UVA football coach Mike London talks with reporters on the ACC football coaches teleconference on Wednesday. The ‘Hoos (2-4, 1-1 ACC) play at North Carolina (5-1, 2-0 ACC) on Saturday.
MIKE LONDON: Our team is preparing to head down to Chapel Hill, play a very explosive offense. Obviously No. 1 in the ACC in total offense and scoring and passing efficiency, 3rd down conversions, so a very well-executed offense, a fast defense, and then you look at the special teams, and everybody talks about the punt returner, Switzer has done a tremendous job for them. It’s a great challenge, and our guys are looking forward to making the trip down there.
Q. You talk about their explosive offense. Can you talk about the dimension Hood brings? Last year they’ve had to rely on Marquise Williams running out of the quarterback spot to generate a lot of ground game, but this year they have one of the most effective backs in the ACC. Can you talk about that and defending him?
MIKE LONDON: Yes, Elijah (Hood) is an excellent running back. He’s got close to 80 carries, and I’ll tell you what, it’s about seven yards a carry, per carry, so that’s an outstanding statistic. And when you look at him, he also catches the football. But it leads to the dynamic of having a very accomplished runner, a running back in there, and then a quarterback that’s also accomplished in running the ball, as well. It causes issues for defenses to make sure that you have all your gaps and assignments taken care of because as I said, he’s demonstrated that he can be a game breaker, a guy that can get big yards, and he’s an explosive runner. He is a very good football player.
Q. A lot of transfers in college football, but it’s kind of an unusual situation that you have a guy that’s playing against the school where he transferred from. Any awkwardness there, or can he give you any insight into the Carolina offense or anything like that?
MIKE LONDON: You know, when you’ve graduated from the institution that you’ve been at, there’s not too many stipulations in terms of going to another institution, whether it’s outside or inside your conference, and just happens to be one of those scenarios. TJ (Thorpe) has done an excellent job for us in being a teammate here and a leader for this program, and obviously he still has a lot of friends on Carolina’s team. They’ve talked, they know each other, and the only insight perhaps is he knows the defensive guys from the standpoint of athleticism. He doesn’t know Coach Chizik and what they’re doing defensively. Offensively obviously some of the things that they do in terms of concept, but he won’t know what they’re going to do in terms of execution and game planning and all those things, so I’m quite sure that they’ll do whatever they need to do to protect that. But the biggest thing is just from the competitive standpoint of having a chance to play another game. He was out for a while with the collarbone issue, and now he’s back, and we’re trying to get him fully implemented into what we do. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a big game for him. You can’t take the human element out of the fact that he played for UNC. He’s excited about it as well as our entire team is excited about this challenge.
Q. Do you have an update on the status of Albert Reid?
MIKE LONDON: Not as of this moment. I can tell you that Albert will travel with us. Whether he’ll play or not is still in the hands of the doctors at this moment. But we practice in the mornings, and we’ll practice — I’ll have an update by this afternoon, early evening, and we’ll either include Albert with a chance to practice tomorrow or may not. I would say worst-case scenario it would be a game-time decision with him. I would say that Connor Wingo-Reeves is probably doubtful and probably won’t play, and obviously those two young men had suffered concussions in our last game, and he’s further back or further off in terms of where he needs to be. So we want the best for both players, regardless of where they are right now. We just want to make sure that they’re okay and that they can move forward.
Q. I hope this doesn’t sound like a silly question because obviously everybody wants to win all their games, but how big was it for you guys to be able to win the way you did and come back from that deficit and for the guys to just know that they were capable of being able to pull out a game like that?
MIKE LONDON: Yeah, you know, it was big from the psychological standpoint. You know, we’ve been in some close games and have lost. Obviously the Notre Dame game and driving — and the Pittsburgh game. We just talked about this team being resilient and having a lot of grit and just having a lot of heart. Everybody talks about leadership, but I think our older guys are a big part of this, as well. It’s been proven that if you hang in there, just keep playing this game — now, it took three overtimes to do it, I believe the first ever in school history, but at the same time, the result of that was a positive result that had guys out there probably playing even better as the game went on, as you went into the overtime periods. It’s something you want to capitalize on. You want to move forward on, you want to move with in a positive direction, and that definitely was, against a very good Syracuse team. We played LSU close. You just never know about the ACC
games. We start playing against each other now and you look at common opponents or opponents from different BCS conferences. It’s about having the next opportunity, and the next one for us is against a good UNC team.
Q. You’ve got some tough games coming up here in the Coastal. Would you say that a win in that game was even more important considering the stretch you have here coming up?
MIKE LONDON: Well, the stretch we had first coming in was about as tough as anything. And then obviously the teams that are left to play in our schedule are very good teams, as well. You just look at the coaches, the players, the all-star players that are still left, and even now — again, we talk about coach-speak and everything like this, but the most important thing for us is to play a good team on the road and win a road game, and that’s the next thing, an ACC road game. That’s how kind of how approach is, is approaching this game using the last game as, okay, we won but we’ve got to get better in a lot of areas and improve in that and have a chance to go on the road and play a good team that’s an ACC game in our Coastal Division, as well. That’s the biggest focus right now.
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