ACC Men's Basketball Tournament Preview: Can Virginia Win the ACC Tournament?

Taking a look at UVA's path to the ACC Men's Basketball Championship

Author:
Matt Newton
Updated:
Mar 7, 2022 5:26 PM EST
Original:
Mar 7, 2022

For the first time in nearly a decade, Virginia enters the ACC Men's Basketball Tournament with its NCAA Tournament hopes hanging in the balance.

ESPN's Joe Lunardi currently has UVA in the "Next Four Out" in his latest Bracketology projections behind Indiana, Dayton, BYU, and Virginia Tech in the list of teams below the cutoff line. The Cavaliers will likely need to win at least three games in order to put themselves in the conversation for an at-large bid on Selection Sunday. The only way for Virginia to guarantee a spot in March Madness is by going all the way and winning the ACC Tournament Championship at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn this week.

Virginia enters the ACC Tournament as the No. 6 seed and the Cavaliers will face the winner of the first round game between No. 11 Louisville and No. 14 Georgia Tech in the second round on Wednesday at approximately 9:30pm. The Cardinals and Yellow Jackets are set to play on Tuesday at 7pm on the ACC Network.

Virginia defeated Georgia Tech 63-53 on February 12 in Charlottesville. UVA took down Louisville 64-52 on January 24 at JPJ and then completed the season sweep over the Cardinals with a 71-61 victory at Louisville on Saturday.

A win over Louisville (NET 137) or Georgia Tech (NET 158) will not do much to bolster UVA's NCAA Tournament resume, but it will keep the Cavaliers alive and give them a chance to pick up possibly two Quad 1 wins on their way to the ACC title game.

On a neutral floor, Quadrant 1 is considered any team ranked inside the top 50 of the NET rankings. If the Cavaliers win their second round game, they will advance to the quarterfinals to face No. 3 seed North Carolina on Thursday at 9:30pm. After pulling the upset at Duke, the Tar Heels entered the latest AP Top 25 poll at No. 25, giving the ACC two teams in the AP poll for the first time since November. More importantly, UNC is currently 33rd in the NET rankings, so a win over the Tar Heels will give Virginia its fourth Quad 1 victory of the season. The Cavaliers also have Quad 1 wins at Duke, at Miami, and against Providence on a neutral floor.

Beating North Carolina will be no easy feat, as the Tar Heels have won each of their last five games and are certainly playing their best basketball of the season right now. In the lone meeting between these two teams in the regular season, UNC dismantled UVA 74-58 and snapped a seven-game losing streak to the Cavaliers on January 8th in Chapel Hill.

It has been nearly two months since that matchup and both teams have progressed a great deal since then, but one factor remains clear: Virginia must have a solution for Armando Bacot, who went off for 29 points and 21 rebounds in North Carolina's win over the Cavaliers. UVA's center tandem of Francisco Caffaro and Kadin Shedrick must be solid and keep Bacot off the glass to give the Hoos a chance.

If Virginia manages to advance past North Carolina, the Cavaliers will likely face either No. 2 seed Notre Dame or No. 7 seed Virginia Tech in the semifinals, assuming that the Hokies are able to get past either No. 10 Clemson or No. 15 NC State in their second round game. A win over Notre Dame (NET 50) or Virginia Tech (NET 37) would qualify as a fifth Quad 1 win for UVA and would advance the Cavaliers to the ACC title game.

Virginia narrowly lost at Notre Dame 69-65 on January 29th in the singular regular season meeting between the two squads. UVA and Virginia Tech split the regular season series of the Commonwealth Clash, with both teams defending their home floors. Beating either the Hokies or the Irish will be a tough task, but certainly doable for the Cavaliers if they play with an edge, knowing that their postseason destiny is on the line.

It is debatable whether those three wins would be enough to earn UVA a March Madness bid. It would certainly make the NCAA Selection Committee consider the Hoos, but it would also undoubtedly make for a nerve-wracking Selection Sunday. There are factors that are out of Virginia's hands, such as how other teams on the bubble perform in their respective conference tournaments and whether there are any "bid-stealers" in other conferences, which will lessen the number of teams on the bubble who will make it in the NCAA Tournament.

Of course, if Virginia wins the ACC Championship, the Hoos won't have to sweat it out on Selection Sunday, having secured an automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament. But that would require winning four games in four days, with the fourth being against what will assuredly be a very high quality opponent from the top half of the ACC Tournament bracket.

The likely candidates to make the final from that side of the bracket are presumptive favorite No. 1 Duke, No. 4 Miami, and No. 5 Wake Forest. Each of those contenders are likely NCAA Tournament teams and Virginia has a mixed record against them.

UVA split the two-game series with Duke in a pair of very entertaining and closely-contested games with each team winning on the other team's home floor. In both games, the Cavaliers showed that the team they have developed into in the second half of the season is more than deserving of an NCAA Tournament bid. A third meeting between Tony Bennett and Coach K's teams in New York would be must-see TV.

Virginia swept the regular season series with Miami, which might cause one to think that it would be preferable for UVA that the Hurricanes come out of that half of the bracket, since the Cavaliers have shown that they can beat the Canes. However, beating any team three times in one season is extremely challenging, especially a team as talented as Miami.

Virginia dropped a 63-55 contest at home to Wake Forest back on January 15th. It would be interesting to see how the Cavaliers fare against newly-crowned ACC Player of the Year Alondes Williams and the Demon Deacons this time around after experiencing some major improvements on both ends of the floor.

The case can be made that UVA could receive an at-large bid by winning three games before losing in the ACC title game. But, as we said before, that plan comes with some inherent uncertainty and risk as the Cavaliers put their fate in the hands of the NCAA Selection Committee. In any case, the ideal scenario remains the one that ends with the Cavaliers cutting down the nets at the Barclays Center on Saturday after winning the program's fourth ACC Tournament Championship.

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