Brennan Armstrong embracing emphasis on balance in new Virginia offense

It might sound weird to say, but Virginia Football fans probably don’t want to see Brennan Armstrong throwing for 400 yards a game again this season.

A tick under 72 percent of the snaps last season under former offensive coordinator Robert Anae, now at Syracuse, were intended to be passes.

The best running play for the offense wasn’t a run call; it was Armstrong scrambling, which he did 32 times for 262 yards.

Those 32 scrambles alone would have ranked third on the running back depth chart in terms of attempts.

Wayne Taulapapa led the backs with a paltry 62 carries and 328 yards rushing.

This is all subject to change under new head coach Tony Elliott, a former running backs coach, and new offensive coordinator Des Kitchings.

Elliott, also the offensive coordinator at Clemson the past seven seasons, called runs on 49.5 percent of his plays in 2021.

Balance is the new world order in the offense room at UVA.

Count Armstrong among those looking forward to seeing how it works.

“I’ve said that I’ll put my body on the line for first downs, for touchdowns, for sure. But yeah, that will help me out a lot,” Armstrong said. “A lot of defenses were keying on me the whole time figuring out what I’m going to do, especially like QB draws and things like that.”

Armstrong put up eye-popping, school-record numbers last year, throwing for 4,449 yards and 31 TDs, and the Virginia offense ended up ranking third nationally in total offense (515.8 yards per game), but the Cavaliers were 21st in scoring offense (34.6 points per game) and 54th in red zone efficiency (85 percent.

To flesh out the point there: the offense was great at moving the ball up and down the field, but things could get bogged down in the red zone, and that was because there was no running game, or not much of one.

“We get down inside the 20- and 10-yard line, and inside the 10, it gets tight,” Armstrong said. “It’s nice when you can run the ball, just little things like that, to be able to run the ball down there instead of trying to, you know, red zone pass it, because honestly, we tried to throw fades. The best option for us was just to try to throw fades down there. I think it’s going to be important for us to run the ball, taking the load off my shoulders with running the ball.”