Virginia’s New Look

In a lot of ways, Virginia is a very conservative school, deeply rooted in tradition, which influences how it perceives and brands itself.

So when Hoosville decided to install a new court you could hardly expect them to go as garish as Northern Kentucky did or as busy and distracting as is Maryland’s.

And of course no one’s is as ugly as Oregon’s which just doesn't do well with cameras at all although it probably looks better in person. But on TV you can’t see the trees for the forest. Much like Oregon’s collection of bizarre uniforms, it gets a lot of ridicule - but you can’t deny it gets attention and as Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

No one is going to talk to much about Virginia’s floor. As the tweet says, it’s “so fresh and so clean.”

Like Duke, Kentucky, UCLA (just now bringing back its traditional center court logo) and Indiana, Virginia wants tradition to speak for the program.

The only problem is that for Virginia, the basketball tradition just isn’t that good. It’s not bad, it’s just not great. Tony Bennett has things going in the right direction but he’s only a few years into what should be a great run.

So when in doubt rely on your real tradition: snobbery. Check out what the urban dictionary says about UVA:

“A provincial university full of...dull, suffocating conformism. If you take a stroll around campus any day, you'll see the armies of drones, one like another, dressed in Arbercrombie like in uniform, even their faces and eye expression are that of robots.

“...Everywhere on campus, you feel the eye of the Big Brother on you--well everything is very orderly and peaceful...like in a grave, sort of... God forbids you dress or look alternatively or exhibit human qualities. Due to isolated location and lack of social opportunities, the school has a lot of bored to death, old fart married professors seeking relations with young thing students. University of Virgina is known for shunning personal creativity; one example would be local student newspaper demanding to remove 'disgusting' exhibit of modern art, just because it's not in harmony with "classical" architecture of the university....”

See? Fresh and clean. They could still fit it on the sideline.