College basketball analyst Seth Davis of Sports Illustrated and CBS isn’t a fan of the UVA fan base. Mainly, it appears at first glance, because the UVA fan base isn’t a fan of Seth Davis.
@TheUVAFool I’m honestly sure I’ve ever come across a more sensitive fan base. Anything that isn’t 100 pct rah rah lights up twitter.
— Seth Davis (@SethDavisHoops) February 9, 2015
Davis, a 1992 graduate of Duke, drew the ire of the UVA fan base last week for questioning on Twitter why Virginia was ranked ahead of Duke in the AP poll (in which he gets a vote) after losing at home to the Blue Devils.
Fans questioned his own internal logic considering his vote for Wisconsin ahead of Duke on his AP ballot the past two weeks (Duke won on the road Wisconsin in December), and then wondered aloud how Duke’s losses to unranked Miami and at unranked N.C. State might factor into other voters’ decisions.
More criticism from UVA fans came after Davis commented on Twitter on the news of the injury to Justin Anderson late Saturday night that the Cavs would struggle because of a lack of bench depth.
Huge for Virginia to lose Justin Anderson. Has been having a grew year. Cavs don’t have a great bench. — Seth Davis (@SethDavisHoops) February 8, 2015
Fun fact there: Virginia’s bench is getting 57.1 minutes per game in ACC play. If that’s not having a “great bench,” the bench at Davis’s deloved Duke must be really, you know, not great. The Blue Devils are getting only 45.2 minutes per game from their bench in the ACC, and a third of those came from now-dismissed Rasheed Sulaimon.
Good luck down the stretch managing minutes for the second half of ACC play and having anything left for March Madness, Coach K.
Back to our column: We all have our biases, and we all have our own internal problems seeing past them. Davis is a ’92 graduate of Duke; I’m a ’94 graduate of UVA. As a UVA alum, I tend to see college sports through orange- and blue-colored glasses.
Even that said, if I had a vote for the AP Top 25, I wouldn’t be going out of my way to kneecap the resume of, say, Kentucky, to justify voting Virginia with one loss ahead of the unbeaten Wildcats, as much as the alum/fan in me would want me to try to do so.
And I say that, and I don’t write for a national publication, don’t work as a commentator for the broadcast partner of the NCAA; in other words, I don’t need to hide my biases as the editor of little ol’ Augusta Free Press, 20-year credentialed member of the UVA sports press corps, alum, my front door a 20-minute drive from JPJ.
And yet, well, I’m not sure if it was my UVA education, vis-à-vis Davis’s Duke education, that ingrained critical thinking into my approach to reporting on college basketball, but things like logic, research, hard data are important to me, and obviously important to those in the UVA fan base raking Davis over the coals for his various non sequiturs regarding Virginia basketball and college basketball in general.
.@Acscholl @RTDSports must have forgotten to mention that Cavs are ranked 190th in US in bench minutes. Will be even lower without Anderson.
— Seth Davis (@SethDavisHoops) February 9, 2015
It’s hard to argue with this level of genius, folks. It must be a Duke thing, which is why we can’t understand.
– Column by Chris Graham
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