The Opening Tip: No. 17 Virginia

Earl Grant's three-year stint at Wichita State coincided with the start of steady improvement within the Shocker program. An assistant to Gregg Marshall in the aftermath of Mark Turgeon's trip to the Sweet Sixteen, Grant represented a staff that scaffolded growth towards an eventual Final Four berth in 2013. Collaboration at every level helped build the team from its early foundations, and an early missed opportunity eventually translated into a College Basketball Invitational berth before consecutive trips to the National Invitational Tournament and, eventually, the NCAA Tournament.

For three years, Grant helped lay that groundwork, but the stark reminder of his time in the Missouri Valley Conference didn't occur during Boston College's outing against Notre Dame or the end of its recent two-game winning streak. Sitting at his home on Sunday night, he instead was reminded by the smartest person in any man's life - his wife - about the time that he last endured 18 inches of snow.

"My wife reminded me [about the 20 inches that we saw in Wichita] because I was talking about getting out [the house] and getting to practice," he said. "I had the urgency to leave the house, but when I looked [at the storm], it was pretty rough, and she reminded me of the time that I was at Wichita State and did the same thing. I rushed out of the house, and about 10 minutes later, I was calling for help because I was stuck in the snow. I knew not to leave the house [for this one] to try to get to the office. We scheduled practice for [Monday] afternoon and because we had the bye week, we got to continue to get better. There are some things that we had improved over in the last 10 days [prior to the storm], and we didn't want to disrupt that development progress."

Disruption stood out as the operative word associated with last weekend's massive storm system. A foot-plus of snow blanketed New England for the first time in 10 years while ice gathered in the more southern points around the Carolinas. Areas in Central Florida, North Florida and the Panhandle fell below freezing temperatures for the first time in four years as remnants of the storm merged into midweek forecasts, and a number of weekend games throughout college basketball were shifted and moved to avoid the travel woes potentially stemming from worsening conditions. Among those matchups, a top-25 game between Virginia and North Carolina pushed its start time ahead by two hours.

Regions shut down in the aftermath of the system until cleanup efforts spent 24 hours clearing roads, sidewalks and parking lots, but the wide-ranging impact left an indirect mark on Virginia's fallout from a five-point loss to North Carolina. Forced onto the road for the first time in 10 days, the Cavaliers looked lost in the first half of their trip to Notre Dame, and the Fighting Irish built a subsequent 19-point lead by outright dominating their more powerful ranked opponent. Still, the upset bid from the team that salted BC on Saturday fell short after Virginia sliced through the lead and gathered steam through overtime, and the Cavaliers won a brutal and grueling double-overtime game by three.

"They played an awesome game," said head coach Ryan Odom after the 100-97 victory. "They got off to a great start. They were really comfortable, and we were uncomfortable - got down 19 in the first half. We were reeling a little bit, but in the timeouts, our guys came in and were communicating with one another in a positive way. Certainly, we did not intend to get down as much as we were down…our guys had to answer, and fortunately, it began to turn a little bit."

At no point was the weather an outright cause for concern, but Virginia clearly looked impacted by its cold start on the road. First half defensive woes compounded an inability to consistently land three-pointers over the first two minutes, and it took a miracle comeback over the final 26 minutes of game time to create a winning scenario. Now headed for the frosty Northeast and another ACC outpost, conditions are ripe for a team to feel the impact of a hungry and rested Boston College roster, even if the sport is contested indoors and well away from the subzero surroundings of a region unwilling to thaw its own hearty heart.

On with the preview of BC's upcoming game against Virginia:

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Virginia Storylines (Mitch Hedberg Edition)

Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two-thousand of something.

Mitch Hedberg is one of my absolute favorite comedians because his jokes were nothing more than silly observations about the world around him. Simple things like escalators could become hilarious lines capable of making me spit drinks out of my nose while I went blind from laughter. I have a hard time believing that he died over 20 years ago, but even his passing illustrated his success as a comic when people believed it was an elaborate April Fools' Day joke.

Boston College entered last Saturday's game against Notre Dame with momentum oozing out of every imaginable pore. The Fighting Irish lacked identity after Markus Burton's injury, and the struggles extended to both ends of the court without a playmaker who could lead every statistical category. Hope existed for them to spread the ball through multiple options, but that required Micah Shrewsberry to completely reinvent the system around unproven parts.

