Virginia's Dave Leitao: Will He Stay or Will He Go?

I don't love speculating about coaches losing their jobs. It always bristled the great Dr. Z when a question would come into his mailbag about a coach's future with a team.

It isn't the head coach's future that truly bugs me. Leitao is a coach at an ACC school; he'll find a job elsewhere if Virginia parted ways with him. Plus, he's earning a hefty salary right now. It's tough to feel sorry for him.

The situation regarding the assistants saddens me. When a coach gets fired, the assistants often get scattered and must find jobs quickly. The best jobs aren't always available to a staff of a recently fired coach. Also, the assistants down the line probably weren't making buko-bucks at their job, either. Their families suffer, too.

However, given the state of the basketball program at Virginia, speculating will occur, so let's get on with it. That's the way it is.

Despite all the recent press questioning him (this article for example), I believe that only a catastrophic event will prove to be Leitao's ouster. A 4-12 finish in the ACC is bad, but it's good enough—given the youngishness nature of the roster—for him to keep his job for one more year.

Actually, I think 2-14 will actually even keep him around for one more year. The AD might ask for some changes, akin to this year's firing Mike Groh on the football team, but I think Leitao stays. 

So, my belief is that Leitao leaves if (and only if) Virginia loses every single regular season game from here on out. That's right, he's got lose all of them. For this exercise, we won't concern ourselves with the ACC tournament. We can assume that Virginia gets a first day game and loses it.

I took probability of winning each game from Virginia's "Scouting Report" on Kenpom.com (who uses the log5 method to calculate it), took the complement (1 - each probability), and multiplied them together. Assuming independence, that's the probability of losing every game in the regular season.

I got 2.4 percent. Therefore, Leitao has about a 97.6 percent chance of staying. 

This estimate assumes a lot of things: that the Virginia freshmen don't start "figuring it out" and playing well or that a loss to BC on Wednesday doesn't diminish the team's spirits for their match up with UNC, etc. 

That 97.6 percent, though, seems to jive with what I'm thinking. Leitao is probably going to come back next year. But will that be all? Now, it would be quite a trick if I knew that.

Don't agree with me? Did I need to use Bayes' rule? Want to add additional conditions?

Let me have it in the comments.

This article is available at Dear Old UVa.

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