I could almost make this a Mailbag column, with how many emails I’ve gotten the past couple of days from UVA Football fans worrying themselves sick over the team’s various and sundry injuries.
My basic message back: we’re in October in football season, everybody is hurt.
Who has my back on that: Tony Elliott.
“The biggest thing is, man, this is a warrior mentality sport, and your body’s never going to feel good,” Elliott told reporters at his Tuesday weekly presser, after spending the first 10 or so minutes detailing the availability of guys.
“The best your body feels is July 30th, before the first practice. And then after that, your body just, it feels bad. And you trick yourself in your mind and say, well, it don’t feel too bad.”
ICYMI
The game at UNC on Saturday is Game 8, the two-thirds point of the regular season.
“This is a physical, gladiator sport where, man, you’re going to have bumps and bruises, you’re going to have to play with a little bit of pain,” Elliott said.
Or, a lot.
To that point, QB Chandler Morris has been playing hurt since the opener, the 48-7 win over Coastal Carolina, when he got knocked out of the game in the third quarter after a mad scramble in the direction of the end zone that ended with him taking a jarring hit to his left shoulder.
Morris took another bad hit on that shoulder in last week’s win over Washington State.
Backup Daniel Kaelin warmed up to be ready to go into the game for Morris on at least two occasions that I could see from the press box.
Starting center Brady Wilson has been out since leaving the Week 4 win over Stanford with a high ankle sprain.
Left tackle McKale Boley has been in and out of the lineup the past couple of weeks.
All three are good to go for UNC, as are backup tailback Noah Vaughn, wideout Cam Ross, swing tackle David Wohlabaugh.
Tailback Xavier Brown looks to be out for at least this week, and maybe well beyond, after a non-contact injury on a special-teams tackle in the Washington State game.
These are just the guys who we know are having obvious injury issues.
This is just par for the course in the sport of football.
Elliott said he showed his team a clip of Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell telling his team that the best they’re going to feel during the course of a football season “is around 85 percent.”
“Very rarely will you ever feel 100 percent at this point in the season, right. But you learn how to win at 85 percent,” Elliott said. “And it’s kind of ironic, too, because our winning grade is 85 percent, so, we don’t expect the guys to grade 100, right. Like, that’s impossible. But we got to have 85 percent for it to be considered a winning performance. And we’re getting that out of a lot of guys. And then each Monday, we talk about how can we get the collective team to where the team is at 85 percent, right, or better. And then we do that, then we have a chance to accomplish that best game that we’re chasing.”
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Chris Graham