Lo and behold, that's exactly what happened against BC. Jalen Haralson remained the team's top shooter but ceded leading scoring duties to Braeden Shrewsberry, and Carson Towt grabbed 13 rebounds while four different players dished two assists. Nobody turned the ball over with any regularity, and only Towt and Shrewsberry appeared in 30-plus minutes. Cole Certa was able to get to the line for a perfect 6-for-6 on free throws, and Ryder Frost, Garrett Sundra and Sir Mohammed all contributed one or two difference-making baskets.

"We need to continue to make good decisions," said Grant. "We have to depend on our defense to give ourselves a chance to be successful, so we needed to build on that [during the week]. Combinations, in the middle of the year, we're noticing new guys in different combinations are more efficient [than other groupings], so we're trying to get those guys more reps in practice. When we get to the game, we [need to be] a little bit more confident and comfortable within those combinations."

An escalator can never break. It can only become stairs. You should never see an 'Escalator Temporarily Out of Order' sign, just 'Escalator Temporary Stairs.' Sorry for the inconvenience.

Moving to Virginia, it's hard to look at the Cavaliers and see anything other than Tony Bennett's Pack Line Defense. Even without the coaching staff intact from that era after interim head coach Ron Sanchez was not retained after last year's 15-17 season, much of the infrastructure from Odom's tenure at VCU included one of the stingiest defenses in college basketball. Last year alone, the Rams allowed the ninth-fewest points in Division I before winning the Atlantic-10 with a 28-win season, and both the 24-14 team that didn't go to the tournament and his teams at Maryland-Baltimore County - including the one that defeated Virginia as the first-ever No. 16 seed to win an NCAA Tournament game - ranked in the top third of college basketball's defensive points allowed.

Not even the 97 points scored by a midweek Notre Dame team changed that effect or impact on the Virginia team ranked among the top-75 defenses in this year's college ranks. The eighth-best effective field goal rating in the country is built by an absurd offensive rebound rate and the denial of both turnovers and free throw attempts, while the defensive reputation of a team built around stopping the paint is producing the No. 7-ranked two-point field goal defensive percentage by denying the rim and glass to anyone who attempts to charge through things.

"We were able to focus on some misses," said Odom after the Notre Dame win. "We scored better and got into the press, which was able to really help us extend the game. It's hard to recount [great plays] on both sides. The shots that were made and the big plays that these young people were making made for a great college basketball game."

Notre Dame's failure to gain 10 offensive rebounds against Virginia translated to just six second chance points while the Cavaliers dominated bench scoring and depth production. The shared production from the BC game altered to a top-heavy, four-player lineup while Towt failed to grab rebounds with the same ferocity, and as a result, a second half shooting percentage that plummeted from the first period ended with Notre Dame scoring approximately half of its first half production. Most of that was caused by a Virginia team that played to its strength after struggling through the first half.

This shirt is dry clean only. Which means…it's dirty.

Virginia's offense under Bennett was a half-court team designed to play a low-scoring and methodical game. The guards were experienced ball handlers around a big man who towered over his competition, and the development of a high-efficiency wagon dismantled teams by shortening the game to its basic component parts. In Bennett's last year, the slowest team in college basketball had an adjusted efficiency that was more than 100 places higher than its actual scoring output, but balancing it against one of the most efficient defenses in college basketball killed opponents.

Odom's development is a bit different because Virginia is a bit faster in running its offense. Average time of possession is approximately two seconds faster than the 20-second offense under Bennett, and more of the production is moving to bigger and larger players in the frontcourt. Freshman forward Thijs De Ridder, for example, has been a part of 28 percent of both Virginia's possessions and shot attempts, but his effective field goal rate and ability to draw fouls makes him a dangerous shooter with a 59 percent and 37 percent rate on two-point and three-point shots made.

"Fresh off of that [Notre Dame] game, you can kind of watch and see which ways each team is trying to attack each other," explained Grant. "You can see what's working, what's not working, and you have a feel from a lot of different schemes on how teams have tried to attack them. It never hurts to play the teams so recently that you can watch them against your next opponent."

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Question Box

Can anyone rattle Chance Mallory?

Mallory entered Virginia as an undersized guard capable of probing defenses, but his commitment to distributing the ball in stressful situations made him the perfect complement for an offense built around frontcourt scorers. Over the last five games, his development as a handler pushed no fewer than three assists against Stanford, Louisville, SMU, UNC and Notre Dame, and his four assists against both the Mustangs and Cardinals paced two road victories for a nationally-ranked program.

