It's probably a good thing I never got around to writing previews of either the Boston College hoops game or the Syracuse lacrosse one. I would've predicted wins in both and then gotten blamed for the losses.
Seriously, those should've been highly winnable games. Of course, they were on the road, which in basketball these days is a deadly place to be. Even so. Syracuse looks like they'll struggle this year to get to the NCAA tournament, or would've struggled if we'd beaten them; an overtime loss to Albany is a major detriment to their outlook and should've also meant not having that hard of a time scoring on them. Again, though: the road. Especially the Carrier Dome, which is a hellhole as far as Virginia lacrosse is concerned.
One thing I sort of pride myself on is looking at a game or a season or something and being able to figure out what happened. I mean, I wouldn't write this thing if I didn't think I could do that. Sometimes the reasons are coldly analytical and sometimes intangible, but usually there's something. So it shames me to say I have no good explanation whatsoever for the Boston College debacle. Feel free to accept whatever explanation you like: freshmen hitting a wall, Duke hangover, a gym with less atmosphere than a 10 AM shootaround. I mean, Jontel Evans taking a long dribble off a short basketball court did not help matters, but that's not really it. The game just....disappeared. It was there and then it wasn't. I wish I knew why, and that's probably the most frustrating thing about it.
The good news is that the BC thing doesn't hurt Virginia's tournament chances as much as you might think. It hurts mainly by not helping; we sure could've used that road win. But the rest of the bubble screwed itself this weekend just as badly. Baylor just lost to not-even-NIT-bound Texas, probably a hangover from their buzzer-beaten missed chance against K-State on Saturday. Ole Miss got taken down by 8-20 Mississippi State, and Tennessee got beat by Georgia. Arizona State and St. John's were losers as well. So, yes, a win on Sunday would've done wonders for separating Virginia from the bubble pack a little, but as long as business is taken care of the rest of the way - that is, beat FSU and Maryland if you please - things will still be OK.
In the realm of smaller tournaments, here's the results of the weekly sim:
I've made the tiebreakers reflect reality instead of arbitrarily assigning them to the highest-rated KenPom team, which is to say that, yes, Miami has clinched the #1 seed. One thing that's not quite true is the sim's declaration that Virginia has no shot at the #2 seed; it's just that that would require such an unlikely turn of events (including VT beating Duke in Cameron) as to be essentially out of the question.
Virginia no longer controls its own destiny for the #3 seed, unfortunately, but if they win out, so must UNC, which means they have to beat Duke. That game is at the Dean Dome, so anything's possible, but still.
