Weird, wild, wacky stuff
So was Dave Leitao trying to send a message to junior forward Jason Cain by playing him all of a total of 15 minutes in a pair of blowout losses to Clemson and North Carolina last week?
We may never know.
What we do know is this - Cain played 39 minutes in Virginia's 71-70 loss to Maryland in the finale for University Hall Sunday afternoon.
And since they only play 40, that means he was on the court pretty much throughout.
That the apparent demotion of Cain was lifted in time for the Last Ball in U Hall has led to some speculation that Leitao might have pulled back on his decision to bench the power forward in the interest of covering his own hide.
Admittedly, no one who witnessed the debacles at Clemson and UNC would have been able to call the 'Hoos at all competitive without Cain on the floor - not with a straight face, anyway.
And so the thinking goes that Leitao gave Cain a temporary reprieve so that he could give his team a chance of satisfying the home fans and 90 or so Virginia basketball alums who were back for the last dance at University Hall.
Cain's nine-point, 11-rebound performance did give the Cavaliers a fighting chance - of that there is no dispute.
Nor is there any disputing how much Leitao wanted to win on Sunday.
"You can understand, for obvious reasons, how difficult this is for me. We fought, we scrapped, and we clawed - and obviously came up a little bit short today. But I wanted to win for you and our players more than anything that I've wanted in my life," he said in a postgame ceremony held at center court after the game.
Everything else is conjecture. We don't know that the coach and the player didn't work out whatever differences that they might have had in the walkup to the game.
Honestly, we're still not sure that there were differences to work out.
All we really can say is that it was curious that Cain was MIA in what turned out to be the two biggest games of the season for the Cavs - and that it was even more curious that he was on the front lines of the biggest game in recent memory in U Hall.
- Chris Graham