2/25/02 - Out of Control

By JOHN GALINSKY
Daily Progress staff writer

Less than a minute into the 2002 season, it became clear this wasn’t the same offensively challenged Virginia men’s lacrosse team of a year ago.
With a burst of speed and a blistering shot, heralded freshman John Christmas scored 48 seconds into his first collegiate game Sunday, sending the fifth-ranked Cavaliers on their way to an opening 20-5 victory over Drexel at the University Hall Turf Field.
“It felt really good,” Christmas said. “I’ve been waiting a long time for my first college goal. To get it that way, to get a goal in the first minute, it set the tone for the rest of the game.”
Christmas and fellow freshman attackman Joe Yevoli combined for seven goals, while senior attackman Conor Gill delivered a career-high seven assists. The first midfield unit of Billy Glading, Chris Rotelli and A.J. Shannon produced nine goals as Virginia finished with nearly double the 10.3 goals per game it averaged last season.
While the 2001 team had few reliable offensive threats, this one seems to possess a variety of weapons. Six Cavaliers scored at least two goals, led by Yevoli and Glading with four apiece.
“We had a good time. We had some sticks clicking,” said Gill, a two-time first-team All-American who matched his previous best of six assists by halftime. “From that standpoint, it was good. We still need to sharpen some things. But hey, it’s the first game for a lot of these guys.”
The debuts of Christmas and Yevoli, both high school All-Americans, went well. Shortly after the opening faceoff, Christmas raced from behind the cage and ripped a close-range shot past goalie Jordie Olivella. He scored twice more off assists from Gill as Virginia built a 13-3 lead at the half.
Yevoli scored three of his four goals in the second half and added an assist for five points.
“I thought the young guys stepped up and played well,” said Dom Starsia, who won his 100th game in 10 seasons as UVa’s coach. “John played the way I thought he was capable of playing. I thought Joe Yevoli played the best he’s played since he got here. I told them both before the game not to put much pressure on themselves.
“They didn’t need to shoot every time they touched the ball. But they’re also kids who can make things happen.”
Gill also made good things happen with assists on four straight goals in the first quarter. He added a goal of his own in the final minute of the period, making it 7-1, and finished with eight points, matching the career high he set against Ohio State as a sophomore.
Rotelli scored all three of his goals in the second quarter, including a tough shot he squeezed off despite being sandwiched and flattened by two defenders. Christmas also had a pretty goal, catching and shooting in the same motion after taking a feed from Gill.
Glading, a junior middie with 10 goals in his first two seasons, had two in the first quarter and scored his fourth in the final period in a short-handed situation.
In all, Virginia took 63 shots, compared to 15 for the Dragons (1-1), who were held without a shot attempt in the third quarter. Tillman Johnson made seven saves for the Cavaliers, who will be tested in upcoming weeks by No. 2 Syracuse and No. 1 Princeton.
“Especially on the attack end, we complement each other pretty well. We’re starting to get a chemistry,” Gill said. “It’ll get better as the season goes on, but this was a good start for us.”

