Thursday, October 25, 2007
Virginia's early recruiting confirms Leitao's reputation
'Twin towers' a first since mid-1980s
Doug Doughty
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Almost 2 ½ years into his Virginia coaching career, the jury was out on Dave Leitao.
Not as a coach, certainly. Leitao was last year’s ACC coach of the year and directed the Cavaliers to a regular-season, co-ACC championship and their first NCAA Tournament trip in six years.
And, really, not even as a recruiter. Leitao’s reputation as a recruiter dates back to his two stints on Jim Calhoun’s staff at Connecticut.
If the jury was out, it was on Leitao’s potential to attract the kind of recruits who could make Virginia a consistent, first-division ACC program.
Leitao’s first full recruiting class at Virginia yielded some players who were able to contribute last season, but, even now, players recruited by predecessor Pete Gillen form the nucleus of the Cavaliers’ team.
That won’t be the case when point guard Sean Singletary is gone, along with four-year teammate Adrian Joseph. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the only two Gillen recruits on Virginia’s 2008-2009 team will be Mamadi Diane and Lauris Mikalauskas.
Leitao could have made a major splash last year when one of the nation’s top frontcourt prospects, 6-8 Patrick Patterson from Huntington, W.Va., had the Cavaliers in his list of finalists. But, nobody ever saw the Cavaliers as a favorite for Patterson, who eventually cast his lot with close-by Kentucky and its new head coach, Billy Gillispie.
To me, the big test was 6-8 Ed Davis from Richmond’s Benedictine High School. Like Al Groh across the street in UVa’s football office, Leitao can only go so far without getting a share of the top in-state prospects.
When Davis revealed at mid-summer that he was committing to North Carolina, it seemed like the old order wasn’t going to change. North Carolina and Duke have been coming into Virginia for more than 25 years and getting whoever they’ve wanted.
Who knows when that will change, but one thing did change this fall. Virginia needed a big man and got one. Got two, in fact. In just over a week’s time, the Cavaliers took commitments from 6-11 John Brandenburg from St. Louis and 6-11 Assane Sene from Senegal by way of South Kent (Conn.) Prep.
Signing two 6-11 players in the same class doesn’t guarantee big-time success for one or both of them. I don’t think that anybody would say fellow 1984 signees John Dyslin and Tim Martin took the program to new heights, although they were two pretty tall fellows.
Terry Holland’s first recruiting class in 1975 included a pair of 6-10 signees, Otis Fulton and Steve Castellan. All they did as freshmen was help lead Virginia to its first – and still its only – ACC championship.
In addition to Brandenburg and Sene, Virginia has a third recruit, 6-6 Sylven Landesberg from Flushing, N.Y., who is rated higher than either of the UVa-bound big men.
“When I look at recruiting classes a lot of times, I look at who people beat for these players,” said Dave Telep of scout.com. “Every now and then, you get a diamond in the rough, a guy who turns out to be better than you thought he was.
“That’s all well and good, but, at the end of the day, you want to make sure you’re beating people for recruits. And, in John Brandenburg, you had a guy who was identified as a major-league academic kid, who narrowed it down to two basketball schools with high academics.
“When you look at Sylven Landesberg, his recruitment spanned three conferences and good teams from each one of those leagues. And, then, Assane Sene was everybody’s hot-ticket item coming out of August, when everyone was looking to beef up with size. So, you had a lot of programs trying to get involved with him.”
A lot of teams would take this class.
“No question,” Telep said. “It’s a legitimate high-major collection of guys. At the end of the day, there were a lot of people recruiting them – at Virginia’s level or higher.”
There is one senior remaining on Virginia’s list, 6-4 guard Elliot Williams from St. George’s School in the Memphis suburb of Collierville, Tenn. Williams has narrowed his choices to Duke, Virginia, Tennessee and Memphis, and has said he will announce a decision next Friday, Nov. 2.
“Elliot Williams would give them that marquee [name] to put on the sign outside the arena,” Telep said. “If I were at Virginia, my biggest fear would be the unlikelihood of Duke missing out on its top two targets. Going oh-for-2 at Duke is rare.”
Greg Monroe, a 6-10 frontcourt player from Harvey, La., saddened the Blue Devils when he picked Georgetown after attending the Hoyas’ midnight madness.
“From my perspective, I think Virginia has a better chance with Elliot Williams than Patrick Patterson,” Telep said. “I just didn’t see [the Cavaliers] getting Patrick Patterson. There’s still some time on this Elliot Williams thing. He hasn’t made a decision yet. He hasn’t put the final nail in anybody’s coffin.”
