Virginia’s loss to Florida followed a familiar pattern. How does this keep happening?

Florida put a destruction on Virginia on Saturday in the second round of the NCAA tournament. The Gators’ 65-39 win was one of the most dominant showings of March so far, and, on Virginia’s part, the tournament’s biggest embarrassment yet.

The loss continued a trend of strong Virginia teams losing either too early or really ugly in March Madness. This one can certainly be filed under “ugly”; whether it’s “early” depends on your view of this Hoos team. But at any rate, UVA took a terrible loss, and it’s the fourth year in a row that the program has exited March in agony.

Winning NCAA tournaments is hard, and so is meeting expectations when you’re a regular top seed like Virginia. But enough disappointment has now piled up that it’s worth wondering what Tony Bennett’s doing wrong, or if he is. A sample size of just a handful of games can only tell us so much, but let’s take what we can.

Virginia has had elite (or close enough) teams every year since 2013-14. The Hoos’ tournament losses in that span have looked like this:

This UVA team wasn’t quite as good as the last few, but the Hoos were better than their seed. They entered Saturday as the No. 10 team on Ken Pomeroy’s ratings index, and their defense has been just as elite as ever.

But it’s important to distinguish “not scoring many points” and “playing bad offense.” Because in Virginia’s case, those two are not the same thing.

Bennett has a couple of defining principles as a head coach. One is his belief in the pack-line defense, where one player pressures the ball while the others pack in tightly to prevent penetration. Another is his fear of allowing fast-break opportunities for the other team. And another is his appreciation for basketball at a snail’s pace.

Bennett does not like to go fast. That’s a hallmark of literally every team he’s ever coached. Bennett’s Washington State teams took among the fewest possessions in the country every year from 2007 to 2009. His UVA teams have been sloth-like, too. There has never been a Bennett team that’s been even a remote exception to this rule.

So UVA teams haven’t scored a lot of points, for the most part. That makes sense, because points are a counting stat. You can’t get them without fresh possessions. The last four UVA teams have all been in the top 40 nationally in adjusted efficiency rating, but they haven’t been near that in total points per game: 287th, 223rd, 232nd, 309th.

Virginia doesn’t need to score many points. The Hoos take an average of 21 seconds off the shot clock on every possession, making them the slowest team of the 351 in Division I. Bennett’s defenses are awesome, and when you combine their awesomeness with the offense’s pace, you get a defense that allowed (entering Saturday) 56 points per game. That’s the best mark in the country.

Their loss to Syracuse last year was their second-least efficient offensive game of the season, according to Pomeroy’s opponent-adjusted ratings. Their loss to Michigan State two seasons ago was their sixth-least efficient game out of 34. Their other loss to Michigan State was ninth-worst of 37.

This year’s will clock in right at the bottom. Virginia scored 0.64 points per possession against Florida. There are barely words for how preposterous that is.

I haven’t just stumbled on to some exciting discovery. (Team loses more games when it plays terrible offense: More at 11.) But this is key to understanding why UVA has failed.

Every year in this four-year run, Virginia has posted a defensive adjusted efficiency mark somewhere in the 80s. That means if a regular Division I team played Virginia, you’d expect it to score 80-some points per 100 possessions.

But in each tournament loss, the defense hasn’t been itself. Michigan State posted a 105 efficiency rating in one of the tournament wins and a 108 in the other. Syracuse’s Elite Eight win came on the back of a 106. And Florida’s offense fared well, too, scoring 1.07 points per possession. This wasn’t a UVA defensive effort.

Virginia is the best defensive program in college basketball. Even the best defenses have bad nights. Virginia’s had them four years in a row on the same days that their offense has happened to also be bad. The two may be connected.

Going slow is good when you’re winning, because it limits chances for the opponent to make up the gap. It can be good or bad in a tight game, depending on how you’re shooting. It’s a downright problem when you fall a few scores behind, as UVA has done in its last couple of tournament losses.

If your defense is making stops, of course, you can play at whatever pace you want. Virginia’s defense spends entire seasons doing almost nothing but stopping teams. That Virginia’s defense has stopped making stops in critical games, right as the offense has also faltered, is partly just rotten luck. It has to be.

But when it’s happened, Virginia’s inability to change its offensive style couldn’t have helped. Bennett does not have a tempo offense he can go to during times of trouble. That contributes to a feast-or-famine problem, where bad things can easily compound.

Sports are fickle and unpredictable, and sometimes everything goes to hell at once. That’s happened to Virginia four years in a row now.

Do you have a different theory? I’d like to hear it, because this is a weird case.