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Have You Checked Kroger®'s Store Locator and Weekly Specials Web Page?

TSL is proud to have Kroger® as a sponsor. Kroger® has been sponsoring Hokie athletics for years and has become a permanent fixture in VT athletics (whenever someone says, "You know what Coach Beamer says" on the message boards, someone else ALWAYS responds with, "Get your tailgate supplies at Kroger®!")

Kroger®'s latest TSL ads, the ones that start out with the notation "Local Specials", are very cool -- when you click them, it takes you to a store locator, and once you locate a Kroger® store from the list, it loads your latest weekly specials. You can browse them all, sort them by category, etc.

Very cool -- click below to give it a test run.

• Kroger® Store Locator and Link to Local Specials

The Hokies were coming off a 21-10 record and their 7th NCAA tournament invitation in the last nine years, but they had graduated four seniors off that team: Dawn Chriss, Megan Finnerty, and longtime starters and standouts Carrie Mason and Kerri Gardin. The team was expected to take a big dip, but losing at home to both Radford and William & Mary painted a gloomy picture of what was to come.

There's a tale-within-a-tale in that 10-5 stretch. Four of the five losses have come to outstanding teams, including home and road losses to #1 Duke, a road loss to #2 UNC, and a road loss to Florida State, a 17-5 team that is 6-1 in the league and all alone in third place. The only bad loss since the W&M loss was a road defeat at UAB on December 21st. The Blazers are 13-9 overall, 7-2 in Conference USA (first place), and #133 in the RPI.

The question becomes, after such a terrible start, can Virginia Tech's women still make the NCAA tournament? They can, but they've got some work to do. First, their RPI isn't nearly good enough yet. It has improved greatly, but still stands at #68, nowhere near at-large territory.

Looking at the RPI, the Hokies have several bad losses, at home to #168 Radford and #118 William & Mary, and on the road to #133 UAB. Their other losses have come to teams in the top 51 of the RPI.

The problem is, the Hokies have no quality RPI wins. They only have four wins against top-100 RPI teams: West Virginia (#60), Charlotte (#77), at UNC-G (#82), and at Virginia (#72). None of those wins are over top-50 RPI teams, which is something you need when your own RPI is only 68.

The remainder of the season looks like a good opportunity to improve the record, but not to snare many quality wins. VT has seven games left:

Looking at things optimistically, the Hokies can go 6-1 over that seven-game stretch (assume a loss at Maryland and wins everywhere else), leaving them at 20-10 overall, 9-5 in the ACC. That ACC record would put the Hokies squarely in the upper half of the league, as high as fifth place, behind UNC, Duke, Maryland, and FSU.

Would that 6-1 season-ending streak be good enough? The ACC had seven NCAA bids last year, including a bid to VT, who finished #7 in the league at 6-8, 20-9 overall. That Hokie team had four wins over top-50 RPI teams (at season's end), but more importantly, it had an outstanding RPI of 23 and a strength of schedule rating of 18.

Here's a comparison between last year's team and this year's team, assuming the Hokies finish 6-1 down the stretch (a big assumption), and assuming RPIs stay roughly the same for future opponents:

For Tech's women to receive an at-large bid, the following is probably necessary:

With their early losses, particularly to Radford and William & Mary at home, the Tech women dug themselves a huge hole that is hard to climb out of. If they don't make the NCAA tourney, they have a very good shot at making the WNIT, and if they are able to achieve another 20-win season, it would be their ninth 20-win campaign in the last ten years.

If you look at the statistics, it's hard to figure out how Tech's women have done as well as they have. The Hokies rank 6th to 9th in every team statistical category in the ACC, except for 3-point shooting percentage and 3-point percentage defense, where they come up dead last.

In individual statistics, only seniors Kirby Copeland and Nare Diawara show up in the ACC stats:

Amber Hall is 11th in blocks at 1.1 per game, but other than that, Copeland and Diawara are the only Hokies listed.