By ANDREW JOYNER
Daily Progress staff writer
The Virginia men’s basketball team has played more than 1,000 minutes this season, yet it will be about eight minutes of action that could define its season.
First, there was the final 3:24 of its game against Maryland on Jan. 31 in which the Cavaliers surrendered a nine-point lead and eventually lost to the Terps, 91-87. Then, there was the final 3:30 on Wednesday at Florida State. In that contest, Virginia held a one-point lead before relinquishing it to a struggling Seminoles team before falling, 66-59.
Then, there was Saturday.
Virginia led by six points with less than a minute to play before squandering that lead as well as it lost 82-80 on a last-second 3-pointer by the Jackets’ Marvin Lewis. The loss was Virginia’s third straight and seventh in its past nine.
Eight good minutes of basketball and Virginia is making plans for its first-round NCAA tournament game. Instead, UVa is left to examine the feasibility of hosting an NIT game.
Just eight weeks ago, Virginia was 9-0 and No. 4 in the country. The Cavaliers likely were overrated at that point but not to the tune of their ensuing 7-9 record. The collapse likely makes the Cavaliers college basketball’s biggest disappointment this season. Although preseason No. 2 Illinois also has had its troubles this year, the Illini likely have stemmed the tide enough to secure a bid to the NCAAs.
Again, eight quality minutes and Virginia avoids that distinction.
“We’re digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole. These are games that we should be winning,” guard Roger Mason Jr. said. “It’s our fault as players. We didn’t do our jobs.”
It would be easy to say that those eight minutes were a microcosm of Virginia’s season, but that would not be accurate. The Cavaliers have obvious flaws: a lack of a point guard, inability to solve a zone defense and a defense that is porous at times. But, to borrow a phrase from UVa football coach Al Groh, the Cavaliers are what they are.
Those deficiencies do not explain how a good free-throw shooting team missed key free throws down the stretch against Maryland and Georgia Tech. Nor do they provide answers as to how a team like Florida State, playing for little more than being spoilers, can outscore a team 9-0 during a key span of a game it had to win.
Instead, those instances perhaps reveal what might be Virginia’s biggest ailment: the inability to find ways to close out and to win games. That flaw can be much harder to correct than offensive movement or defensive positioning.
“You have to make plays at the end. We didn’t execute properly down the stretch. ... This was a game we should have won,” said UVa coach Pete Gillen on Saturday, using nearly identical words he used after the Maryland and Florida State games. “If I got a dollar for every time I say that free throws win games, I’d be a multi, multi, multi-wealthy person.”
Now, Virginia’s NCAA hopes lie with the near impossible: a win at home against No. 3 Duke here Thursday and a win at No. 2 Maryland in the last game at Cole Field House on Sunday. Those possibilities seem trapped in a vacuum given Virginia’s current state.
“We have to go day-by-day. Right now we’re struggling and we’ve lost three in a row,” Gillen said. “Obviously, Duke is a gigantic game. Right now, we’re having trouble beating good teams and Duke is an unbelievable team.”

By ERIC SWENSEN
Daily Progress staff writer

The University of Virginia’s Honor Committee has nearly completed its work on the 158 cases referred by a university physics professor since April, though a few cases will remain for the committee’s successors.
One hundred thirty-nine of the cases had been investigated as of Feb. 18, committee Chairman Thomas Hall said last week.
Hall said he expects the bulk of the trials to be completed by the time the current committee’s term expires April 1, a few weeks later than the early March goal he had discussed over the past few months.
By the end of the school year, Hall expects, only a handful of “extraordinary cases” such as those involving students who have been out of the country, will remain to be adjudicated.
UVa students accused of lying, cheating or stealing are tried by fellow students according to the tenets of the student-run honor system. The only sanction for those convicted is expulsion.
Louis A. Bloomfield attracted international attention last spring when he referred 122 students to the committee on plagiarism and other charges, after developing a computer program to examine term papers electronically submitted to a class web site for his popular “How Things Work” physics course.
Bloomfield developed the program, which searched the papers for identical strings of six or more words, after a student claimed some of her sorority friends turned in papers from a sorority paper file.
The number of cases has grown due mostly to refinements made by Bloomfield to the program, including an improvement that allows him to compare a term paper with others written in the same semester as well as papers submitted in other semesters.
One of the 158 cases will not be processed because the Honor Committee already had convicted the student for an offense unrelated to the Bloomfield investigations.
As of Feb. 18, 25 students had left UVa admitting their guilt in cases brought by Bloomfield.
Another 13 students had been convicted at trial, while just two had been found not guilty, including the only student charged by Bloomfield with lying in connection with the plagiarism cases.
Hall said the roughly 86 percent conviction rate in trials is a bit surprising.
“In the past, conviction rates have hovered between 25 and 75 percent,” he said. In the 2000-01 academic year, there were 10 guilty verdicts and 17 students acquitted, a conviction rate of 37 percent, while 10 of the 16 students tried during the 1999-2000 academic year were found guilty, a 62.5 percent conviction rate.
Four students have been found to have a mental disorder that contributed to their honor violation, a decision roughly equivalent to being declared not guilty by reason of insanity at a criminal trial.
Their cases are dropped, but the students agree to other treatment options, such as ongoing therapy or suspension, until they are mentally capable of returning to UVa.
Eighty of the 139 cases investigated have been dropped. Hall said many were dismissed because students are allowed to work together on a paper in Bloomfield’s course. If the computer program tags a group’s work as a source of plagiarism by others, its members all come under suspicion, even though some may have not been aware of any wrongdoing.
On the other hand, copying papers was usually an individual act, he said.

