MINNEAPOLIS – Even if Virginia thought the attention ramped up with its return to a welcome home celebration on Sunday, the first full day of Final Four activity introduced a whole new level to the team.
From photoshoots to interviews to practice, the Cavaliers – as well as anyone from Auburn, Michigan State, and Texas Tech – were met at every turn with reminders of just how big this event is. That meant a line at least 50 feet long with reporters waiting to get into the locker room, golf carts to transport them around the U.S. Bank Stadium facility when needed, and some promotional work featuring musical instruments. It meant hoards of faces asking questions around almost every locker. It meant oversized pictures of themselves on the walls of the stadium halls and the team hotel.
The long and short of it is that the spotlight is bright.
“So far, I’m just overwhelmed,” Virginia senior Jack Salt said. “I didn’t know what it was going to be like. I didn’t really follow college basketball until I was older, like 16, but right now I’m just overwhelmed. At the same time, I’m trying to lock in and focus because we’ve got a tough game to play on Saturday.”
On that end of things, UVA got its first chance to see and shoot inside of U.S. Bank Stadium, home of the Minnesota Vikings, on Thursday. The facility has been converted into a basketball arena for the week with approximately 72,000 seats surrounding the floor.
As fans have seen in the past, that’s a massive leap from the typical locations these teams in play in usually and it can impact shooting due to sight lines and depth perception. The Cavaliers have the advantage of playing at Syracuse as a member of the ACC and they won a game in the Carrier Dome earlier this season. Still, that holds a capacity of just 33,000 for basketball games so getting their first chance to be on the floor seemed positive to the Hoos.
“It’s really big and I then I think the depth behind the basket is pretty far,” UVA freshman Kihei Clark said. “So, we just had to adjust but I thought we did a good job of adjusting.”
“The basket seems really small compared to the rest of the arena,” Virginia sophomore De’Andre Hunter said. “It is similar to Syracuse but it’s a little different. Just being out there and being able to shoot in the arena is fun.”
The Cavaliers said they adjusted to all of the hoopla and the arena’s scale, however, and got down to business with practice. They’ll need as much preparation as possible to deal with a red-hot Auburn team that enters the Final Four on a 12-game winning streak. That included three straight NCAA Tournament wins over high level programs from Kansas, North Carolina, and Kentucky.
“We’re feeling good,” UVA junior Mamadi Diakite said. “I thought we were going to be losing focus because of the media stuff at the beginning, but as soon as we got on the court, everyone was locked in and we were going as hard as we could. We had a good practice according to coach and I thought we had a good practice too.”
Where Preparation Meets Conspiracy
The Cavaliers earned a spot in Minneapolis thanks to one of the tournament’s most exciting games and a doozy of a finish. The Hoos trailed Purdue by three points when Ty Jerome stepped to the free throw line with 5.9 seconds to go in Louisville. Jerome made the first, but missed the second and that set off one of the more incredible sequences in March Madness history.
Mamadi Diakite managed to slap the ball backward in the rebounding scrum and it rolled all the way into the backcourt. That’s where Kihei Clark retrieved it, wheeled quickly to survey the court, and then fired an accurate pass all the way back to Diakite just 15 or so feet from the basket. Diakite caught it and shot it all in one motion. And it went in! Read about the last 25 seconds in detail here.
In the days reliving the whole thing since, some fans have hypothesized that Jerome intentionally missed the free throw even though he said he didn’t and that UVA wanted to keep its plan internal. Virginia coach Tony Bennett said that the Cavaliers absolutely did not intend to miss the second free throw.
“Yeah, I marvel at it. Probably three times I’ve watched it,” Bennett said. “Two years ago – I don’t know if you were covering our game against Louisville, that was so improbable, maybe even more improbable how it ended, but given the circumstances and what was on the line, it was unreal for the presence of mind of Mamadi and Kihei, Mamadi to tap it, Kihei to chase it down to make that pass.
