Virginia fans couldn’t wait for Robert Anae to put his name into the coaching transfer portal. Now they’re looking at the sputtering Des Kitchings offense and thinking, you know, that Bobby Haskins lateral wasn’t really that big a deal.
Kitchings has Anae’s QB, Brennan Armstrong, who threw for 400 yards a game last year, and Anae’s wideouts – Dontayvion Wicks, who had 1,203 yards receiving a year ago, Keytaon Thompson, who had 1,237 yards from scrimmage, Billy Kemp IV, who had 74 catches.
Armstrong threw for 405 yards and five TDs against Illinois in Virginia’s 42-14 win last September. Wicks had three catches for 69 yards, KT five for 68, Kemp six for 55.
Today, Armstrong had 180 yards and two INTs, and completed 13 of his 32 throws.
Wicks had two catches on 16 (!) targets.
Thompson had five catches on six targets for 62 yards.
Kemp didn’t record a catch.
Last year’s O line is now making Michigan, Southern Cal and Central Florida better.
And that’s because new head coach Tony Elliott, for all the positive vibes he’s brought to Charlottesville, struck out looking on the transfer portal in trying to place the guys who left, forcing Kitchings to go with four guys who made their first collegiate starts last week.
It showed in Week 2. McKale Boley, a true freshman who graded out at 42.5 in Virginia’s 34-17 win over Richmond last week, was back at left tackle Saturday, and was routinely beaten in both the run and pass game.
And yet Kitchings still kept trying to run Boley’s way, and kept having Armstrong drop back into the pocket, despite the fact that Illinois was consistently getting into the backfield against even three-step drops, much less the litany of slower-developing five-step drop plays that Kitchings kept going to.
One of the few times that Kitchings tried to move the pocket resulted in the big gainer of the day, a 62-yard pass play from Armstrong to Lavel Davis Jr. on a rollout to the left on which BA had a running back in the flat short that drew the attention of the Illinois linebacker and safety, leaving Davis streaking behind the defense for the big play.
When I saw that one, I was thinking, OK, we’ve got something going here, but we didn’t see much moving pocket after that.
Emblematic of the day was a fourth-and-two play in plus territory just before halftime. Illinois called a timeout before the play, and I remarked on our Twitter Spaces podcast that it seemed obvious that Kitchings would go with a run-pass option play for Armstrong to try to create something, but instead, Kitchings had BA drop back, and of course he took a hit trying to deliver a pass, throwing off his back foot because of the pressure, to Kemp, who was smothered in coverage, and the pass fell incomplete.
I hate criticizing play-calling, because I realize that I’m a sportswriter, not a well-compensated Power 5 offensive coordinator, and I don’t spend my waking hours watching film and devising a game plan, based on a playbook that I’ve come up with and had my guys practice for months on end.
That said, I’d like to think that people who are in these positions should be able to adjust to what they’re seeing in front of them in game action, and I didn’t see that from Kitchings on Saturday.
We knew going in that Illinois was more stout up front this year. The Illini gave up 32 rushing yards and generated 20 QB pressures in last week’s 23-20 loss at Indiana.
Indiana ain’t Ohio State, but it’s a Big Ten school, so those numbers would suggest to you, maybe we need to try more screens, more quick slants, more moving the pocket to get Armstrong out of the crosshairs.
What we saw instead was a lot of straight dropbacks, a stunning lack of designed movement for one of the more mobile QBs in college football, and a mind-boggling inability to learn from mistakes.
To be fair, Anae would have trouble getting the offense moving with this offensive line, but then, last year’s line decided to enter the transfer portal only after it was clear that Anae wasn’t returning.
That’s a bit on Carla Williams, the Virginia AD, who dawdled in naming a new head coach to replace Bronco Mendenhall, and then on Elliott, who has said numerous times the past few months that his biggest regret is not recruiting the departing line guys harder to try to get them to stay.
Anae almost certainly wasn’t going to hang around for Tony Elliott, but maybe Elliott could have worked harder to recruit Anae’s QB coach, Jason Beck, and maybe that would have had an impact on those guys.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
One thing is for sure. Anae doesn’t score three points with these guys today.
He might call a dumb trick play that leads to disaster at some point, but he doesn’t score three points.
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Chris Graham
