In a season where the Virginia football team has halted a lot of disappointing streaks, it couldn’t topple two trends Saturday in Durham. Duke extended its winning streak against UVa to three games with a 20-13 win, while the Cavaliers road losing skid grew to seven games.
The Hoos fell to 2-1 in ACC play with the loss, creating a three-way tie atop the Coastal Division with Pitt and Duke. The most recent road setback came on a day where the Hoos outgained the Blue Devils, but lost the turnover battle and the penalty category.
“Those are the things, like second-half penalties, when you’re playing a good team and it’s a close game and you’re going back and forth … that you’ve got to overcome,” Virginia coach Mike London said. “We just didn’t overcome it enough for us to have a chance to win this game today.”
The game stood deadlocked at 13-13 in the fourth quarter after the two teams swapped 10-0 runs in the first half and field goals in the third quarter. Duke, which pushed its home winning streak to eight games, finally pulled ahead for good midway through the fourth quarter. On the game’s deciding drive, the Devils rushed five times for 55 yards – 35.5% of its 155 total yards for the contest. The drive included a 23-yard run by Duke quarterback Anthony Boone, who finished with 48 yards rushing and 176 yards passing (22 of 37 passes with one touchdown), and 32 yards from running back Shaquille Powell.
“They’re a good team running the ball. They’re very productive and [have] the element with the running backs and Boone being able to pull it – actually, he ran the ball more times than what he had shown in the past,” London said. “Hats off to them for exploiting what we couldn’t capitalize on.”
That go-ahead drive ended with a touchdown pass from back-up quarterback Thomas Sirk, who enters the game to give the Blue Devils a different running element with Wildcat and read option possibilities. He entered the game with 25 runs and just 11 passes this season, but beat the Wahoos with his arm. On the snap, he rushed forward like a running play but stopped just short of the line of scrimmage to throw a jump pass to a wide-open David Reeves near the back of the end zone.
“When you run that Wildcat offense, it’s always a possibility. It’s always something that you have to be made aware of and we were loaded up to stop the run,” London said. “Obviously, it was a breakdown and we didn’t cover the guy. He did a good job of showing the run and, at the last minute, making the jump pass.”
Virginia’s offense essentially matched Duke’s running game with 140 yards in the game as the Hoos went to that well 31 times. All three of the Cavalier running backs had some success. Kevin Parks posted 16 carries for 75 yards, Khalek Shepherd added six carries for 33 yards, and Taquan Mizzell carried four times for 21 yards.
UVa added 325 passing yards to that to win the total offense category 465-334, but incompletions, dropped passes, and missed opportunities along with some untimely penalties outweighed the positive gains. Matt Johns completed 22 of 45 passes for 325 yards and threw a five-yard touchdown pass to Khalek Shepherd. Miles Gooch led the team with six catches for 129 yards.
Virginia receiver Darius Jennings threw the ball away late for the other pass attempt on an end-around option pass late in the game that was well covered by Duke. Jennings also had three catches for 79 yards as one of the top targets on the day, but he dropped an early vertical pass up the sidelines and Johns overshot him on a wide-open pattern up the middle in the third quarter that likely would have been a touchdown.
The inconsistency of the passing attack was compounded by some poor game management once the Blue Devils took the lead late. The Cavaliers began the next drive with 7:23 remaining and used 3:03 of the clock on a 65-yard drive that produced no points. Along the way, UVa burned a timeout due to a slow play-call and later picked up a delay of game penalty on fourth-and-seven. That was one of six penalties on the day that cost the team 60 yards. The slow drive left Virginia with only 23 seconds for one last-gasp possession from 85 yards away, but the game ended on a throw underneath the defense near midfield.
“From the signaling, to inside, to calling it, to getting lined up, that’s something as coaches have got to make sure are easy enough for the players to get lined up and it wasn’t executed today so that’s our fault,” London said. “They have a 40-second clock and they have a 25-second clock. There are things that you have to teach your guys to look at being run down and be made aware of. We just didn’t have that focus that we needed to make sure that we could avoid a penalty like that [delay of game].”
