“It’s like whipped cream on crap.”
This was the eloquent simile Virginia coach Dave Leitao used yesterday afternoon to describe his team’s tendency to follow a lousy first half with a better second half — a trend that continued yesterday when Duke routed the Cavaliers 79-54.
To be accurate, this comparison was a simile within a metaphor. “In golf ... when you’re playing, you hit a really good drive in the middle of the fairway, and you get to the green in two and you four-putt,” is what Leitao compared to soft, sugary sweetness coating — ahem — solid waste.
While this was Leitao’s only humorous quip following the beatdown at Cameron Indoor Stadium, it was not the only intriguing one, an especially surprising development given Leitao’s self-described ornery nature after losses. Most interestingly, Leitao elaborated in great detail on the current state of the program at a time when, I think we can all now definitively say, his job is very likely on the hot seat pending the outcome of the rest of the season.
Thus, I’ll let Leitao do most of the talking in this column, seeing as how I hammered the Cavaliers enough in their last dismal effort against Florida State. There’s really nothing of substance I can add that would shed any more light on just how mind-numbingly horrible Virginia has played of late.
Plus, it’s 5:09 p.m. as I type this sentence, and I really don’t want to miss the kickoff of the Super Bowl.
So, without further ado, here is a selection of some of Leitao’s surprisingly revealing and lengthy answers he gave at his postgame presser yesterday.
On the state of the program:
“This is a very bad year to be where we’re at. This league is much better than at any point in time that I’ve been here. You’ve got three teams that have already been No. 1; nobody’s talked about Clemson, they’re very, very good, and we have yet to play them — we play them twice. You go down the line — Florida State, for the first time since I’ve been here ... will be in the tournament. Miami is not the Miami that I got [when I came to Virginia]. So, this league is very, very good at a time when we’re very, very young — and I don’t use that as an excuse; it’s just a fact.”
“When you take over a program, usually you clean out a roster in a span of two years, and you get your people in, and you let ‘em grow, and somewhere — three, or four, or five, or 10 [years thereafter] — success.”
“It’s a league of ebbs and flows with programs, unless you’re Duke and can maintain yourself, and get at the top — [or] Carolina — and stay at the top. What we did, when I first got there, was we went and rode the people that were there because, one, they were very good people, and two, they were, I thought, very good players. They helped us win a lot of games, helped us win an ACC Championship, which a lot of teams in this league can’t say.”
For you youngsters out there, Leitao was referring to 2008 graduate Sean Singletary and 2007 graduate J.R. Reynolds.
“The downside of that is at some point they leave, and you’ve got [to] start. It stunted the growth of the guys that are older right now, that we’re asking to do things for the first time — leadership, command, all those kinds of things. And, we’re asking young people — three of which are freshmen that start — to come into an environment like this, or any environment, and perform like you’ve been around the block for many times.”
“So, I understand that the growing pains come. I don’t look at it programmatically other than, we’ve got a job to do, and we’ve gotta grow through improvement — team-wise, individually, through recruiting. Through all those things, you get to the place that you need to be. It’s happened with all the [teams] that I just mentioned, it’s happened already for us, and now it’s [going to] happen again.”
On Duke’s defense being among the best defenses in the conference and the country:
“I think this year more than any other year, the correction is that they are the best in this league. Obviously I don’t get to see other teams as often as I’d like, so I would put them in comparison to anybody else. I think Wake Forest — correct me if I’m wrong — is the only [ACC] team that’s scored over 60 points [against Duke] this year.”
Yes coach, that is correct, and the Demon Deacons only put up 70 — “and while doing so, they’re still scoring. You get fooled by teams that don’t give up a lot of points because they don’t score a lot. This team scores a lot, but yet doesn’t give up a whole lot.”
“There’s a tremendous amount of attention to detail in what they do. They’ve figured it out — they’re athletic, they’re quick, they’re fast — and whatever their individual deficiencies may be ... on defense, you never get a chance to see them. What they did to us was made us play faster than we wanted to physically and then after that play faster mentally, and that’s what they do to everybody.”
On whether Duke is better than Connecticut, where Leitao spent 18 years as an assistant coach for Jim Calhoun:
“Fortunately for the rest of the world, or unfortunately for me, I don’t think my opinion on that matters that much.”
The quote that stuck with me, in reference to building a successful program:
“It’s happened already for us, and now it’s [going to] happen again.”
Certainly, Virginia will be good again; the question of whether it is with Leitao at the helm is what will generate much discussion. Sounds familiar to another revenue-generating team at the University, doesn’t it?
But for now, it’s 5:54 p.m. Go Steelers.
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