It’s official. Virginia has scored more points in the Director’s Cup than ever before, and there are still points a’comin. The ‘Hoos are currently in third in the most recent Director’s Cup standings release, behind perennial No. 1 Stanford and this year’s No. 2 Florida. With only baseball points remaining, this will be the final top-three finish this year. Assuming my fuzzy math is working, the Cavaliers’ No. 3 finish will be the best in school history, after setting that record last year with an 8th place finish.
The most recent update, released today, takes into account Men’s Golf (we had our best finish ever), Women’s Rowing (we had our best finish ever, with a national championship), and Men’s and Women’s Track (we had our best finish in a very long time). With that, right now we’ve got 1189.25 points. We’re behind Stanford’s 1508.50 and Florida’s 1237.25. We were knocked out of the baseball postseason during the super regionals, meaning we will only be getting 64 points for our 9th place finish. Florida made it to the College World Series, and while they’ve been eliminated, I believe that will count as a 5th place finish, for 78 points.
The good news is that UCLA only has 1034.00 points. This means that even if they win the entire shebang, which is entirely possible, they’ll only finish with a max of 1134.00 points.
You should take all of this with a grain of salt. For the final standings, only the top 20 sports – 10 men and 10 women – will count. I believe Virginia’s NCAA appearances are within the 10-per-gender, and so all of our points will be counting as planned. But who knows – I am no numbers guru. But assuming this does hold up,
Congratulations Virginia Athletics for a fantastic record-setting overall season! Some days it’s tough to be a Wahoo (read: fall and March). But at the end of the day, I wouldn’t trade in my orange and blue closet for any other.
As a point of comparison, the next two closest ACC schools are North Carolina (who finished ahead of us at SECOND overall last year) and Duke at 9th and 10th respectively. Carolina went on the road to Omaha and so will be earning some points, but Duke will definitely be falling. Maryland is next at 27th with no more points coming their way. I stopped looking at the list at 40. Virginia Tech, obviously, was not there.