It appears that the folks in the press box in Charlotte on Saturday decided that the reason the Virginia offense bogged down in the 38-27 loss to West Virginia had to do with Noah Josey leaving with an ankle injury in the second quarter.
The narrative almost fits – if you buy into the idea that the offense was actually humming until Josey went down.
While the drive chart will tell you, two TDs in the first three possessions, the second one was a gift – the West Virginia defense overloaded the left side of the box on a third-and-short, and Xavier Brown took the handoff from Beau Pribula and headed between the guard and tackle to his left, and slipped through the line untouched 47 yards for a TD.
Josey only playing 20 snaps had nothing to do with the scheme designed by offensive coordinator Des Kitchings that had Pribula barely getting the ball past the line of scrimmage through the air, including on third-and-longs, for the remainder of the first half, or getting the ball at midfield after a stop and a shanked punt with the score tired in the third quarter, and Kitchings running the ball into the line twice and trying a shovel pass on third-and-7 that didn’t work.
That was where the game turned.
Even head coach Tony Elliott, given the Josey-got-hurt lifeline in a question in the postgame presser, had to say, in effect, No, that wasn’t it.
“You would love to have Josey out there from a from a leadership standpoint, but I don’t know if it was a glaring, you know, issue that that cost us the outcome of the of the game,” Elliott said.
O line stats
- *RT Monroe Mills: 75 snaps, 1 QB pressure allowed, 66.5 PFF grade
- *RG Makilan Thomas: 75 snaps, 1 sack allowed, 70.5 PFF grade
- *C Drake Metcalf: 75 snaps, 2 QB pressures allowed, 61.4 PFF grade
- *LG Noah Josey: 20 snaps, no pressures allowed, 65.6 PFF grade
- LG Ben York: 55 snaps, 2 QB pressures allowed, 55.5 PFF grade
- *LT McKale Boley: 62 snaps, 2 QB pressures/1 sack allowed, 59.0 PFF grade
- LT Jon Adair: 13 snaps, 1 QB pressure allowed, 60.7 PFF grade
* starter
Notes
- Boley’s 59.0 game grade was his lowest since the 2025 ACC Championship Game against Duke, a 27-20 OT loss in Charlotte, when he registered a 53.2 grade. That was one of three games in 2025 in which Boley, a 2026 preseason All-ACC selection, had a grade below 59.0.
- Mills had two game grades in the 80s in UVA’s first two games (86.4 for NC State, 88.5 for Norfolk State) before his 66.5, which was his lowest since the 2024 season, when he was at Louisville, and had a 61.9 game grade in the Week 6 game with SMU.
- Josey’s 20 snaps were a low for him since the 2024 season finale with Virginia Tech, when he was on the field for 16 snaps.
- Tailback Jekail Middlebrook was dinged for allowing four pressures, which is a function of him being in the game when Alley was mad scientist-ing double-A-gap blitzes, which forced Middlebrook to choose which of two free rushers coming up the middle to pick up.
Never figured WVU out
The bigger issue for the offense was, Kitchings, up in the press box, and Pribula, down on the field, just never figured out what the WVU defense was doing, even as defensive coordinator Zac Alley went out of his way to make it plainly obvious, stacking the box with eight or even nine defenders to try to take away the run and mask the glaring issues with his secondary, which came into the game with a 105.4 NFL passer rating against.
“They mixed it up,” Elliott said. “They played some man coverage, and they bailed out of there, and then they played some Cover 2. I thought I thought Zac did a really good job of putting together a good plan against us.”
Pribula was slow to see what was going on across the field, leading to delays in shifting his backs and receivers and helping with O line adjustments.
The lack of recognition led to UVA burning a timeout two plays into the third quarter, and at least two other plays getting blown up with rushed snaps.
In addition to trying to disguise coverages, West Virginia blitzed early and often – on 21 of Pribula’s 37 pass dropbacks, per data from Pro Football Focus.
As it turns out, Pribula was effective throwing the ball against the blitz: 13-of-18 passing and a 123.4 NFL passer rating.
Eleven of those dropbacks resulted in pressure; he was sacked three times on the pressure dropbacks.
Against standard three- and four-man pressure, Pribula was just 8-of-15 passing with a 72.4 NFL passer rating; six of the 16 non-blitz dropbacks resulted in pressure.
Pribula finished with decent counting numbers – 21-of-33, 197 yards, two TDs, but the bulk of that came in the fourth quarter, with the outcome already decided; he was 9-of-13 for 104 yards and a TD in the final minute.
“With a lot of the exotic pressures and things, we probably led more with the controlled passing game as opposed to down-the-field shots, and then once we got behind, right, like, it’s hard to, especially when they’re getting shots on your quarterback, it’s hard to kind of get everything to line up,” Elliott said.
Grounded
The offense looked, in the first quarter, like the ground game juggernaut that it had looked like through two games, putting up 113 yards on the ground, averaging 8.1 yards per attempt.
The rest of the way: 70 yards, 3.9 yards per.
“Early on, you know, we were leaning on the the running backs, and I think in order to do that, you use some of your different personnel groupings, and then I think later in the game, we became a little bit more one-dimensional because we’re playing from behind. I felt like when we were playing from ahead, you know, we could kind of dictate the pace of play, and unfortunately, you know, we weren’t able to do that,” Elliott said.
Odd thing about what he’s saying here: the game was a one-score game until 5:24 to go in the fourth.
Margin and time left didn’t dictate anything; the inability to get first downs dictated everything.
The stats tell us that Virginia had 13 possessions; eight of them went for four plays or fewer, including the quick-strike 47-yard TD run at the end of the first quarter.
Four possessions were three-and-outs, and a fifth was a four-and-out, with a failure on a fourth-down conversion attempt.
A sixth had Virginia deciding to just run the clock out at the end of the first half after getting the ball at the 25 with 26 seconds left and two timeouts in Elliott’s pocket.
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Chris Graham
