Deep Dive: State of the Program, Part II

In Part I of our State of the Program review, we acknowledged that UVa basketball has moved into a still-successful period but has dropped down a tier or two in the college basketball hierarchy.

In Part II, we’re going to look at what Tony Bennett and the Cavaliers need to get back to the dominance seen from 2014 to 2019, which culminated in the national championship.

As soon as the buzzer sounded and UVa was out of the NCAA Tournament, the “Tony Bennett can’t win in March,” or “UVa’s style is the problem” takes were dusted off and trotted back out. Those ideas were passable before 2019, especially after the loss to UMBC, but it seems odd to go back to that well after we’ve all seen Bennett take Virginia to a national title.

We’ve seen Bennett’s team fail in March and thrive, too. Since the 2014 season, Virginia has had as many Sweet 16 appearances (three) as first-round losses. Of course, the Wahoos have also been to a pair of Elite 8s and beaten four teams ranked 32nd or higher in KenPom to get there. Virginia has certainly underachieved based on the seed line but that’s true of most teams because most of the 64 teams don’t make it to the second weekend and even fewer beyond that.

The fact remains, though, that UVa hasn’t won a single NCAA Tournament game since the title. For a program that had been so good for more than five seasons, that sort of drought would not have been something fans (or this writer) would’ve predicted four years ago. But rather than pointing to style or Bennett’s postseason coaching abilities as the reason for the quick exits, the correct approach is to look at the root cause.

And here it is: The main reason UVa hasn’t been as good in the postseason since the title is because the Wahoos haven’t been as good, period. And that’s not a coaching issue; it’s a talent issue.

No coach is perfect. Tony Bennett isn’t the greatest basketball coach of all time. But he has a track record that shows that he can ‘take his and beat yours,’ more often than not. That’s only the case, though, when he has the appropriate amount of talent on the roster.

As we mentioned in Part 1, UVa’s overall success has dropped off since 2019. The program has two shared ACC regular-season titles during that stretch…and that’s it. The Cavaliers won a good number of games but haven’t been overwhelming teams the way they did in the 2014-19 stretch. And they’ve lost more games against weaker competition than they did during that stretch, with fewer signature wins in part because the ACC has really not been the same since that 2019 season where the league had three No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament. UVa has zero ACC Tournament titles, and not a single NCAA Tournament win; the program also missed the dance altogether last season.

The results have been down and UVa hasn’t been as efficient, either. From 2014 to 2019, the Cavaliers ranked in the top 12 of the KenPom rankings every season. They ranked in the 6th or better in five of those six seasons (12th in 2017). Since then, they’ve ranked 42nd in 2020, 19th in 2021, 72nd in 2022 and 34th this year. KenPom isn’t the end-all-be-all of course but going into the Sweet 16, some 15 of the teams remaining are ranked 32nd or better; Princeton is the exception. And 14 of the remaining teams are in the top 25, with the top seven are all still alive. If we’re using this year as a template, only the 2021 team looks like one that belongs with most of the true contenders in the second weekend.

And it’s not too difficult to figure out why this has happened. After the title, Kyle Guy, Ty Jerome and De’Andre Hunter, the core of that team and a lion’s share of the scoring production, departed for the NBA. UVa became a victim of it’s own recruiting and development success, and there was no way to replace that amount of talent going out the door. The staff cobbled together a solid team that couldn’t really score, built around a couple defensive stoppers remaining from the title team (Braxton Key and Mamadi Diakite) and leaned more heavily on younger players and a JUCO transfer to get through. Frankly, getting that 2020 group to a 23-7 record before the postseason was called off may have been one of Bennett’s best coaching jobs.

UVa lost a few veterans from that team and backfilled from the transfer portal and a freshman class that looked promising. Bennett went out and got coveted transfers Sam Hauser (who was in the program in 2020, sitting out) and Trey Murphy, which was about the best the Cavaliers could’ve asked for in the midst of a pandemic. The crop of freshmen included a pair of top-100 recruits in Reece Beekman and Jabri Adbur-Rahim. That team had a decent season, winning a share of the ACC regular-season title and dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Virginia bowed out of the NCAA’s in the first round after a week without practices. But it’s probably not fair to wonder too much about what could’ve been, given the fact that UVa would’ve faced Gonzaga in the Sweet 16 that they were blown out by in the regular season.

