The building of a program: A progress report

I swear I could hear some Al Groh coming out of Mike London.

The first-year UVa. football coach had just been asked by a reporter how he could maintain his positive approach to his rebuilding effort in the face of the Cavs’ third consecutve blowout ACC loss, 44-10 to rival North Carolina.

London was noticeably testy at what had seemed an innocent question.

“You’re talking to a guy nine years ago when a doctor said me giving my bone marrow to my daugher was 10,000-to-1 odds. I’m going to remain positive. I’m going to stay a positive guy,” said London, whose team stands at 2-4 midway through the 2010 season, and appears to be regressing after a September that featured two wins over I-AA teams (Richmond, VMI) and a surprising strong performance in a narrow 17-14 loss at Southern Cal.

Florida State rolled out to a 27-0 halftime lead three weeks ago en route to a 34-14 win in Charlottesville. Georgia Tech ran for 477 yards in a 33-21 win Atlanta on Oct. 9. Turnovers, bad tackling and miscommunication in the defensive secondary all plagued the ‘Hoos against UNC.

“We’re all in this thing together, and we’ll all get out of this thing together. And we’ll play better. We’ll play better,” defensive coordinator Jim Reid said after the Carolina game.

Something else Reid said also got my attention. He asked a reporter standing next to me if he remembered the score of the Southern Cal game from two years ago. USC beat Virginia in Charlottesville in 2008 by a 52-13 final.

“If it was the same thing this year, everybody would be like, Well, you’ve got to keep rebuilding. Instead, you go out and play a heckuva game, and everybody’s like, Oh, my God, national championship right around the corner,” Reid said,

This team was never realistically expected to do more than win three or four games, so Reid has a point there. A win over Eastern Michigan puts Virginia at three, with opportunities against Duke and Boston College on the road and Maryland at home looming against a backdrop of a couple of expected beatdowns at home against Miami and on the road at Virginia Tech.

I get it that the guys in the locker room can’t go out there thinking that they’ll do well to go 4-8 or 5-7.

“My vision of this program is to have guys that believe in themselves and can play play after play, and when bad things happen, then that happens. It’s how you respond to those things that I think are the most important,” London said after the North Carolina game. “We’ve got to respond better. Adversity is going to happen in lots of things. It happens in life. But it’s how you choose to respond to those things that makes a difference.”

The trick to “respond(ing) better” isn’t that necessarily we have to see a string of W’s out of this bunch. I think at this point that the core of the fan base that Virginia has left after this recent run of mediocrity that dates back really to the start of the 2006 season – we all agree that 2007 was an outlier by now, right? – just wants to see some signs of improvement.

And at this point, as long as the coach doesn’t end the season reading a poem about how much he likes himself and thinks he’s the greatest guy in the world, that would be some improvement.

Column by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at [email protected].