Stunned UVa must now figure out how to pick up pieces following epic loss

The Cavaliers had been ranked No. 1 in the country for the past five weeks and had set a school record with 31 wins.

In the end, it wasn’t even close. Maryland-Baltimore County, which prefers to go as UMBC, was a 74-54 winner over a UVa team whose only loss since December was by one point to Virginia Tech in overtime.

“I told our guys in the locker room, ‘A week ago, we were cutting down the nets in the ACC Tournament and how good that felt,” UVa coach Tony Bennett said.

“They had a historic season. They really did in terms of ACC wins and an ACC conference tournament championship and then we had a historic loss, being the first No. 1 seed to lose.”

The No. 1 seeds were 135-0 against No. 16 seeds in the NCAA Tournament before Friday night.”

“It’s the first time it’s happened but this was a possibility,” Bennett said. “We knew that. We had a remarkable year and we knew our margin for error wasn’t huge. We weren’t quite right.”

The loss came at the hands of a former member of the Virginia family, second-year UMBC head coach Ryan Odom, a UVa ballboy when his father, Dave, was on the UVa staff in the 1980s.

“Obviously, you could see [UVa’s] pain there after the game, once it had settled in,” Odom said. “But, certainly it doesn’t take away from the happiness that I have for our guys.”

It was the largest margin of defeat for the Cavaliers since last year’s NCAA Tournament, when they were 65-39 losers to Florida in a second-round NCAA game in Orlando, Florida.

At the end of the regular season, Virginia ranked No. 1 in the country in scoring defense with a yield of 53.1 points per game. On Friday night, UMBC (25-10) scored 53 points in the second half.

Jairus Lyles, a graduate student. who began his college career at VCU and later spent time at Robert Morris, had 23 of his game-high 28 points in the second half.

Lyles is a graduate of DeMatha High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, and attended camp at Virginia. Both of his parents went to UVa and his dad, Lester, was an All-ACC defensive back.

It was the younger Lyles who got the Retrievers into the NCAA field with a buzzer-beating 3-pointer in a 65-62 victory at Vermont.

While Virginia (31-3) did not look strong out of the box Friday, the Cavaliers were tied 21-21 with UMBC at the half.

“It’s tough to remember what was said,” said UVa sophomore Ty Jerome, whose impression of Bennett’s halftime was that “every possession is going to matter and we had to buckle down, especially defensively, and offensively just to be more aggressive.

“And we didn’t do either one of those things.”

The Retrievers (25-10) got a three-point play and then a 3-pointer from Joe Sherbure to go up 27-21 to start the second half. It was the beginning of a 17-3 run, and the Cavaliers were basically toast after the 10-minute mark.

“I don’t think there was any point in the game that we thought we couldn’t play with them,” Lyles said. “We knew we could play with them before the game. Tying it up with them at halftime definitely gave us more confidence.”

Lyles was one of four UMBC players in double figures, along with Sherburne, 5-foot-8 point guard K.J. Maura and 6-5 sophomore Arkel Markel, who had a double-double (12 points, 10 rebounds).

The Retrievers outrebounded the Cavaliers 33-22, with no UVa players grabbing more than five rebounds.

Jerome and fellow sophomore guard Kyle Guy had 15 points apiece and combined to go 13-of-27 from the field. The rest of the team was 10-for-29, including an 0-for-9 outing by fifth-year guard Devon Hall, who was 0-for--6 on 3-pointers.

Bennett subbed Nigel Johnson for Hall with 17:09 remaining in the first half and UVa leading 5-3. Hall played a total of 28 minutes after playing 30 minutes or more in 20 of the previous 22 games.

Fellow veteran Isaiah Wilkins fouled out in 24 minutes.

The Cavaliers were without prize redshirt freshman De’Andre Hunter, one of the heroes of their ACC championship run, who learned earlier in the week that he had a broken left wrist and would require surgery.

“I know that they just lost one of their best players so that is a factor [in UMBC’s win] as well,” Odom said

The Cavaliers shot 41.1 percent from the field, their low over the last nine games, and matched a season-low with four 3-point field goals. Their 18.2 percent shooting from beyond the arc was another season low.

“The adulation [and] praise, it comes and goes and we had a lot of that this year,” said Bennett, whose team will finish the season as the only Division I men’s team with as few as three losses.

“On the other side, there will be blame and people pointing [fingers]. That can’t, in the end, define these guys. If you play this game and you step in the arena, this stuff can happen.”