Can Virginia ever make a Final Four playing like Virginia?
By Chris Stone
History suggests Virginia’s system isn’t built for NCAA Tournament success.
Last night, for the first time in the history of the men’s NCAA Tournament, a No. 16 seed knocked off a No. 1 seed when the UMBC Retrievers handled the tournament’s top overall seed, the Virginia Cavaliers.
UMBC obviously deserves credit for the win. The Retrievers played significantly better than Virginia. They dominated the Cavaliers’ pack line defense by knocking down 3-point shots — 12 in total — and creating easy paths to the rim by spreading the floor and attacking off the bounce. There were no questions about who deserved to win after the 20-point beating.
Still, it’s hard to shake who they beat. For years, analysts across college basketball have questioned whether or not the system Tony Bennett plays at Virginia — a grinding, slow paced, defensive-minded game plan — was capable of actually succeeding in a single elimination format.
The Cavaliers ranked 351st nationally this season in adjusted tempo, per KenPom, which is a way of saying that when playing against a Division I team that wants to play at an average pace, Virginia’s game would involve the fewest total number of possessions.
This season, the Cavaliers had an adjusted tempo of 59.4 possessions. They’ve had an adjusted tempo below 60.0 possessions in seven of Bennett’s nine seasons.
The argument, in theory, against Bennett’s system is pretty simple. When a team reduces the number of possessions in a game against inferior opponents, they increase the variance involved in the outcome. Put another way, in a 70 possession game, the underdog might need to make eight to 10 shots it doesn’t normally make. Against Virginia, in a sub-60 possession game, it might be just five. It also means there are fewer offensive possessions for a team like the Cavaliers to score points on while attempting to come back from a deficit.
Now, we have 16 prior seasons of data at KenPom we can look at to examine the relationship between adjusted tempo and making the Final Four. The results are pretty stark.
Of the 64 teams to make the Final Four since 2002, only two of them came into the tournament with an adjusted tempo below 60.0. Notably, those two teams — the 2007 Georgetown Hoyas and the 2015 Wisconsin Badgers — had elite offenses by efficiency standards. The Hoyas were the second best offense in the country in 2007 and the Badgers were the most efficient offense of the KenPom era.
Virginia, meanwhile, has finished with a top 10 offense by adjusted efficiency just once under Bennett. That was in 2016 when the Cavaliers made the Elite Eight, their best NCAA Tournament result with Bennett to date. This season, Virginia’s offense finished outside the top 30 nationally.
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This analysis obviously isn’t highly scientific. There are some limitations. For example, only a small subset of the 351 teams in Division I play at such a glacial pace, which means there are simply fewer slow-playing teams who can make the Final Four from the jump.
However, it’s still hard to get past the fact that no team since at least 2002 has made the Final Four playing how Virginia played this season. It’s impossible to rule out Bennett making a future Final Four playing in the same way, but he’ll need an elite offense to do so because the defense first, slow paced system isn’t built to do it on defense and slowness alone.