The situation was there was 5.9 seconds when Ty went to the free throw line, and obviously I didn’t instruct him to miss it, but I said, all right, if he misses it, try to tap it, just tap it out of there. I put someone in at the scorer’s table so if Ty makes that second free throw, we’re going to try to trap, get a steal, make a play, or foul right away, and then they’ll be at the line. You can have 4.5, 5 seconds to still run a play. I was trying to stay in the moment.
Ty looked at the bench, and I didn’t say miss it because I thought there was enough time if he made it. I wish I could say that’s how we practiced it. If he misses, that’s what was there. But Kihei, his instincts, and Mamadi to not drop it, I’m still in awe of that. It was such a high-level game, and Purdue played so well. I feel for Matt [Painter] and those guys, but you had to make that play the way Carsen Edwards was playing and obviously the way that setting was.”
Staying The Course
When the Hoos pulled off that crazy finish and won in overtime, it sent the program back to the Final Four for the first time since 1984. UVA Associate Head Coach Jason Williford, the interviewee in this Quick Take Q&A on the EDGE, soaked up the moment Thursday just like the players.
Williford came close as a player in 1995 (an Elite Eight loss to Arkansas in 1995, 68-61) and as an assistant coach (an Elite Eight loss to Syracuse, 68-62 in 2016).
“It’s unreal,” Williford said. “I’ve got a ton of pictures already in my phone. Just being out here for practice today was awesome. All the texts. All the calls. It’s big time. It really hasn’t hit me yet because I’m still in next game mode. We’ve got to prepare; we’ve still got two games hopefully. It’s awesome. For my family, my friends, all the UVA alum – they’re super excited.”
Williford always thought that such a moment was possible when he first joined Coach Bennett’s staff 10 years ago. So even when the Hoos lost in shocking fashion to UMBC last year, becoming the first No. 1 seed to ever lose to a No. 16 seed in this tournament, he didn’t waver on that belief. He tuned out the outside noise long ago.
“I don’t pay attention to a whole lot of that to be honest with you,” Williford said. “When I first got here 10 years ago, I’ve been with Tony the whole time – our style will never win in the ACC, you’re never going to get recruits, your kids aren’t going to play at the next level. All of that. We’re going to recruit kids that fit UVA, that fit what we want to do, and ultimately we knew we were going to be successful. We won’t have anything to prove to the outside world. We just had to keep knocking. That’s been our goal. Just keep knocking, keep doing it the way we do, we’re going to do it the right way, we’re going to get quality, high character kids. Ultimately, I knew we’d get here. I didn’t know when, but I knew at some point we’d get here.”
No Gifts Please
One of the bigger non-basketball storylines of the day turned out to be the wedding registry of Kyle Guy and fiancee Alexa Jenkins. The website ‘Busted Coverage’ had posted something earlier in the week about testing the NCAA rules with a mention of the wedding registry, an article that has since been removed.
Guy said during the open locker room session for UVA that it was “crazy to me that that’s illegal” to have the registry available online.
Virginia's Kyle Guy and his fiancee can't start their wedding registry because NCAA. pic.twitter.com/kuFB3O8A0f
— USA TODAY Sports (@usatodaysports) April 4, 2019
During his press conference, however, NCAA President Mark Emmert fielded a question about the situation and clarified it is not against NCAA rules to have a wedding registry or to receive holiday gifts from family and friends.
“I heard about that just as I was walking in just now, and I immediately grabbed my people and said, What’s this all about?” Emmert said. “What we know right now is that nobody in the NCAA said anything of the sort. We don’t know what the source of that information was, whether it came from the institution or not. It’s certainly not the case that that’s a violation of NCAA rules. We allow people to have all the usual and accustomed gifts among families and friends at all holidays and weddings of the sort. There’s not a prohibition against that. We’ve been reaching back out already to the university to try to find out what transpired there. That’s simply an inaccurate story.”
