Second-year UVA Basketball coach Ryan Odom is pretty sure he has a good team heading into next season, based on his aggressive scheduling.
Word is that Odom has added a neutral site game with Arkansas to the November portion of the 2026-2027 schedule.
Arkansas was ranked 11th in the latest ESPN Too Early Top 25, which dates way back to July 1.
SB Nation, in a July 13 update to its Too Early Top 25, had Arkansas at 9.
Virginia was 14 and 15, respectively, in those two renderings.
That is too low for the Too Early Top 25s for the group that Odom has put together, but anyway.
The November-December schedule also has Kentucky (ESPN: 17, SBN: 22), a road game at Maryland – ignored in the Too Early Top 25s, but that arena is a super tough place to play – and the Battle 4 Atlantis, with a field that includes the likes of Marquette, Texas A&M and Xavier.
None of those are in the Too Early Top 25s, but they’re all name programs.
Oh, and then there’s a game in December in MSG against a certain UConn team.
You may have heard of them.
All of that, plus a home-and-home with Duke, which is usually decent, most years.
Tony Bennett, you may remember, would schedule tough when he thought he had good squads.
For instance, 2015-2016, he scheduled West Virginia (which finished with a 26-9 record) and Cal (with a freshman by name of Jaylen Brown) for back-to-back games in December.
And the 2016-2017 schedule had Iowa and Providence in November, WVU and Cal in December, Villanova (with Jalen Brunson) in February.
It’s been a while since we had the level of nonconference schedule that Odom has put together for the coming season.
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Chris Graham
