Author : our esteemed friend and college football/basketball writer @MattZemek, Editor at @TrojansWire .
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As a warm-blooded male member of the human species, I like high-scoring sports. Give me 1987 UNLV-Indiana as a Final Four national semifinal any day, any week, any year, over 2000 Wisconsin-Michigan State.
The Bennett family offense can look beautiful when run by Ty Jerome and aided by De’Andre Hunter and Kyle Guy. We saw as much when Virginia won the 2019 national championship. Yet, I get it: When this offense doesn’t have elite scorers and playmakers in charge of it, it can be downright ugly. We saw as much against Ohio, when the Cavaliers simply couldn’t make open shots.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
This Virginia team began the season with the expectation that shooters were back, scorers were back, and that offense would re-enter the picture in Charlottesville. That dream never fully materialized, and so this loss to Ohio — while not necessarily expected by UVA fans — didn’t rate as a big surprise, either. This Virginia team was several notches below the No. 1 or No. 2 seeds of past years. This was never a national championship-caliber team, if we accept the idea that beating Clemson by a ton of points after the Tigers’ COVID-19 pause is not enough to indicate top-tier greatness. A great team needs to play great basketball for at least a month in order to enter the conversation of Final Four contenders. 2021 Virginia never did that. This is not an especially stinging loss.
Gonzaga was going to destroy this team if a rematch occurred in the Sweet 16. Virginia fans are not going to lament this loss the way they lamented UMBC or 2016 Syracuse. Those were crushers.
This was not.
Yet, a (not-so) funny and weird thing happened after Virginia lost to Ohio on Saturday.
Lots of people — most notably Kentucky basketball commentator Matt Jones — raised the point that if Virginia hadn’t escaped Purdue, how differently would we view Tony Bennett and UVA basketball, given the UMBC and Ohio flameouts?
Let’s be clear here: The question isn’t INHERENTLY unfair. What matters is that if you ask a question of one team/coach/program, you ask it of all the other examples in the same general category.
Lute Olson’s Arizona won one national title and had a lot of early NCAA Tournament exits.
The same applies to Jim Boeheim and Syracuse.
The same applies to Tubby Smith at Kentucky… and Jim Harrick at UCLA… and Jud Heathcote at Michigan State.
Al McGuire won a national title at Marquette, in a season when his 1977 team was considered lucky to have been given an at-large berth in the NCAA Tournament.
Sunday morning, I had an Auburn fan in my mentions who said Virginia’s 2019 national title has an asterisk because Ty Jerome double-dribbled.
Never mind the fact that Jerome was hand-checked just before the double-dribble; if we accept that he did double-dribble, would this make Virginia the ONLY TEAM EVER to benefit from a blown call?
What about Michigan in 1989, and the phantom foul call which enabled Rumeal Robinson to hit the winning free throws with three seconds left against Seton Hall in the title game?
What about the travel call on Villanova against North Carolina late in the 2005 East Regional semifinals? The 2005 UNC national title run could have been derailed then.
You get the point here, folks: If you’re going to say Virginia was lucky in 2019, to the extent that you question Tony Bennett’s or the program’s legacy, you have to do that for everyone else.
OBVIOUSLY, however, Matt Jones and the others who try to minimize Bennett’s achievements didn’t do that, and they WON’T do that… because they hate the Bennett family playing style and want to place it in a separate category, continuing to chip away at its legitimacy and stature in college basketball.
If you are willing and able to question ALL other examples of a given dynamic, more power to you… but if you’re going to focus exclusively on Tony Bennett and Virginia, you out yourself as a selective judge and an intellectually dishonest commentator.
I don’t question the legitimacy of various national titles. I COULD, mind you, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.
We sit here every March and wonder when — or if — a great coach will finally get over the hump and make a Final Four or win a national title. We asked this of Tony Bennett for several years, and he finally won.
Was he lucky? Of course… but that doesn’t make him unique at all.
Lute Olson’s 1997 Arizona team was not in his list of 10 best teams at Arizona, measured by season-long performance… but it got hot in March.
Jim Boeheim’s 2003 Syracuse team went to Albany for the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 despite being a No. 3 seed. Syracuse played home games when it probably should have gone to a different region. Yet, the Orange cashed in that bracket break and won it all. They were the best team in that tournament. The same goes for Kevin Ollie and UConn in 2014. They earned the title, even if the bracketing process gave them a break they didn’t deserve. They still had to win all the games and beat quality teams.
Jim Harrick’s 1995 national title at UCLA wouldn’t have happened if Tyus Edney hadn’t gone coast to coast against Missouri… but it DID happen.
We can do this forever, folks. We can always ask, “What if X didn’t happen?” It’s not fair, though.
If we’re going to question if a coach will ever win a national title, the questioning stops when that coach wins the national title. We can’t relitigate questions on the other side of that national title. That’s not how this works. It is never how this works.
You don’t have to like Tony Bennett’s playing style. No one is asking you to do that. Just spare me the tired routine of acting as though Virginia is the only team to get really lucky en route to a national title in college basketball, or that it is the only team to benefit from a bad call.
If you want to go down that road for UVA, do it for everyone else. If you’re going to take the time to single out one program, you have to spend hours treating every other similar example the same way.
Do you want to do that?
No? I thought so. Let’s move on with our lives, shall we? We have better things to talk about than Tony Bennett’s legacy. He won a national title. You can’t wish it away, as much as you might want to. Take the L and do something else with your day. It will be more productive than this.
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