This is long past a slump now. This is long past a nosedive. This is long past a tailspin.

This is a free fall. This is Enron. This is "Ish tar." This is Gary Condit on the talk-show circuit. This is the Titanic on ice. This is one basketball season plummeting into the abyss. This is a disaster.

The Coach for Life doesn't look like such a $900,000-per-annum bargain these days. The Virginia Cavaliers he coaches began the 2001-2002 campaign ranked 11th in the country. They boomed into the top 10 by knifing through nonconference softies like buttah. They rose as high as No. 4. They currently are No. 22.

With an anvil.

The Cavs somehow conspired to lose to Georgia Tech 82-80 on Saturday. At home. With a six-point lead and Mr. Automatic, Roger Mason Jr., on the foul line with less than a minute to go. And still they couldn't close the deal. And still their fadeout continues.

They've now dropped seven of their past nine starts and are closer to sixth place than third in the ACC standings. They're 16-9 all told. Their regular season concludes with outings against league ringleaders Duke and Maryland. Their defense is a myth, their offense a blurry hodgepodge, their decision-making - on the floor and on the bench - frequently dubious.

They were once a shoo-in for the NCAA playoffs. They're now on the far side of the bubble, their plans for March gladness just about burst.

There's plenty of misdemeanors to go around for these Cavs - botched assignments here, missed free throws there, end-game collapses everywhere - but ultimately this is Pete Gillen's product. And right now, its stock is dwindling.

We're talking baffling developments here. Do a background check on Gillen, and you'll unearth few people who have anything bad to say about him. He comes across as a decent, if tightly strung, guy. He has the reputation of being solid on the practice floor, of knowing an X from an O, of having motivational skills.

Which doesn't come near to explaining why his U.Va. squads - and not just this one - can't defend and have no coherent attack when turnovers don't produce breakaway layups. But maybe reveals why Gillen is turning defensive in the wake of this descent.

Florida State shoots 51 percent against the Cavs, for instance, and Gillen gripes about the officiating. Georgia Tech frees its shooters for 15-of-25 accuracy on 3-pointers, and Gillen dumps on his crew for messing up an inbounds play and not putting the ball in Mason's hands.

"Down the stretch, they didn't do what we said," Gillen observed. "Instead, they did it their way. I'll take the blame, but they didn't do what we told them to."

Somehow, I don't think Roy Williams and Mike Krzyzewski have this problem. Plus, maybe Georgia Tech had something to do with imploding Gillen's strategy. Double-plus, suggesting your players are blockheads isn't the coolest idea when you're knocking down 900,000 big ones to provide them with Plan A and Plan B.

Triple-plus, Gillen wasn't exactly sharing culpability when questioned for ordering a foul that stopped the clock with 19.6 seconds to go and U.Va. up by three. The Jackets nailed a couple of free throws, then won it on a trey that beat the buzzer.

"I've always done that," said Gillen. "I've always given a foul in the last 25 seconds. That didn't beat us. We didn't defend, and we didn't make our free throws."

Whatever the case, it's a given U.Va. didn't anticipate this predicament, either, when it was riding high. Now, barring an upset over Duke or a stunning run at the ACC tournament, the Cavs will have to wait'll next year as this one unravels.

The Coach for Life has a mess at his feet.

The Coach for Life has some major tidying up to do.