smith is a poet and sportswriter from Baltimore. He is the Director of Cornell University Press and a lifelong Orioles fan.
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