Coach Ron Sanchez, sitting at the postgame podium, glanced down at a piece of paper. His gaze dropped from the reporters in the room to the box score before him, for one simple reason.
He did not know the final score.
The explanation for that has nothing to do with a deficient short-term memory. It deals, instead, with Virginia’s second-half disintegration Saturday against Southern Methodist. A tight game swiveled so abruptly south over its final 10 minutes that there remained no reason for Sanchez, when the final buzzer blared, to check the exact score. The numbers were academic.
He eventually learned that his Cavaliers (5-4, 0-1 ACC) had lost 63-51 to the Mustangs (8-2, 1-0 ACC) inside Moody Coliseum, breaking the program’s streak of 16 straight wins in conference openers. Tony Bennett never lost one. Sanchez lost his first.
“I thought we had a chance to win it,” junior guard Issac McKneely said postgame. “We were up seven, with nine or 10 minutes left. We just have to figure out a way to close games like that.”
McKneely, with the clock reading 10:19 in the second half, drilled a corner three-pointer, putting the Cavaliers ahead by seven points, 45-38. They never made another field goal.
The circumstances did not help. Sophomore guard Dai Dai Ames exited in the first half with an ankle injury and never returned, and junior forward Elijah Saunders played only 25 minutes, grappling with foul trouble.
Ames’s injury and Saunders’s limited minutes reduced a flagging offense to one dimension. Find McKneely, the plan seemed to be, and hope he can make something happen.
It worked for a little while. McKneely scored 17 points on 4-8 from the three-point line, accounting for 12 of Virginia’s 23 second-half points. But Southern Methodist smothered him in the end, hounding him, someone always breathing down his neck.
“We just tried to make it as hard as we could for him to take contested shots,” Coach Andy Enfield said.
Virginia had switched to its “sides” offense, the traditional Bennett approach that the coaching staff moved away from this offseason, for one McKneely three-pointer midway through the second half. They planned to return to their new ball-screen offense afterward.
But McKneely told Sanchez to keep running sides, and so Virginia did. That move represented one of the game’s larger themes, a backstep toward the old Bennett principles. That meant in offensive schemes. It meant in defense. It meant in intangibles.
“I was really enthused,” Sanchez said. “I thought that resembled more of a Virginia basketball type of game. I thought we were playing the right way.”
He mentioned diving for loose balls and “some really, really good stretches.” But most of all he referred to the defense.
The Mustangs shot 25 percent on three-pointers and 43 percent from the field. They suffered through an eight-minute scoreless period that bridged halftime. Virginia, after taking an early beating from freshman center Samet Yigitoglu, adjusted to hold him to two second-half points.
It only lasted so long. Senior guard Kario Oquendo awakened in the second half, where he scored 15 of his game-leading 21 points. Yigitoglu may have decelerated after halftime, but he still emerged with 16 points.
The Mustangs, more than anything, prevailed in the two areas where the Cavaliers have struggled most. They outrebounded Virginia 36-25 and forced 14 turnovers.
“Those are things that we have to continue to clean up,” Sanchez said. “And when you take one of your primary ballhandlers out of the game, it definitely impacts that play.”
Virginia also missed some easy field goal attempts. Junior guard Andrew Rohde and sophomore forward Blake Buchanan failed to convert simple floaters. Freshman forward Jacob Cofie bungled a dunk, hanging on the rim as the ball bounced the other way.
The desperation leached into the players’ movements as the final minutes arrived. McKneely launched a three-pointer with a defender draped all over him. Rohde twice dribbled out of bounds. All the Cavaliers could muster late in the game were a few free throws.
On the other end, searching for a comeback, they resorted to putting the Mustangs on the line. Southern Methodist hardly faltered, knocking down seven of its eight shots from the charity stripe in the final 63 seconds to seal Virginia’s fate.
Sanchez and company have one win against a team in the top 285 of the kenpom.com rankings, over No. 43 Villanova. Virginia’s four losses, all against teams in the ranking system’s top 50, have come by a combined 72 points.
“We just need to stay encouraged,” McKneely said. “Like I said, it’s a long season, and we have a lot of ball left to play. We just gotta continue to get better in practice, and most importantly, stay together.”
Virginia is still waiting for redshirt freshman guard Christian Bliss, who is dealing with a foot injury, to play his first minutes. Sanchez called his status “day to day.”
Sanchez seemed to consider Saturday’s game an overall positive. He said the team’s inexperience showed, but he also noted the difficulty of losing minutes from Ames and Saunders. And he highlighted the defensive improvements.
“We took a massive step forward in our defensive side and also the offensive side of the ball,” Sanchez said. “The turnovers, again, plagued us.”
Thursday’s game at 7 p.m. at home against Bethune-Cookman will provide a relaxed opportunity to build on the improvements. But positives, for a team already running out of time to reverse course, are scant consolation.
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