The UVA Football team won three games in 2023, and had three losses that you could directly attribute to special teams blunders – two of them blocked punts going back for TDs, a third a penalty on a missed last-second game-winning field goal that gave NC State a second try that the Pack got right.
The ‘Hoos have been markedly better on special teams this season. Pro Football Focus ranks the Virginia special teams unit 38th nationally, and the ESPN Football Power Index has the unit ranked 61st.
For context, UVA’s special teams ranked 105th in PFF and 108th in the ESPN FPI in 2023, and PFF had the special teams 115th in 2022, and the ESPN FPI had the unit 127th.
So, yes, better.
And then there was what we saw in Saturday’s loss to Louisville.
ICYMI: Louisville 24, Virginia 20
- UVA Football: Late score lifts Louisville to 24-20 comeback win over ‘Hoos
- UVA Football: I’m going to try my best to put a positive spin on that loss
- UVA Football: What it costs to play in a half-full stadium, and who pays the bill
- Scott German: They had a UVA Football game, and nobody came
Louisville, incidentally, was one of the losses last year that we could pin directly on a special teams blunder, a blocked punt that went for a TD in a 31-24 Virginia loss.
Yesterday, in a 24-20 loss to Louisville, which took the lead for good with 1:55 to go, the game nearly turned into a blowout due to a series of Virginia special teams mistakes.
First, it was Jonas Sanker, who otherwise was sublime at safety – 11 tackles, one pass breakup, one tackle for loss – deciding to return a third-quarter kickoff that he had caught five yards deep in the end zone.
Earlier in the game, Sanker caught a kickoff in the end zone, fumbled the ball, and then tried to run it out, before being stopped before getting back to the goal line by a teammate, and a sideline of screaming players and coaches.
On this one in the third quarter, Sanker crossed the goal line, but didn’t get much further – he was tackled at the UVA 14, setting up the offense the length of a first down behind where it should have been, at the 25, with a touchback.
After getting one first down, the possession stalled, and the punt unit was sent out onto the field.
Daniel Sparks, averaging 48,2 yards per punt coming into the game, was directed to go with a rugby-style punt, even after struggling with a rugby-style kick in the first half that barely cleared his upbacks and eventually went for just 21 yards.
This one in the third quarter went for -16 yards – as in, 16 yards the other way, backwards, toward the wrong end zone, after hitting an upman in the backside.
That set Louisville up with the ball at the Virginia 14, and the Cardinals scored on the next play, a 14-yard TD run by Isaac Brown, that gave UL two scores in two minutes, to turn a game that had come out of the locker-room break tied at 7-7 into a 17-7 Louisville lead.
Credit to the Virginia side for not letting the momentum shift turn the game into a rout, but still.
What was the coaching staff thinking here?
To hear Elliott tell it, the thinking was, they were afraid.
“I know there’s gonna be a lot of questions about, well, why are using that technique? Well, up at Louisville last year, we got, we got basically lost by a touchdown, and we gave up a blocked punt for a touchdown,” Elliott started his answer in the postgame presser with reporters.
I mean, I’m not making anything up here or exaggerating when I said they were afraid.
Elliott said as much right there.
“Studying these guys, they do a great job of scheming up your protection,” Elliott went on. “They’re very skilled. They got a lot of speed guys that are slippery, that can get small. They overload your A gaps. They understand the angles with the cutoffs.
“And so, the objective was just to move the pocket and get the ball on the ground and keep it out of the hands of their dynamic returner. And we just didn’t execute it, you know, the way that we needed to.”
That’s quite the word salad right there to try to get around saying, we were scared of them blocking the punt, so we blocked the punt for them.
“Just again, when you’re trying to rugby, and you’re kicking, you know, a low liner, just didn’t get enough lift on it, and it hit the guy, hit one of the shield guys in the in the back, and then, you know, going back to the first half, man, there was one that, you know, you wanted to be a little bit higher, but you don’t want it to be up in the air. You kind of want to get it on the ground, so it’ll bounce around, buy you a little bit of time.”
Still not cleaned up
No doubt, that’s how it’s supposed to work, and a lot of teams, and a lot of punters, use rugby-style kicks with good and even great results.
But given that Sparks, who again, good, borderline great, punter, had almost hit one of his upbacks in the posterior with one of these kicks earlier in the game, maybe you go back to what you’re good at?
And Sparks, to that point, boomed a 56-yarder on a conventional punt from the shadow of the back line of the UVA end zone in the fourth quarter to flip the field.
“Sparky had a heck of a field. Thought the protection was good there,” was Elliott’s read on that one.
Between that, and not having your kickoff returners coached to stand at the goal line, and if the ball sails over their heads, they know to just let it fly, Louisville doesn’t get the ball back with 9:57 to go down 20-17, needing a field goal to tie, or a TD to take the lead.
The season stats tell us that UVA’s special teams are much better than they had been the past couple of years.
Just not good enough to not be responsible for another one-score loss.
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Chris Graham