The 2021 offseason was chaotic and UVa lost more of its roster than it could really handle. Hauser, Tomas Woldetensae, and Jay Huff were out of eligibility and moved on. Murphy, who was expected to be a multi-year addition, was one-and-done in Charlottesville after a better-than-expected first season that saw him become an NBA lottery pick. Virginia could’ve handled that if the younger players were developing into the heirs to Guy, Jerome and Hunter, but they weren’t. Casey Morsell bolted for NC State after two seasons; fellow sophomore Justin McKoy left too. So did freshman Abdur-Rahim, who wasn’t really used much as a freshman but was expected to develop into a good player for the Hoos. Again, UVa couldn’t backfill the roster enough to overcome these losses. Armaan Franklin and Jayden Gardner joined the program via the transfer portal; Virginia had a one-man recruiting class coming in, too.

Bennett got the benefit of the doubt before the start but the season went about as it should, given what the roster looked like on paper. UVa incorporated the two transfers as best it could, but the Hoos ultimately limped to the NIT. The good news was that they had a highly-regarded recruiting class on the way, nearly everyone was returning, and of course, they could always add through the transfer portal. They did just that with Ben Vander Plas from Ohio and a group of talented freshmen, and entered 2022-23 with higher expectations. And while UVa exceeded those expectations early, the team looked more like a suped-up version of the NIT squad for most of the 2023 calendar year than a true contender. UVa also suffered the injury to Vander Plas and once again crashed out early.

UVa hasn’t been at the elite level it was at from 2014 to 2019, but that’s not because what happened during that run was some sort of fluke. It’s not because Bennett forgot how to coach, either, or that UVa is great in the regular season and tank in March. The truth is, the Cavaliers haven’t been elite because they haven’t had elite rosters.

There are a number of reasons for that, many outlined above. The pandemic didn’t help, though all programs had to navigate it. Virginia had a lot of players leave earlier than expected for both good and bad reasons, and it created roster gaps. The transfer portal has also become a much bigger part of roster management, and while UVa has had some losses, its also a program positioned to take advantage of the portal. NIL is an emerging factor too, though it doesn’t seem that UVa has been significantly impacted by that, at least not yet.

But it’s also fair to say that while UVa has landed some talented players, there have been recruiting gaps and misses that caught up with the program. That famous 2016 class that led UVa to a national title had four top-60 players in it, including Huff, who developed more slowly than the others. But while Guy, Jerome, Hunter and Huff were developing and then leading the team, until the Hoos won that title, the program didn’t suit up a single top-100 recruit. The players that typically would have matured into their replacements were either under-recruited or multi-year projects, and simply didn’t pan out in some cases.

The 2017 class consisted of Francesco Badocchi and Marco Anthony. Neither did much at UVa and both left after the title season. The next class was Kihei Clark. Francisco Caffaro and Kody Stattmann. We’re not going to unpack the enigma that is Clark’s career at UVa, but he certainly contributed enough to say that he panned out. Caffaro and Stattmann were seldom-used players who became role guys late in their careers.

There was an uptick in the 2020 class, with UVa enrolling a pair of top-100 signees in Casey Morsell (49) and Kadin Shedrick (63). Like many big men, Shedrick has been developed slowly and over time, though the jury is still out on what he’ll become. Morsell, as mentioned, left town after two disappointing seasons where he never showed the upward trajectory UVa had been accustomed to. McKoy also joined in the 2019 class, and he has had a quiet career since leaving.

The 2020 class looked pretty good on paper, too. UVa added two top-100 players in Beekman (72) and Abdur-Rahim (45) and long-time commit Carson McCorkle. Beekman has worked out great, and assuming he returns will be the leader on next year’s team. Abdur-Rahim entered with a lot of promise but didn’t see early playing time and bailed for Georgia. This is possibly the most-disappointing “miss” in recent classes, at least to this point; though Abdur-Rahim hasn’t really seen his career take off at Georgia either; he averaged just 7.1 points per game, playing 18.8 minutes per contest for a Georgia team that went .500. McCorkle, of course, would also leave before landing st Wofford.

Virginia had limited space in the 2021 class, and took Taine Murray as the only addition. The 2022 class looked like 2016 2.0, but we still have to see them put it together on the floor in the years to come to be sure.

UVa isn’t going to recruit with the blue-bloods and land a bunch of one-and-dones, but talent matters, and the Hoos thrive when they have more of it. And more specifically, we’re talking about NBA-caliber players with elite traits, rather than guys that can be good college players but aren’t transcendent talents.

