DD lets us know just how tight-lipped Craig Littlepage’s bunker has become these day. Not exactly the type of media outreach I think we all would expect from an Athletic Director, given that he’s directing athletic activities that needs the media to publicize its athletic activities.

I’ve been critical of the secretive nature of this AD in the past. I’m not happy that this problem is getting worse.

A reader concurs:

Do I want to go to Atlanta to watch UVA get pummeled in the 5-12 game at noon, or the 6-11 game at 7 on Thursday in a dome? Only to try to scalp to Dukies or Heels for the weekend? No thanks, not gonna happen this year.

Yeah, it’s going to take more than a slick email to get me on that plane.

I just got an email from the VAF advertising ACC basketball tickets. I understand they have to do this, but this might be the one year they may want to discourage Virginia fans from attending.

FanHouse takes a look at Virginia’s football recruiting, and the subsequent winning and losing, under the ol’ cap tosser and our current chess playing pilot.

Gary Williams gets into it with a Maryland associate athletic director over recruiting. Not exactly the way to make nice with the boss when the job performance is circling the drain.

Another reader reacts to my “worried about Leitao” post:

Good article about Leitao’s flawed offense. Leitao is probably not the man that’s going to bring Virginia basketball back to competitiveness. But who made the poor decision to bring him to UVA? If I were a prized recruit, I wouldn’t want to hone my skills at a college where the coach can’t coach, and all he seems to do is yell at his players. Gillen had a very poor season at Providence before we brought him to UVA. Leitao had one horrible season at DePaul before he came to C’ville.

I’m certainly not convinced that Leitao is destined to fail. He’s got some solid young talent here and coming, and perhaps these players are just the guys he needs for instilling his offense. But, if not, it’s sort of depressing to think that Virginia might be on fired coach #3 since the Terry Holland era.

Former Virginia blogger uvasportsfanatic writes in a reaction to my “worried about Leitao” post:

You know what is sad about your post today is that I posted something similar on my site a couple years ago during Leitao’s first year, but I was willing to give him all the slack in the world since it was his first year and he was playing with inherited players. But I’m completely on board with your thinking. He has no clue how to design an offense. The reason we won two years ago was due to the singular talents of Singletary and Reynolds, the fact that they could get to the free throw line and we played good defense and rebounded the ball. But we still had excruciatingly long offensive droughts and were far from a prolific offensive team.

(more…)

Up until very recently, I firmly believed that Leitao was rebuilding the Virginia basketball program back to its old heights. Maybe I’m late to this party, but I now am worried about whether Dave Leitao is going to achieve the sort of success at Virginia that we were expecting and that will keep him from being fired eventually. And this worry comes from my own observations of the program and from some recent writings about the team, especially this superb article (sub. req.) by Kris Wright about the offensive struggles.

Virginia’s basketball teams have consistently been poor on offense. Aside from the year that Leitao actually had two consistent scoring threats (the 2007 tandem of Sean Singletary and J.R. Reynolds), the offense is often best described as being of the pass-around-the-key-til-someone-bricks-a-three variety. Watching the FSU loss, I felt like I was taking in a movie I’d seen for the 10th time, like one of those comedies that TBS ends up showing nonstop. Only I’m not laughing. Supposedly, Leitao is running something called the “motion offense” (sub. req.) that involves something that Virginia’s players don’t do well: moving around! Of course, it’s more than that — poor passing, poor shooting, poor everything at times. But, overall, his players often fail to execute the motion offense’s fundamentals. Thus, this is year four of the Leitao era, and his program still hasn’t established the basics of his own offense. Young players, veteran players, guards, forwards, it doesn’t matter. Virginia’s offense remains stagnate.

My tentative conclusion: something is wrong with the way Leitao is teaching his offense. His players, year after year, simply aren’t getting it.

Further proof can be seen in Leitao’s inconsistent rotations. Ben Allaire has some observations on how the rotation is all over the place. Some of that can be blamed on the players’ inconsistencies or a futile search for a rotation that makes sense. Or perhaps Leitao believes that some players match-up better against different opponents, thus altering playing time accordingly. Or maybe he’s trying to outsmart the other coach with some surprises. Regardless, coaches of successful teams have set rotations that they can count on. Leitao doesn’t have that, and this speaks to the players’ inabilities and inexperience, but perhaps (and this is the “worried” part) also to Leitao’s failings in deploying his offense.

As a result, I wonder if Leitao needs his own Gregg Brandon. Al Groh finally saw the light and decided to bring in a new offensive mastermind to breathe life into an offense that has struggled season after season, regardless of the players, allowing Groh to focus more on his specialty of defense. Sound familiar?

One last related worry: Kris Wright’s article (sub. req.) on this really being year one is concerning. It makes sense: Leitao had success earlier than expected because of Sean and J.R., and the real “year one” is happening now. However, the beauty of having “year one” during the first season of a coach’s tenure is that subsequent improvements build momentum that can lead to sustained growth. Having a few seasons of early success that are interrupted by rebuilding season halts that momentum. In addition, the impression from the outside (recruits, fans, reporters) is that the program is in decline, rather than the other way around. Thus, even if Leitao could figure out the offense (with the help of an expert), I’m officially worried that the out-of-sequence nature of his coaching run might not lend itself to the sort of sustained improvement needed to rebuild the program, or the type of rising goodwill from fans, recruits, and the media that gives a coach the time and tools for that rebuilding.

Not me, but Baby Vandy-Hoo is taking my attention today. Check out our message boards or our NewsLink if you’re looking to waste some work hours.

An FSU blogger reviews the last game: “So combine what has been a pretty good defense with an improving offense and we have the makings of a pretty good team.”

An alternative conclusion would be that UVa just makes everyone look like a pretty good team. When Maryland follows up their victory over Virginia with a 40 point drubbing at the hands of D*ke, it kind of puts things in an ugly context. And Carolina gets to apply some context all over FSU for us on Wednesday night.