Ever since Bronco Mendenhall announced that he would bring most of his BYU offensive coaches with him to Virginia, the words pace and tempo have accompanied talk of the new system being installed. Coaches have made it so clear that UVA wants to play fast, you’d think Ricky Bobby was on the staff.

But what else comes with the package? The Cavaliers will use a version of the Air Raid, which offensive coordinator Robert Anae learned in part while working at Texas Tech with Mike Leach. The Virginia “brand” will feature “a lot more running back-tight end things in the system. You’ll see a kind of mixture and merge of it all,” Anae says. The latter likely has some Rich Rodriguez influence in there after Anae made a two-year stop in Arizona between his two tenures with Mendenhall at BYU.

With that in mind, there appear to be two other key tenets beyond pace. For this article’s purposes, let’s call them space and symmetry.

Space

Without question, Virginia wants to influence the space opponents must defend. That could mean different things at different times because the Cavaliers will use varying personnel groupings unlike some versions of the Air Raid that basically use three or four receivers at all times. UVA, of course, will do that too but there’s more variation to the looks. Some examples of space challenges for opposing defense could be horizontal spreads (receivers dispersed all over the formation) or overloads (all the receivers to one side – sometimes bunched, sometimes not).

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