“It was a good victory for us.” That’s how UVA football coach Mike London opened his postgame presser following the Cavs’ ugly-as-sin 35-29 win over FCS William and Mary on Saturday.
If you didn’t have to watch, good for you, because what you missed was the I-AA Tribe doing everything but winning the game against a Virginia team that was 12 seconds away from pulling the upset of #8 Notre Dame last week.
UVA went scoreless for the final 25:00 after going up 35-20 on a W&M team that looked dead in the water after a 74-yard punt return touchdown by Maurice Canady, which came one series after Virginia scored an 80-yard TD on a screen pass to speedster Taquan Mizzell.
William and Mary chipped away, chipped away, chipped away, and had the ball at the UVA 30 in the final two minutes with a chance to win.
But Virginia won. By six points. Over an FCS, I-AA, whatever you want to call them, team.
And a win is a win is a win is a win, apparently.
“We hadn’t had that in a while,” London said. “We could walk around all sullen and downtrodden, but that’s a good football team we played.”
On the I-AA level, William and Mary is a good football team, probably a playoff team, if the Tribe can stay healthy.
W&M scored on its first four offensive possessions and led by as many as 10 points in the first half, and aside from the two big plays kept UVA from doing anything of substance in the second half.
To buttress that point, the Cavs had 100 yards of total offense in the second half, 80 on the screen pass to Mizzell.
That’s hard to figure, that Virginia had 20 yards of offense outside that one home-run play.
Against an FCS, I-AA, whatever you want to call them, team.
“You always want to put the finishing touches on the game and run away with the victory,” London said. “The finishing part today was that we made a play on that last William & Mary drive. When you talk about finishing, that’s a big part of it.”
There is absolutely no way that Mike London is actually this clueless. No way he actually believes that this game was any kind of evidence that his team now knows how to finish off an opponent after blowing last week’s game in the final seconds, after coughing up late leads to UNC and Virginia Tech in 2014.
The Virginia offense had two opportunities to run, even kill, clock in the fourth quarter, and failed to get a first down either team. William and Mary turned the first into a safety and a touchdown on the ensuing free kick that got the Tribe to within one score, and the second netted W&M a first down at their own 45 with 3:01 to go on the change of possession, with the game hanging in the balance.
On that final drive, William and Mary was able to pick up a first down on the opening play to get into plus territory, then extend the drive on a fourth-down defensive holding call, before the Virginia defense was ultimately able to get the stop on another fourth-down pass in the Cavs end zone.
“The biggest thing is that we won the game. That’s always the ultimate goal,” London said, tipping us to his next career, as a political spin-meister.
By God, you know, he’s right. Win the game. Great point, coach.
“I thought our offense drove the ball well at times. That first drive was one of our longest drives we’ve had in a while. We had some explosive plays for long gains. There was improvement there. There’s some improvement still needed on defense when we face offenses that look like the teams we’ve played the past two weeks. That has to be corrected because Boise State is a team that does similar things with high-skilled players. That’s going to be critical for us.”
At 1-2, with that highly skilled Boise State team coming in next week, it is indeed going to be critical for London and the UVA program to figure out, somehow, some way, to pull what would now come across as a most improbable upset.
Because if the Cavs are 1-3 heading into ACC play, it’s hard to imagine them being able to put together the 5-3 conference mark that would be necessary to get them to 6-6 overall, qualify them for some fifth- or sixth-tier bowl, and give the Virginia football program the requisite progress that could justify keeping the train wreck that is the London regime in power for another painful autumn.
No matter how London might spin it.
– Column by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
