The Virginia men’s basketball team started this season with two highly Virginia-esque wins, the statistics of which were so consistent that some were identical. There was stifling defense: 34 points allowed on 59 possessions against Syracuse, then 34 on 69 trips against James Madison. There was pedestrian offense: Tony Bennett’s team shot 4-for-25 from 3-point […]
Chalk up the 2019 college football season as one in which the sport reestablished the value of conference championships. Each of the top eight teams in the penultimate College Football Playoff rankings is vying for a conference title this weekend. The committee, which has often been prone to going in a new direction after the […]
Virginia was a postseason fraud, or it wasn’t. Tony Bennett’s system had unavoidable flaws, or it didn’t. The national championship couldn’t be won at a plodding pace, or it could. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is deemed the definitive assessment in the sport, and perhaps no team has been evaluated more harshly over the past […]
Monday’s NCAA men’s final between Virginia and Texas Tech will be a matchup of similarly defensive-minded teams that are each making the first national championship game appearance in program history. And in the age of big programs chasing one-and-done recruits, neither the Red Raiders nor the Cavaliers are a recruiting powerhouse: In the Final Four, […]
gfoster (Geoff Foster, sports editor): Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s Final Four chat! After the chalk prevailed in the first weekend, the second weekend finally provided some upsets. In the Elite Eight, three of four underdogs won outright, and the fourth, Purdue, probably should have won — but Virginia’s last-second heroics and overtime win make the Cavs […]