It being now impossible to locally source football, this should be the time to transition to some college basketball, if anyone out there still has the appetite.
Uh, maybe you’ll want to wait just a few more days.
Thursday night was not the occasion to start shopping for a late winter alternative because Virginia was in town. This is an opponent that breeds consternation, not converts. For as good as the Cavaliers may be, when they have their way, they tend to transform the whitewater river of basketball into a rather muddy farm pond. Blame their penchant for rabid defense.
They, like cheap whiskey and bad traffic, just have a way of bringing out the worst in people.
And when Georgia Tech and Virginia get together, you can pretty much throw out the record book (no all-time highs will be threatened, ever) and the scoreboard (a dry-erase board and one exhausted marker will do).
A rather surprising 3-1 in the ACC at the beginning the night, Tech waded into the deeper water of the conference – where they will spend the rest of this month with games against North Carolina, FSU, Clemson and Syracuse – and foundered a bit, losing 64-48. No big surprise, really. Of the many upsets that have cratered the surface of college basketball this season, this one never threatened to leave a mark.
Nor was it any shock that there has not been this little scoring in Atlanta since the last Dragon Con. This was the first time the Yellow Jackets failed to crack 50 points since the last time they played Virginia.
Tech coach Josh Pastner holds up Virginia and Notre Dame as models for what he wants his program to be. It’s a worthy aspiration, but far more difficult in practice than design. To emulate the Cavs is to take a basketball game and transform it into something a little less free-flowing, but crushingly efficient. Like translating French into German.
In practice, it looks like this: Tech scored 19 in the first half. But with the wind chill, it felt more like minus-3.
The Jackets fluid guard Tadric Jackson spent most of the night sporting a bandage above one brow, for you don’t challenge the Virginia defense without a good cut man.
The Tech student section grew hoarse calling down last few seconds of the shot clock, as Virginia turned so many possessions into sieges. Tech has enough trouble depositing ball through hoop without this kind of staunch resistance.
Not all of the Jackets’ 18 turnovers were the doing of Virginia’s defense. Some of them were simple, sloppy passes. But give Virginia credit for the fact that, unlike the Falcons, it dropped none of them.
And it turns out Brian Gregory is not the only force that can hold Ben Lammers to four points in a game.
Concern grows hereabouts about Tech’s big man and his offensive output. Going for a mere four Thursday only deepened the worry. The player who must set the tone for Tech at both ends of the floor, so Pastner says, is now averaging just less than nine points per game in the ACC.
“I think there’s a confidence issue with Ben,” Pastner said afterward. “Like I told him in postgame, I want you to take 30 shots, take 25 shots, even if you miss all of them we need you to shoot the ball, shoot the ball, shoot the ball. Be aggressive. Demand the ball. We got to get you going.”
“He’s got to see it go through the hoop. He just needs one game to get over the hump, that break-out game, to get him back to where he was last year.”
Playing Virginia is seldom the cure for what ails a shooter.
Nor does playing Virginia make for great marketing across all platforms. The purist must admire what these Cavs bring to the floor. The casual consumer looking for some high-voltage outlet, however, may want to wait until they leave town before giving this college basketball thing a real hard look.
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