If he never watched a game, or if he somehow missed the years of national discourse, freshman forward Jacob Cofie knew it from the recruiting conversations. Defense. Virginia plays defense.
Cofie is typically brief and breezy at the postgame podium. But this time, after Virginia’s loss Saturday to Notre Dame, he lingered a little longer on one answer about the weight the program places on defense.
“Tony Bennett was on us on defense, defense, defense,” Cofie said, in part. “He wanted us to make that a priority, and [Interim Coach Ron] Sanchez, too. So I feel like that was engraved early.”
Cofie paused, as if to end the answer. A media member in the front row twitched, opening his mouth to ask the next question. Cofie stopped him. He needed to hammer the point home.
“From the jump, I knew,” Cofie said.
So have so many others. On the inside, and on the outside, everyone knew — defense reigned supreme. It became the “Virginia Way,” referenced in pressers, even enshrined on the second page of the team’s game notes, lest anyone forget.
“The Virginia Way,” the game notes say, “is playing defense, taking quality shots, sharing and taking care of the basketball, stopping transition, rebounding and playing more defense.”
“It was the number one thing,” Chase Coleman, a graduate assistant and guard from 2019-2023, said. “It’s really big, especially under [Bennett]. It’s like, if you can’t defend, you can’t play.”
People on the outside, watching the Bennett era’s deliberate style, always heaped on the derision, targeting the grinding, monotonous pace. No matter.
“We knew that the defense was what held the rock together,”Coleman said.
That is still the creed the program follows. But it is not working the same way.
Bennett arrived in 2009 to implement his system, and from 2011-12 to 2023-24, Virginia never ranked worse than sixth in scoring defense and, per kenpom.com, ranked nine times among the nation’s top seven teams in defensive efficiency. The defense was a hallmark, a calling card, something to hang your hat on.
Those days have passed.
Isolated games suggest this — Virginia this season surrendered 80 points to St. John’s, 87 to Florida, 88 to Stanford and 81 to Louisville. The overall numbers confirm it — the Cavaliers sit 97th in defensive efficiency and have the 29th-best scoring defense.
This is a case of a program being unmoored from its most fundamental principle.
Does the packline still work?
Virginia’s packline defense requires a grueling education.
The packline is predicated on continuity, on staying connected, doing the right thing time after time in the same possession. That has been the trouble. You guard one action correctly, then you make the wrong decision on a screen. Over instead of under. Left instead of right.
“It’s five guys,” Sanchez said. “They have to be completely connected. One guy screws up, and all of a sudden the possession breaks down.”
Learning it takes studying a new vocabulary, mastering unique principles, then drilling it all again and again on the court, “trial and error” sessions followed by intense breakdowns, in three-on-threes and two-on-twos and one-on-ones, gradually understanding positioning and footwork and all the constant readjustments. It is about breaking habits and building new ones.
It starts with a summer crash course. Then the work just barrels on.
“Learning the pack, in my opinion, takes almost a full year,” Coleman said.
That is the way it has always been. Players entering Bennett’s program hardly expected to play much as freshmen, knowing it took that long to learn the defense. Many even redshirted a year while they worked to grasp the defense.
Now, though, college basketball is in an age of transience. Rosters turn over dramatically each offseason, undone and remade with the transfer portal. A player will transfer in and, instead of that full year, will have just a summer to internalize the defense before being thrust onto the court. That is hardly enough.
“This is not just mental,” Coleman said. “This is mental, physical, cognitive. This is language, this is behavior. This is everything. It’s almost like changing your whole life, in a sense, in terms of this basketball perspective and understanding how we play.”
The long-term investment made sense in the old way of things. But if it takes a year to learn the defense, and if players no longer have a year to learn it, where does that leave the packline?
Sanchez, on the Jan. 20 ACC media call, fielded a question about whether, with the shifting times, the packline has changed at all.
“Well, no,” Sanchez said. “I wish you could speed up Mother Nature, and I wish that you could speed up experience. The only way you get it is by being in it.”
Coleman emphasized the importance these days of that summer crash course. Everything in that limited window, especially now, has to be so intentional, every morsel of time maximized. That does not mean throwing information at the players and seeing what sticks. It means making sure everything has a purpose.
Sanchez, a week after saying the program had not adapted its approach to teaching the packline, offered a potential workaround.
“Maybe part of the recruitment, for teams that want to play the pack, should be to recruit guys that have played in the pack system,” Sanchez said. “So maybe they have a foundation in it already, so they’re not starting from ‘Pack 101.’”
