The UVA Football offense never had a chance on Saturday against SMU, and it started with the game plan, the coaching given to the quarterback, and the play calling.
Offensive coordinator Des Kitchings kept things dramatically simple for the SMU game for his sophomore quarterback, Anthony Colandrea, after Colandrea was benched at halftime in last week’s 35-14 loss at #6 Notre Dame, upon throwing three INTs in the final 2:57 of the second quarter of that one.
Colandrea attempted 27 passes in the SMU game, and it was almost all short stuff – 10 pass attempts behind the line of scrimmage, and nine pass attempts between 0-9 yards downfield, with an average depth of 3.4 yards per attempt on those, according to Pro Football Focus numbers.
Colandrea was 15-of-19 combined on those passes, for 77 yards – so, 4.1 yards per attempt, and 5.1 yards per completion.
He completed just three passes that traveled more than 10 yards in the air, all to wideout Malachi Fields, with an average depth of throw at 12.7 yards, the three completions going for 31 yards, or 10.3 yards per attempt.
The goal for Kitchings, obviously, was to keep everything through the air short to minimize the exposure to possible turnovers.
Coming into the SMU game, Colandrea had thrown seven INTs in 73 passes over his most recent three games.
He had been picked off four times in his first 220 passes in seven games ahead of that stretch.
The problem with the emphasis on keeping things safe and simple to avoid turnovers is, when you’re not attacking downfield, the defense is going to be able to hover more defenders near the line of scrimmage to make it harder to run, and we saw that in the rushing-game numbers.
Virginia gained 140 sack-adjusted rushing yards on 30 attempts, but the bulk of that was Colandrea on scrambles – the QB scrambled nine times and gained 64 yards on those runs.
Take Colandrea running for his life out of the equation, and the backs went for 76 yards on the day on 21 attempts, or 3.6 yards per attempt, pretty pedestrian.
About that running for his life thing: Colandrea was sacked nine times, and pressured on a total of 24 of his 45 pass dropbacks, on which he was only able to get seven pass attempts out, completing four for 19 yards.
Five of the sacks came when the SMU defense sent extra pass rushers (which happened on 14 Colandrea pass dropbacks); the other four came with four-man pressure (31 pass dropbacks).
SMU was able to get pressure on Colandrea on 15 of those 31 pass dropbacks with four-man pressure (48.4 percent).
The 2024 season rate for pressure allowed with Colandrea at QB on non-extra-man dropbacks going into the SMU game was 31.6 percent.
I’m wondering here if it was so much the pressure from the SMU defense, or if it was Colandrea feeling pressure before it was there, because of the focus on trying to avoid screwing up.
As far as the goal of not turning the ball over is concerned, Virginia didn’t have a turnover against SMU, so, success.
Flip side: the offense only had 173 yards on the day, and didn’t score until garbage time in the fourth quarter, after an SMU turnover gave UVA a short field, and the TD came on a fourth-and-goal that broke all the rules going in – Colandrea ran backwards 20 yards before connecting with Fields in the right corner of the end zone on a pass that was just as likely to have been intercepted as it was a scoring play.
Video: Tough weekend for UVA Football fans
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Chris Graham
