It’s pretty pathetic, being real about it, that we’re feeling like it was a good defensive effort to give up 28 points and 423 yards, but that’s where things are with the Virginia defense.
Just to be clear about this, a team giving up 423 yards per game would rank 98th of the 130 teams in FBS; a team giving up 28 points a game would rank 79th.
Of course, for the season, Virginia is giving 30.5 points and 461.9 yards per game, so, holy hell, what we saw last night actually was improvement.
Pathetic.
Notre Dame punted once and had two turnovers, and came up short on two fourth downs, so, those are the positives.
The Irish still seemed to move the ball at will with a dink-and-dunk pass game and a ground game that racked up a smidge under 250 yards.
Leave it to Bronco Mendenhall to give you 158 words on how this was somehow something other than unacceptable.
“The issues are athletes in space and, yeah, possibly a bit of the fact that it’s the end of the year and we’ve been grinding. We need more guys to the ball. The best defense is when unblocked players have a chance to make the play. However, great running backs always make the first guy miss. You just see that over and over. We saw Nick Grant at the end make some really nice tackles. Our message at halftime was leverage and tackling, leverage and tackling, leverage and tackling. Great tackling comes with great leverage, and some of those we were inside out rather than outside in. But I did see improvement defensively, and I saw more consistency. I saw us making more critical plays when we had to make them to keep the points down and get off the field. So yeah, we can work on the tackling for sure, but there’s other things I liked tonight.”
Sorry, there was nothing that anybody should say they liked about that effort.
I say that, and then I need to note that a reporter asked defensive back Anthony Johnson about the effort made to fix defensive issues early in the game, which was news to me, that there were issues that got fixed.
“I think it goes with the mindset,” said Johnson, who did have an INT, and added four tackles. “We have guys flying to the ball. We’ve got guys in position. We just have to concentrate a little bit more on wrapping guys up and bringing them to the ground, do a better job in our pursuit, getting multiple hats on the ball so if one guy misses, the next guy is right there, and it’s not going for four or five extra yards after the play.”
Johnson was also asked about how the fourth-down stops might carry over into the next couple of games.
Seems that the reporters were feeling as good about that beatdown as Mendenhall was after the game.
“It just adds more confidence knowing that we’re capable, knowing that we got guys in position to make plays,” Johnson said. “Those two takeaways are big. Turnovers are big factors in the game, and that’s on our pillars, what we talked about in our goals is getting two turnovers, and we met that goal tonight. The score did not come out our way, but getting those fourth-down stops and those turnovers is really positive and something that we’re going to feed off of going into these next two weeks.”
Don’t know about you, but I don’t like feeling like I’m being sold something that I don’t want to buy.
Story by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
