Danny Hultzen helped lift UVa to a
best-ever Director's Cup finish.
AP Photo/Ted Kirk
The NACDA Director's Cup standings are out, and they're something to be proud of if you're a UVa fan. Eighth place in the nation, behind Stanford, UNC, Florida, USC, Michigan, Texas, and Cal. With North Carolina, Michigan, California, and Virginia, this list would look pretty familiar to anyone who likes to look at academic rankings too.
The Director's Cup, for those unfamiliar, assigns points based on how well each team performed at the NCAA championships. Each team, be it football or water polo, has equal weight assigned. Football, obviously, has no national championship tournament or meet, so they use the polls and the bowl games.
Finishing eighth out of 278 schools that earned points obviously lends itself to a lot of bonus statistics, like also being second in the ACC. If we had participated in spring sports only, it still would have been good enough for 39th place overall; spring was especially fruitful for UVa as only USC topped our spring total.
Of course, the school's official release on the subject can always be counted on to helpfully point out exactly how awesome is any achievement. The release points out that UVa has never failed to achieve a top-30 finish in the Director's Cup standings. To schools like Stanford, which has a 15-year chokehold on actually winning the Cup, that may not be much; it's a worthy bragging point for Hoos, however, because Virginia Tech has never made the top 30. Virginia has never finished below either VT or Maryland, which makes for some nice braggin' rights; now if we could just take care of UNC we'd be set.
The only downer? A little what-might-have-been exercise: what if we'd had a good football team? That's not hard to calculate. Simply going to a bowl game was worth a minimum of 25 points. In other words, if one field goal flutters a few feet the other way against Miami, it'd have been enough to move us into 7th place and an unmatched best-ever finish in the standings. As it is we'll have to "settle" for a tied best-ever finish; the 1998-1999 teams also finished eighth.
The real bottom line is that no matter what some fans may wish for, Craig Littlepage's job is safer than if he were to be judged on the results big money-making sports alone. It bolsters the point made last Sunday with finances. We could have a debate for hours on end as to whether we'd trade a lot of this non-revenue-sport success for a football and basketball team that regularly contends for ACC championships - I don't even know myself how I'd feel about that. But either way, the UVa athletic program as a whole should be applauded for a truly fine effort this season.
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