Deep dive: What happened to the UVA running game we were sold?

Remember Bronco Mendenhall and Robert Anae talking in the spring and in fall camp about the ground game that they were going to unleash?

Mendenhall said more than once that he felt he had the best stable of tailbacks this year of any of his years in Charlottesville.

That’s called setting expectations high.

The numbers tell us that UVA is gaining 115.5 yards per game on the ground in 2021, ranking 13th in the 14-team ACC.

That great stable of tailbacks, through four games, has totaled 246 rushing yards.

Wayne Taulapapa leads the group with 81 yards.

Now, you could retort back, the offense is second in the ACC in total offense (546.0 yards per game), so, does it matter where you get the yards, as long as you get them?

I’m not a, you need a balanced offense for the sake of having a balanced offense guy.

If you get 70 snaps in a game, you don’t need 35 of them to be runs and the other 35 to be passes.

Whatever works to move the ball, works, basically.

But as we’ve seen the past two weeks, in the losses to UNC and Wake, if you don’t run for 200 yards and five yards a carry, you still need to be able to run it when you need to be able to run it.

Case in point: in the 37-17 loss to Wake Forest last week, Virginia drove the ball inside the Demon Deacons’ 10 on their first two drives, and came away with three points for the efforts.

Why?

On the first drive, with first-and-goal at the 4, Brennan Armstrong lost two yards on a draw. Mike Hollins gained a yard on second-and-goal, getting us to third-and-goal at the 5.

The call was play-action to tight end Jelani Woods in the flat. The pass from Armstrong was high, but even if Woods had caught the ball, he would’ve been tackled at the line of scrimmage, because the Deacs weren’t fooled by the play-action.

Setting up the fourth-and-goal that was doomed not to work, given the previous three plays.

On the second drive, Armstrong gained eight yards on a scramble to set up a third-and-4 at the Wake 6, so there was only one play call to question here.

The play call in question: another QB draw, on which Armstrong only gained two yards, ahead of the field-goal try.

If you can run the ball effectively when you do run it, maybe there’s 11 more points on the board early, maybe it’s not 20-3 Wake at the break.

Put some game pressure on Wake, on UNC the week before, maybe the D doesn’t give up 59 and 37 in back-to-back weeks.

When Ds have their backs against the end zone, they don’t have to account for deep and medium passes, and can commit more guys to taking away the short and intermediate stuff that you need with less acreage to work with.

As great as it is that Armstrong is leading the ACC in passing yards by a country mile, it would be nice if he didn’t also have to lead the team in rushing attempts and rushing TDs.

Maybe some plays where Armstrong turns and hands the ball off to a Taulapapa, a Hollins, a Ronnie Walker Jr., would make it so that Armstrong doesn’t have to drop back 51.8 times a game and otherwise run for his life, with defensive fronts teeing off on the pass rush knowing that the ball is almost certainly going in the air.

Just 21 runs up the A gaps, and 27 at the B gaps, with the deepest and most experienced O line in the ACC.

QB1 has twice as many rushing attempts as anybody else on the team.

Bottom line: gotta be able to run it.

Story by Chris Graham