"Mallory's value is also magnified by his wealth of intangibles and true leadership skills," wrote 247sports Director of Scouting Adam Finkelstein in 2024. "He's not only a throwback true point guard, but one of the most skilled players in the class, with the ideal mental make-up to compensate for whatever he may be lacking in terms of physical measurables."

Who complements Fred Payne?

Fred Payne isn't exactly a trade secret around ACC circles. The front-runner for this year's Most Improved Player Award - an award won by Donald Hand, Jr. at the end of last season's run - is ranked among the ACC's top shooters because he's trusted to lead Boston College at both ends of the floor. His breakout performance in the second half of the Pitt game therefore fed directly into his first half showing against Notre Dame.

Payne struggled in the second half of Saturday's game against the Irish because another shooter didn't step forward as a legitimate threat. Luka Toews bowed out of the scoresheet after nailing down 11 points in the first half, and Donald Hand, Jr. reverted to scoring double-digits by getting to the free throw line. Neither Boden Kapke, Chase Forte or Aidan Shaw productively helped an offense that couldn't find Jayden Hastings, and that left Payne without a secondary option on the floor.

BC plays its best basketball when a secondary option emerges from the lineup, and the first half perfectly illustrated how it doesn't necessarily matter who fills that role. An offense littered with options and intelligent basketball players could even blend the role into several players by working through ball movement and vision that's capable of sniping any defense in a half-court setting.

Have you ever felt like a stranger in your hometown?

I returned to Malden on Friday as part of my monthly "haircut-and-dinner" hometown tradition, but driving through the streets made me acutely aware of how much things changed over the past couple of months. Specifically targeting three main areas, I noticed that the name of my family's former business - the place where my great-grandfather worked alongside my grandfather and my dad before the family sold it in the late-1980s - had been changed. In its place stood an unrecognizable variety store that wasn't the butchery from years past.

Moving around the block, my childhood house featured a new porch and a new exterior that was remarkably different from the old days, and my grandmother's house two blocks up the hill from that house featured new front windows and no awnings over those windows. In an instant, I immediately felt like a stranger in Malden, almost as if I didn't know my own hometown.

Businesses come and go, but the jarring reality of my journey hit me like a sack of bricks because it's been more than 10 years since I moved away from my parents. I married and moved into an apartment before buying a house and having a family, but my hometown remained a pair of old and comfortable sneakers. Finally discarding those sneakers scarred my soul and heart, but I guess that's the inevitable march of a clock that doesn't stop.

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BC-Virginia X Factor

Nothing burns like the cold. -George R.R. Martin

North Carolina's 85 points against Virginia offered the first 70-point performance in regulation by a Cavaliers opponent since Maryland scored 72 in a loss to UVA. Louisville's technical clearance over the 70-point bar came in a 79-70 loss on January 13, but the only team prior to the Tar Heels to score more than 70 points in regulation and beat Virginia came during Butler's 80-73 win on November 23. Other than those games, the 95-85 loss to Virginia Tech and 100-97 win over Notre Dame stood out, but each game required multiple overtimes.

Virginia owns three different five-game winning streaks because of its ability to slam the door on opponents. Even without a prolific offense, the Cavaliers are 17-3 because they held Southern Methodist to 68 points, held Stanford to 55 points and held NC State to 61 points. Texas lost to Virginia during the ACC-SEC Challenge because it scored 69 points at home, and Dayton lost to the Cavaliers by 13 points because they couldn't keep up with the Virginia defense.

BC has to assume that its offense will not enjoy an offensive explosion against the Virginia defense, so the Eagles need to play their own defensive brand against the interior Cavalier shooters. Even with a 9-11 overall record, BC hasn't surrendered 80 points in regulation, and no team scored 80 points since the 93-90 overtime loss to Tulane.

Their own inability to consistently break though the 70-point barrier critically wounded efforts against LSU, UMass, Georgia Tech, Louisville and NC State, and even the last game against Notre Dame would have flipped if the Eagles could have found two or three extra baskets. As an ongoing storyline, that's where development is needed.

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Scoreboard Watching

The half-game separating Boston College from the bottom five teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference standings is a wobbly balance beam that teeters on the brink of already producing a wild storyline. Three of the teams currently tied for the final two spots in the postseason conference tournament won't advance, and a loss on Saturday potentially slots the Eagles into the same conversation as Pittsburgh, Wake Forest, Florida State and Notre Dame - all of which are in action on Saturday.