The problem, though, is that few programs actually run the packline. That limits the pool of transfers a packline-playing team can target.
Nine Virginia players are averaging more than 10 minutes per game this season. Five are in their first year with the program. Next year, as the sport’s trajectory suggests, the roster will turn over again.
“I think that's the biggest question of college basketball right now,” Coleman said. “For coaches that really want guys to really buy into their system. Knowing that it's a one-year, two-year deal with a lot of the kids that are coming in now.”
Rebounding woes
Virginia’s opponents this season have sometimes imitated a typical wily teenager in H-O-R-S-E. The guy who chucks the ball off the backboard so he can spring forward, catch it and, a second later, take a layup.
Before last season, the Cavaliers had ranked inside the top 175 in rebounding percentage every year since 2010-11, with eight straight solid years in the top 102 from 2013-14 to 2021-22. Last year they ranked 267th. This year they rank 281st.
“In private, we’re having some conversations about rebounding, for sure, with the individuals whose roles are to do that,” Sanchez said after Virginia’s Jan. 15 loss to SMU.
The effect of bad rebounding is unmistakable. Opponents get extra opportunities to score, more chances to poke holes in that creaky defense. They have out-shot Virginia in 14 of 21 games this season.
Sanchez has insisted, repeatedly, that rebounding is about tenacity and effort, that there is really no reason for his team to be so feckless on the glass. Certainly the problem is not height, for the nation’s 31st-tallest team. It is something about the mindset that the team has struggled to unlock.
Coleman mentioned Dennis Rodman, one of the greatest rebounders in the history of basketball. Rodman tended to decide that he would not leave until he racked up his quota of rebounds, and Virginia’s players must channel that.
“Just putting everything into getting that ball, wanting to have it, making it yours and nobody else’s,” Coleman said. “That mindset of, ‘If it’s not me getting it, [my man] isn’t getting it.’”
The importance of the individual
The packline, even at its best, was never infallible. It broke down sometimes, as all defenses do, letting an opponent squeeze into the paint, maybe collapsing late on a passing lane.
But often, sidling over, sneakers flashing, came a safety net.
First it was Isaiah Wilkins. Then Mamadi Diakite. Then Jay Huff, Kadin Shedrick, Ryan Dunn. The rim protector. The eraser. The person to come clean things up when the defense failed.
Since 2012-13, in every season but one, Virginia has had one player average at least 1.1 blocks per game in conference play. This season, though, Cofie’s 0.9 leads the team, quite a downgrade from the 2.4 average Virginia had with Dunn last season.
“Nothing is better than having a rim protector that can anchor your defense,” Coleman said. “On the other end of that, nobody is better than the tip of the sword, like a Kihei Clark or a Reece Beekman.”
As much as the packline is meant to be a well-oiled machine, resting on continuity and help, it also relies on strong individual defense.
“The thing about the pack is, like, ‘I got your back,’” Coleman said. “But if you can guard the ball, and you can get a stop on your own, it makes life a lot easier for everyone else around you.”
It frees players up. Knowing there is that player on the court squaring away his man, locking him up, means teammates do not have to help as hard or as much.
Virginia lost two of those players this offseason. Beekman and Dunn were the two best defenders in the conference, leading the vote-gathering for the ACC All-Defensive team. The lack of a player like that puts strain on everyone individually.
It is not necessarily a lack of athleticism, as many have theorized. The players themselves, Coleman said, have the athleticism. But the packline, for all these new players, is not yet coming intuitively, meaning the players’ minds are ever churning.
“The more we think, the harder our feet get, the heavier they get,” Coleman said.
A dying tradition
John Paul Jones Arena, over the last decade and a half, has become known for an idiosyncratic custom. It would happen when the red numbers on the clock behind the basket started nearing zero. The noise would build, an opponent nearing a shot-clock violation, the din as loud as that for a transition three-pointer in most gyms.
Then the buzzer would sound, and the hollering would fully descend, accompanied by a crowd of students smacking their heads like monkeys. Shot-clock violations are baked into the culture.
The program started tracking them in 2018-19. In the six full seasons since, Virginia forced an average of 0.83 violations per game. Its lowest output came in the shortened 2020-21 season, with 18 in 25 games, or 0.72 per outing. This season? Eight in 21 games, or 38 percent.
Going crazy for a draining shot clock used to be fans’ most gleeful tradition. Now, like that stingy and obstinate and rage-fueling defense, it feels lost.
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