WHAT THEY SAID
A look at what national reporters and analysts are saying about U.Va.’s loss to UMBC.
History made, and the greatest choke in basketball history now on its ledger, it is time to deconstruct the towering fraud that is Virginia basketball.
Virginia hoops as coached by (Tony) Bennett is built on rigidity. You play by a set of well-defined beliefs and principles and rules. It is Swiss timepiece basketball.
So what happens when the watch stops? When the clock breaks? When things go wrong?
Panic is what happens. Take Virginia out of its narrowly constructed comfort zone, make it play faster or make more shots than it is accustomed to, and you can see the cogs and sprockets in Bennett’s precise head start to seize up.
— Pat Forde, Yahoo
I’ve seen coaches win games in this tournament, two, three, four games, and they’re terrible coaches. Things just went right. It’s what you do over the course of 35 games that determines what kind of coach you are.
A reasonably good player on the pro tour can beat Tiger Woods in one round. When he was in his peak, he got beat a lot.
It’s one-and-done. You’re off your game a little bit, you know. People will say, they’re just good in the regular season, they’re not good — that’s just stupid. That’s just stupid.
If I could hire a coach in this country and I could get Tony Bennett, there would be nobody in second place. Nobody. He’s kicked our (butt) every time we’ve played him except we got lucky once.
— Jim Boeheim, Syracuse coach
Juxtapose Virginia’s postseason track record with Virginia’s stylistic quirks, and one is inescapably tempted to reach a particular conclusion. It is the same conclusion that the baseball general manager Billy Beane seemed to draw when explaining how his unusually assembled Oakland Athletics of the early 2000s had tremendous regular-season success but never got to the World Series. “My stuff,” he said (though he didn’t say “stuff”), “doesn’t work in the playoffs.”
Beane said last week that his notorious line was a reference to the flukiness of baseball’s playoffs, not to the way the A’s played. The dissonance between Virginia’s regular-season and postseason performances, he insisted, is most likely pure luck.
“It doesn’t mean there’s a systemic flaw in what they’re doing,” Beane added.
— Marc Tracy, The New York Times
But Bennett’s style is so distinctive that, according to coaches intimately familiar with it and those who have pulled off upsets of the Cavaliers, there is — if a coaching staff’s collective ego will allow it — a decided formula to disrupting and even defeating U.Va., and the secret is as simple as this: Play the Cavaliers the way they play you.
“Kryptonite,” was how one of Bennett’s coaching peers described the strategy — not much of a secret after U.Va. has fallen victim to its own attacks, to lower-seeded opponents, in four of the past five tournaments.
“You kind of do to him what he does to other people,” said the fellow coach, who requested anonymity in order to honestly assess the strengths and weaknesses of Bennett’s system. “We can’t beat them at our own game, but we can beat them at his game.”
— Kent Babb, The Washington Post
I was shocked. I kept thinking something it was April Fool’s Day or something. I didn’t know what the crap was going on.
— Roy Williams, UNC basketball coach
This may be the most improbable upset in NCAA tournament history.
Virginia had just lost De’Andre Hunter. I don’t think that was the controlling factor in this game, but I mean, it harkens back to Chaminade beating Virginia when it was No. 1 with Ralph Sampson. I mean, who could imagine it happening? And it’s happened now. Lightning has struck twice on Virginia.
— Jay Bilas, ESPN