From a tiebreaker perspective, any grouping of teams with the same record is first matched into a head-to-head setting against one another. Even if teams don't play one another and even though BC can't yet fall directly into a head-to-head tiebreaker with each of the teams in that scenario, winning percentage is used among the combined conference teams. As a result, BC's is technically 1-2 against the bottom five teams because its win over Pittsburgh is tempered by the losses to Georgia Tech and Notre Dame.

Syracuse is one game ahead of those teams and represents a major factor in BC's head-to-head tiebreaker. The Eagles are one-half game behind the Orange and the two Western teams from Cal and Stanford, and home head-to-head matchups remain against both of the former Pac-12 teams. Given that a future tiebreaker scenario involves records against teams from the top of the conference until teams are eliminated, a game against Virginia is equally critical.

Beyond all of that, a two-game swing separates BC from a three-way tie between the sixth place programs at SMU, North Carolina and Virginia Tech, so games are equally critical for teams situated ahead of the Eagles.

Saturday brings most of that to the forefront within the ACC. BC's game against No. 17 Virginia dots the national CW Network broadcast at 1:30 p.m., but the rest of the core national slate includes noon tip-offs at top-seeded and No. 4 Duke's trip to Virginia Tech and Pittsburgh's trip to No. 22 Clemson. NC State and Wake Forest are slotted for an ACC Extra broadcast at the same time as those two games.

The mid-afternoon slots No. 16 North Carolina at Georgia Tech on ACC Network while SMU is at No. 20 Louisville on ESPN, and an early evening tip-off between Cal and Miami precursors Stanford's 6 p.m. tip-off at Florida State. After the BC game, the late CW Network broadcast features Notre Dame and Syracuse in a matchup with plenty of implications for the Eagles.

On the national stage, noon start times feature Cincinnati at No. 10 Houston and No. 11 Texas Tech at Central Florida while the 2 p.m. start features the in-state rivalry between No. 2 Arizona and Arizona State. Later on, the No. 24 Miami Redhawks - undefeated at 21-0 - host Northern Illinois in a MAC matchup before No. 13 BYU plays a Big 12 conference game at No. 14 Kansas.

Later in the evening, Ole Miss heads to No. 18 Vanderbilt while Kentucky is at No. 15 Arkansas in the SEC, and the 8 p.m. start between No. 2 UConn and Creighton precedes No. 6 Gonzaga's late-night tip against Saint Mary's.

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This Random Day In History

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed into order the final version of the Emancipation Proclamation before it was read publicly to newly freed people in areas of control by the Union Army. In it, the president utilized powers as the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States to designate persons held as slaves in Confederate-controlled areas as free. It later became the basis of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude except as the punishment for a crime at the national level. Passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, the amendment was adopted by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865.

It wasn't formally adopted as an amendment until 27 of the 36 states ratified the resolution on December 6, 1865, but the action essentially spoke to the American people through the Congressional record. Any system of slavery that existed prior to the Civil War was no longer a part of America.

I'd argue that no amendment to the Constitution - maybe the Bill of Rights - established further-reaching consequences within American society. Two additional "Reconstruction amendments" later passed to protect the rights of freed slaves, including the all-important Fourteenth Amendment that addressed citizenship rights and equal protection under the law. By the end of the decade, the Fifteenth Amendment protected the voting rights of all citizens regardless of race, a move that was hotly debated because of the preexisting Three-Fifths Compromise and the ensuing power block potentially enjoyed by the newly-freed slaves.

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Pregame Quote and Final Thoughts

Take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again. -Frank Sinatra

Virginia is one of the most powerful teams in the nation. Even without the fabled or vaunted Pack Line Defense, the Cavaliers are built around the core tenets that have been in place for decades. Playing in front of a strong defense, an offense that's capable of tearing through an opposing team has a 17-3 team in position for a run at a highly-touted seed in the NCAA Tournament.

BC doesn't carry that resume into Saturday's game, but the Eagles are a pesky defensive team that's capable of shutting down any opponent. They once held their own stroke on the offensive end, so finding that groove against a stingy defense is going to be downright difficult. Opportunities will exist, though, and maybe there's a recipe brewing for a Saturday afternoon upset.

Boston College and Virginia tip off on Saturday at 1:30 p.m. from Conte Forum in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. National television coverage is available on the CW Network with radio coverage available through the Boston College Sports Network, locally in Boston on WEEI 850 AM.

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Chase Forte

Jayden Hastings

Boden Kapke

Fred Payne

Aidan Shaw

Luka Toews

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