One thing I have to say about this year’s UVA Football team: in all my years of covering college sports, I have never seen a team quit on itself quite like this one.
I mean, I’d thought the way they gave up in the West Virginia game two weeks ago was next-level, but I was … wrong.
There was a whole ’nuther dimension – elite, Olympic-level – to the quit that we saw today in Tallahassee, with an FSU team that got its AD fired a couple of weeks ago and had its head coach hanging on by a thread being made to look like the second coming of Bobby Bowden.
ICYMI
The seven-figure QB, Beau Pribula, was 14-of-32 for 168 yards through the air, and on the ground – well, this statline is because college football handles sacks weird, but Pribula officially had negative-62 yards rushing, because Florida State sacked him 10 (!) times.
If you were wondering: the ‘Noles had recorded a total of seven sacks in their first four games.
SMU put up 585 yards, 430 through the air, against FSU in Week 1; Alabama, a week later, went for 567 yards, 247 on the ground.
Virginia, today: 205 yards.
It wasn’t all on Pribula.
On back-to-back snaps in the first half, center Drake Metcalf was knocked flat on his arse by basic bullrushes ahead of Pribula getting sacked.
His receivers had, unofficially, four dropped passes.
And when they weren’t dropping passes, they were running either the wrong routes, or the QB was throwing the wrong routes, one or the other – maybe both, who knows.
The defense, for its part, as it did in the WVU loss, made a sub-60 percent wildcat QB look like Lamar Jackson, in today’s case, Ashton Daniels, who was 12-of-19 for 183 yards through the air, and more importantly, had 168 sack-adjusted yards and five (!) TDs on the ground.
This is two times in three weeks that a guy who won’t make it out of training camp in the CFL making John Rudzinski’s defense look like the JV trying to play the varsity.
By way of explaining what it was that we just witnessed, we’re going to hear from the head coach, Tony Elliott, that it’s a simple matter of the D needing to clean up its run fits, and the receivers and O line and Pribula needing to get on the same page, when they weren’t even reading from the same book today.
Just saying it, Elliott failed his guys today, in a couple of key ways.
The most visible was his plain awful body language as the game started to get out of hand in the third quarter.
The job of a head coach who doesn’t call plays is to have input into the game plans with his coordinators during the week, and then on gameday, he tells the offensive coordinator when he’s planning to go for it on fourth down a play or two ahead, is responsible for the timeouts, and otherwise is the head cheerleader – picking up the QB after a bad play or rough series, firing up the O line and the D as necessary.
There were two scenes caught on the TV broadcast during timeouts on the field when we saw Elliott standing outside the huddle of the unit on the field looking like he had just watched video of somebody hitting a dog upside the head with an open hand – wait; did I really just write that sentence, given what has been going on around the program the past couple of days?
When the head coach is skulking around the sidelines with slumped shoulders like the game is already lost, the game is already lost.
The second way he failed his guys: for the second time in three weeks, he sent his starting QB back on the field in garbage time.
Pribula, already having eaten 10 (!) sacks, was back on the field with 3:41 to go, down 38-7.
Why?
I hope somebody is asking TE about that in the postgame presser that is going on as I write.
Is he that scared of creating a quarterback controversy between an obviously over-his-head Pribula and Eli Holstein, the backup who started for two years at Pitt, and should be getting a look this week?
I questioned two weeks ago, as the loss to WVU was still playing out, why Elliott didn’t read what was going on – that Pribula was having trouble processing the speed of the game – and go to Holstein just out of thinking, Not saying anything about who the QB1 is for the rest of the season, but doing this gives my team the best chance to win this game.
It sure does feel like Elliott is sticking with Pribula out of stubbornness, just based on TE having made the call pretty early on that he was going to make Pribula the starter, and he wants to be proven right in having done that.
The definition of insanity would seem to be applicable here.
The rest of the guys on the offense – and the coordinator, Des Kitchings – don’t believe in Pribula being the guy, and the sense of quit that flows from there seems to be pervasive.
We keep hearing how much money the donors put together to help Elliott build this roster – after giving him, what I was told, $35 million to put together last year’s 11-win group, he got more, in the area of $40 million, to make another run at the fringe of a playoff berth this year.
That’s a ton of money for a group that has now quit on itself not once, but twice.
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Chris Graham
