Virginia’s Cavaliers looked like what many of has hoped for all season … at least for 29 minutes and 14 seconds Saturday. But the demons that have haunted this football team all season long again conspired to rip the hearts out of fans and the fight out of the players. The laundry list is familiar: untimely penalties at critical times, dropped passes at critical moments, missed assignments, bang-your-head against a wall play-calling, failure to convert turnovers into points, and failure to execute at key moments. The only thing missing was a turnover when the game was still in doubt.

I do not grade coaching or player attitude, not because I don’t have an opinion but because there are a lot of unknown variables and guessing the attitude and heart of a player is extremely unfair since performance does not always reflect heart or desire. In grading Virginia’s players and talking about “plays that take no talent,” discipline, and execution, I want the readers to know that those issues only become habitual when coaching fails. The job of a coach is to recognize such things, correct them, and reinforce best practices. It appears the Virginia coaching staff has not been able to do this successfully. I share this with you to say, that these grades, as always, while reflecting mostly execution they do in some small part reflect the impact of coaching that has been less than championship level this season. Coaches must put players in a position to win. For the last four games, the UVa staff has failed to do so and until that changes, this club will continue to struggle.

As we look at the numbers, in a game marked by two dramatically different halves, the grades are unsurprisingly a mixed bag.

Greg’s Grades

Let’s take a quick glance at the grades. As a reminder, all 12 opponents have been assigned a rating. In response to many reader requests, I instituted an Opponent Strength Rating (OSR) number in the weekly grades. All 12 opponents have been assigned an OSR number based on where they rank among the 120 FBS schools. So the breakdown looks like this: Teams 1-15, Tier 5; Teams 16-35, Tier 4; Teams 36-85, Tier 3; Teams 86-105, Tier 2; Teams 106-124, Tier 1.

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