Virginia missed a chance to finally stand amid the ACC giants

Since last November you could almost hear the steady hum generated by our northern neighbor’s crushing efficiency. Not a nerve-grating hum, but not a soothing or captivating one, either. Just steady, purposeful, a system at work. Finally, with a gaudy 31-2 record and the 2018 ACC regular-season and tournament championships as prelude, that hum progressed to college basketball’s biggest stage, where Tony Bennett’s Cavaliers stood as the top-rated, top-seeded squad.

A deep validating run in the NCAA tournament figured to assure Bennett’s program a place among the game’s elite. Instead, its 20-point loss to Ryan Odom’s Maryland-Baltimore County Retrievers made an emphatic statement of a different sort. Not only will UVa live ignominiously as the first No. 1 seed ousted by No. 16, but its defeat aborted the school’s most concerted effort in more than three decades to assert it belonged with Duke and North Carolina as defining ACC powers.

Serious challenges to the ACC’s competitive hierarchy have waxed and waned since 1975, when the NCAA began allowing multiple entrants from the same league into its tournament. Following that season, David Thompson moved on from N.C. State and ACC members reverted to chasing North Carolina, humming along to five Final Fours between 1967 and 1977 under Dean Smith.

In all the years since, other programs marshaled challenges but only Duke under Mike Krzyzewski managed to consistently occupy a spot beside Carolina in the conference’s front rank. Those two schools, with six national titles between them since 2001, remain so fixed in the league’s contemporary firmament they last missed an ACC tournament final in 1996.

Recently that status quo appeared to be changing, and not due to the importation of any Big East powerhouse. Rather Virginia, the initial ACC expansion addition in December 1953, had become a force by going against the game’s contemporary flow with unwavering emphasis on a deliberate offense and a stifling defense. Bennett’s system produced three first-place ACC finishes since 2014, a pair of league championships, and this year’s No. 1 ranking.

Jeff Jones, formerly a player and head coach at Virginia, sees in Bennett’s “replicable” approach, including a commitment to player interchangeability, a basketball version of Bill Belichick’s Patriots, with five Super Bowl wins the most successful NFL franchise of the free agency era.

“With the exception of Tom Brady, isn’t that what New England does?” Jones, currently head coach at Old Dominion, asked prior to his alma mater’s UMBC debacle. “You plug different guys in. That doesn’t mean they’re not good players – they’re good players. But they might not be all-pro. You put them together and everybody buys in, and they’re exceptionally well-coached, and the results are what matters. How can you argue if it works over time?”

Jones was the point guard when Virginia mounted the first sustained challenge to Carolina’s hegemony, reaching a Final Four under Terry Holland in 1981. The Cavaliers had enjoyed minimal success and a single 20-win season prior to Holland’s arrival from Davidson in 1975. His second year UVa defeated three ranked teams en route to its first ACC tournament championship, defeating UNC in the final. Not until 2014, four coaches and nearly 40 years later, would Virginia win a second ACC title.

Virginia’s rise was built around a single player, 7-4 center Ralph Sampson, the nation’s top prospect. After the Cavs won the ’80 NIT, then a major event, they went toe-to-toe with the Tar Heels for the final three years of Sampson’s career. From 1981 through 1983, UVa was 37-5 in the ACC and 88-13 overall compared to 34-8 and 89-18 for UNC. Taking a defense-first approach, the Cavs repeatedly led the ACC in field goal percentage defense, blocked shots, and rebound margin.

Those Virginia squads largely relied on the same core group, but everything started with Sampson, whose mere presence distorted how opponents operated. A three-time ACC and national player of the year, Sampson paced the league in blocks every year he played, led in rebounds three times. “With Ralph you always thought you had a chance to win the national championship,” recalls Ricky Stokes, a guard who came to UVa a year after Sampson. “He was so dominant. You slept well at night.”

Relaxing the rest of the time wasn’t so easy, though, according to Stokes, these days a senior associate commissioner in the Mid-American Conference.

“There was so much pressure each and every time you stepped on the floor,” he says. The program’s great expectations were never quite realized – that era’s Cavs failed to win an ACC tournament and got to a Final Four only in 1981, the high-water mark of the Sampson era.

That year the Cavs finished alone in first place with a single ACC defeat. They defeated UNC twice during the regular season, but fell to Carolina in the first Final Four meeting ever between ACC teams, as senior Al Wood scored a career-high 39 points.

In 1982, Sampson’s junior year, Virginia lost to UNC in an ACC tournament final best known for a late stall by both teams that produced a 47-45 result and irresistible calls for a shot clock. Then in Sampson’s final college contest, an NCAA regional final against eventual-champion N.C. State in 1983, he couldn’t or wouldn’t get the ball when a one-point game hung in the balance, furthering a reputation for failing to come through at crunch time. (That ’83 team, top-ranked in the nation, suffered one of the biggest upsets ever, losing to Division II Chaminade in Hawaii on Christmas Eve.)

Oddly, as soon as Sampson graduated UVa unexpectedly returned to the Final Four in 1984. That made the program one of four from the ACC – aside from Duke and North Carolina -- to make a pair of trips to the national semifinals along with Georgia Tech (1990, 2004), Maryland (2001, 2002) and N.C. State (1974, 1983).

No such NCAA glory has revisited Charlottesville during Bennett’s nine-year tenure. In six tournament visits his teams are now a combined 7-6, with a single advance to a regional final. This was their second one-and-done appearance. That NCAA record, particularly the stunning loss to UMBC, doesn’t negate the program’s overall achievements. But, as Smith and Krzyzewski learned, the hum of consistent excellence is insufficient when using the NCAAs to measure greatness.

This story was originally published March 17, 2018 at 1:38 PM with the headline "Virginia missed a chance to finally stand amid the ACC giants."