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Virginia Basketball’s Schedule Makes ACC Repeat a Longshot

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By @writered21

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For head coach Tony Bennett and his Virginia Cavaliers, there is no champion’s advantage entering the 2014-15 ACC basketball season. Fresh off a season that featured 30 wins, a first-place finish and 16-2 record in the ACC regular season, and the ACC tournament title, if any team was going to get a break from a scheduling standpoint, it would be UVA. Virginia got quite the opposite.

An encore of that 16-2 mark from a year ago seems impossible when you examine two key stretches of the Cavaliers’ conference slate, which commences Jan. 3, 2015, against what should be a much improved Miami team. The first gauntlet the Cavaliers must run through begins Jan. 31, when the Duke Blue Devils come to Charlottesville to take on Virginia for the first time in two years. The teams met twice last season, once in Durham where Duke escaped with a four-point win, and then again in the ACC tournament championship game, where the Cavaliers proved victorious.

Virginia doesn’t have to go to Duke this season, but what the Cavaliers have to do the rest of that week more than makes up for it. Just two days after the Duke game, Virginia goes to North Carolina. The Cavaliers didn’t have to go to Chapel Hill last season, and when the teams met at UVA, the Cavaliers cruised to a 76-61 win. The Tar Heels will be playing with revenge and three McDonald’s All-Americans among their freshmen.

The eight-day stretch concludes with another tough test for Virginia, a home game against Louisville. The Cardinals have been a national power of late and while this will be a bit of a rebuilding year for coach Rick Pitino‘s team, the Cardinals coming to the ACC this season only makes the league that much tougher. Hosting Louisville after playing Duke and North Carolina presents a three-game run where the Cavaliers would be quite fortunate to go 2-1.

If Virginia still finds itself in the battle for the top spot in the ACC in the season’s final week, getting across the finish line is going to be no easy task. The next-to-last conference game of the regular season is March 2 at Syracuse. UVA waxed the Orange last year in Charlottesville in the game that decided the regular-season title.

Then, Virginia goes to Louisville on March 7. That will be a tough assignment for the Cavaliers should they need to win that game to secure the top seed in the ACC tournament. And it’s a two-game stretch in which a couple losses could see Virginia slip to perhaps fourth or fifth in the final conference standings.

The one bright spot in the conference slate is a three-game home-stand from Feb. 14-22, in which Virginia welcomes Wake Forest, Pittsburgh and Florida State — all winnable games. Given the five contests mentioned above, Virginia will have to win those three, plus almost all the others, to contend for the ACC regular-season crown this season.

Ed Morgans is an ACC Basketball Writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @writered21 and add him to your network on Google.

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