In 2012, UVa went to the tournament on the back of Mike Scott, a stretch big who had a long NBA career, in large part thanks to Bennett’s development. In 2014, the team got older and had future pros Joe Harris, Malcolm Brogdon, Anthony Gill and Justin Anderson heavily involved. With Gill and Brodgon sitting out in 2013, and with a younger roster overall, UVa went to the NIT. The 2015 and 2016 teams were led by the same core group of players who continued to gain experience. The 2017 team was a bridge year that had solid players like Devon Hall, Isaiah Wilkins, Marial Shayok and London Perrantes. But none of the veterans on the roster were bonafide pros, and the team dipped in form a bit, playing similar basketball to what we’ve seen recently from the 2021 and 2023 teams. In 2018 the team was turned over to Jerome and Guy though Hall and others were still around. UVa also had a future lottery pick, Hunter, take off the redshirt and become a key part of the rotation. Then he got hurt going into the NCAA’s and the rest was history.

The 2019 team speaks for itself, but it’s worth noting again that UVa had three players drafted a few months later. That team also had Key, who was ranked No. 60 in that 2016 recruiting class, and future NBA draft pick Diakite.

The Wahoos did have pros in 2021, the best team they’ve had post-title. It wasn’t enough to make the team really good, perhaps in part because the pros were both transfers and the roster had spent far less time together. So maybe, it’s more fair to say they need better talent and time for them to put it together to become elite.

Having NBA players doesn’t automatically translate to more wins, at UVa or anywhere else. Teams built around good college players with limited NBA ability can be very good. And teams loaded with draft picks (see: Kentucky) don’t always live up to their potential. But there are also plenty of examples of coaches who maximized their ability only when they had top players to coach. Jim Boeheim won a single national title…when his team was led by freshman Carmelo Anthony. Maryland’s back-to-back Final Fours and title came when their backcourt was made up of Steve Blake and Juan Dixon, who combined for 20+ NBA seasons. Florida’s title teams had Joakim Noah, Al Horford, Mareese Speights, and so on. According to some quick research, it appears that the last time a team won a national title and then didn’t have a player drafted that same year was 2010 Duke; and that team had a bunch of pros that decided to come back, like Kyle Singler and the Plumlee brothers.

In order to get back to dominance, Bennett needs to continue to recruit at the level he has over the past two classes while supplementing from the portal. Some will hit and some will miss, and the development piece of the program has not been under much scrutiny.

Bennett and the staff will also have to keep the group together, as best they can. The portal is the portal; it giveth and it taketh away. UVa has to demonstrate to the younger players that they’re in the right place and that their development is a priority.

A staff can recruit incredible players but if the players don’t stick around to see their efforts come to fruition, then it’s all for nothing. But it’s also not worth it to stock the roster with projects that don’t have other options, either.

UVa has missed on too many players over several recruiting cycles to have a sustainable roster, even though some of those players stuck around for quite a while.

Virginia can do everything right and players can still end up transferring out, and there’s not much that can be done about that. But it’s on the staff to show the players that they’re heading in the right direction, because if they don’t someone else is going to tell them otherwise.

The Hoos need talent to win, like all teams do, and there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. The future is unknown, but they saw significant flashes from Isaac McKneely and Ryan Dunn, with two more top-100 recruits redshirting. Elijah Gertrude and Blake Buchanan are quality additions in the 2023 class, too. And there’s always the portal, and Bennett has a track record of turning solid players into very-good, NBA-bound players.

Bennett has proven that he doesn’t need to get five-star recruits to win. And that’s good news, because he’s not likely to get many of them. He has won 73 percent of his games and 70 percent of his ACC games during his time in Charlottesville, with six ACC regular-season titles, a pair of ACC Tournament titles, three Sweet 16’s and a national title without ever signing a five-star recruit. Bennett has only signed five top-50 recruits, too.

He has proven that he can win with top-100 players that he can develop over a couple of years, especially when they have NBA-level shooting ability or athleticism. That’s more than many college coaches can say, including many that are much more bulletproof in the media or the court of public opinion than Bennett seems to be.

But the last four years have also proven that UVa needs to get those types of players to be truly great, and while it’s oversimplified, but they need them to pan out.

The ones that pan out seem to be the ones with elite traits, so the more of that, the better. The rising sophomore class has those types of traits (McKneely and Isaac Traudt are quality shooters and Leon Bond and Dunn are great athletes) which could be great news for the program.

If UVa can continue to stack good classes on top of each other and can keep those players together, the Hoos will get back to the level of basketball we saw from 2014 through the title. And if they continue to strike out on talented but reasonably attainable players, or try to build their roster around transfers, or put together a roster full of multi-year projects, then expect postseason success and true regular-season dominance to remain elusive.