The UVA Football offense is coming off a horrendous two-week stretch in which it hasn’t scored until garbage time in back-to-back defeats to Notre Dame and SMU.
The bad news: it’s more than just simply lack of output.
Offensive coordinator Des Kitchings seems to have lost confidence in his starting quarterback, Anthony Colandrea, keeping the game plans and play calling about as vanilla as you can imagine the past several weeks, trying to emphasize not turning the ball over, at the expense of trying to move the chains and get the offense into scoring opportunities.
To that point, the average depth of Colandrea’s passes in the SMU game was a season-low 5.9 yards downfield, with the emphasis on passes behind the line of scrimmage and just on the other side of the line of scrimmage, which are high-percentage passes, but aren’t going to do much to move the chains.
Even going vanilla hasn’t helped Colandrea overcome the issues with turnovers – he’s been picked off seven times in his 73 pass attempts over his last four games, after throwing four INTs in 220 passes in his first seven.
Emphasizing the short passing game should at least keep your QB from getting sacked nine times, but that was the number that the SMU defense put up last Saturday, as the Mustangs stacked the box with extra defenders, knowing that Kitchings wasn’t going to have Colandrea attack them downfield.
It’s a mess, basically, but Tony Elliott, who got the job at UVA three years ago in large part due to his success as a play-caller at Clemson, where he was part of a group that won two national championships with him as the offensive play-caller, doesn’t think it’s as bad as it has looked of late.
“Yeah, I know how it felt on Saturday. Man, it felt like everything was just going wrong. When you watch the tape, it comes back to what it typically is. It’s a game of inches, right?” Elliott told reporters at his weekly press conference on Tuesday.
After reviewing the game tape from SMU, Elliott cited little things – “one guy maybe not stepping exactly the way he’s supposed to step, or one guy sliding a little bit too far oversetting.”
“It wasn’t like it was all broken,” Elliott said. “Sometimes it was the quarterback not getting the ball out on the first progression and just trusting it. And then there were some issues you’re just going to have to kind of grow through when you got young backs in there trying to pick up third-down protections from that standpoint.
“So, when you look at it, it wasn’t as bad as it felt in the game,” Elliott said. “All the things are correctable, right? So, it’s correctable with guys just straining a little bit harder fundamentally, and then having the right mindset collectively to go out and play their best game.”
I think it will help that the offense will have Trell Harris back. The Kent State transfer had 13 catches in the season’s first three games before suffering a knee injury in the Maryland game that eventually required surgery.
Harris is the team’s best downfield threat – he had three catches on seven targets on passes that traveled 20 or more yards in the air in the first three games of 2024, and both totals still rank second on the team, despite him just having played in those three games.
You get Harris back, and now Virginia Tech can’t roll its coverages to take away Malachi Fields, who was at his most effective when he had Harris as his running mate, and tight end Tyler Neville and slot man Chris Tyree should get more room to operate in the middle of the field.
Make the D respect the entire field from a pass-coverage perspective, and in turn, you can open up lanes for the ground game.
I still wonder about Colandrea, who is making us think of the quarterback that Keanu Reeves played in the movie “The Replacements” that had the nickname “Footsteps” because he would feel pressure that wasn’t there and take off running before letting plays develop.
From what I’ve observed, Colandrea is like a hitter in a slump who has everybody telling him everything that he’s doing wrong, and starts to overthink things to the point that the slump takes on a life of its own.
I’m not saying Tony Muskett, last year’s QB1, is necessarily that much more obviously better an option – I think both are about equal; Muskett is the better pocket passer, Colandrea is more able to keep plays alive and move the chains with his feet – but it might make sense to go with Muskett right now just because Colandrea seems to be in a head funk.
Without explicitly giving anything away, I’ll just say, I’m hearing things from credible sources that may be in the works on this point for Saturday night.
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Chris Graham
