Around the Corner 9/7: Bronco Mendenhall starting a podcast, TJ Power announcing today, Mike Tobey suffers freak injury

Ah, Wednesday, beyond the hopelessness of Monday and the dullness of Tuesday but not quite reaching the excitement nor sense of accomplishment of Thursday and Friday. With this hump day, I bring you another morning of Virginia Cavaliers news from Around the Corner.

Notable news

Takeaways from Tony Elliott’s weekly press conference — Streaking the Lawn

After attending Tony Elliott’s weekly presser yesterday, I plugged out some quick takeaways from his comments post-Richmond and pre-Illinois. One thing worth noting is the the guys coming back from injury with running backs Ronnie Walker and Cody Brown back to being active and left tackle Jonathan Leech heading in that direction.

Slovenian shockingly injured himself on the tipoff after landing on a ref during the EuroBasket tournament — ForTheWin

As he’s been on a roll of late for Slovenia in EuroBasket, Mike Tobey unfortunately was the victim of one of the oddest basketball plays (?) I’ve seen as he rolled his ankle on the referee’s foot after jumping for the tip. Fortunately, all was fine and he came back into the game later on as he continues to work with NBA superstar Luka Doncic. Still, what a weird moment.

INTEL: Ranking the contenders for 4-star TJ Power — On3

Yeah so this sucks. After leading for TJ Power for a while UVA’s been put on the back burner. And with Power set to announce his decision later today and Crystal Balls pouring in predicting his commitment to Duke, I’ll let you infer what news will hit the recruiting world in a couple hours.

That said UVA’s 2023 class isn’t gonna be too bad especially after a stacked 2022 group made life more difficult. Of course there’s still the small problem of finding Bennett’s next point guard, but that may now be left til the 2024 class. We’ll have you covered with more in-depth UVA basketball recruiting analysis sometime soon.

Bronco Mendenhall starting a podcast

So this is something fun! Following his departure from Virginia at the end of last season, former Head Coach Bronco Mendenhall is now starting his own podcast talking about college football and all the ins and outs of the game. Bronco’s a truly interesting dude and I plan on listening in to see what he’s got to say.

Social media dive

In our dive into the world of social media today, first we’ll take a look at this sweet video edit from the Virginia Football media team of highlights from Saturday’s game.

Next up, while I’m often critical of Jon Rothstein and his methods of chasing Twitter clout, his acknowledgement of Tony Bennett’s team and the experience it has is nice to see. Frankly I’d throw in the young guns McKneely and Traudt as likely more impactful for the team as a whole than some of the older, known quantities.

And, to close things off, a fun combo of football and basketball as Ohio transfer Ben Vander Plas spent part of yesterday helping to film Tony Elliott’s weekly presser. He seemed to be enjoying himself and is already making his mark on the program as a personality if nothing more.

Student perspective

Yesterday was just another day in paradise. After getting to Tony Elliott’s weekly presser from 1:00-1:30 in JPJ before deciding to ride my bike over to Barracks to have lunch at Chipotle and try to knock out some work. Unfortunately, the Barracks Chipotle seems a bit behind on certain things...

To those confused by the College Inn comment, last year I got embroiled in a Twitter controversy regarding my excitement about Chipotle coming to the Corner and filling the College Inn’s old lot. To briefly defend myself, I grew up going to the College Inn and it was one of my childhood favorites. I was devastated when it closed, but am admittedly a Chipotle fan, despite its status as a chain restaurant and the fact that it takes away some of the Corner’s originality. Some Twitter folk found me Chipotle enthusiasm as an insult to the fabric of Charlottesville, which I do apologize for.

That tangent aside, I had lunch at Panera since that seemed to be the best place to do work before coming home and jumping on the STL pod. That should be out either later today or tomorrow. Was fun to get back into the groove of our weekly football pod looking back at Richmond and previewing Illinois.

In terms of, you know, student life, I can’t complain much. With no Friday classes I’ve got two more days of class this week — Wednesday’s are always rough with four classes — before I’m actually heading out of town this weekend to visit my girlfriend who quite tragically attends the University of *belching sound* Maryland. But I haven’t seen her in nearly a month so looking forward to getting to *additional belching noise* College Park.

Hope you all have a wonderful Wednesday!