10 Things I Learned … Miami

1. Filmroom Woes. When you win a game, you cannot wait to get to the filmroom early the next week. When you lose a game in blowout fashion, you do not want to be in the filmroom but you know what is coming and it is just a matter of getting through it. But as a player, when you lose a game that you feel you should have won, you dread the filmroom. What you absolutely, positively cannot bear to watch are those three or four – heck, maybe just one! – plays that had it gone the other way, the outcome of the game would have been different.

Welcome to this week for the UVa football team.

The funny thing is that the plays that probably are haunting most fans this week are not the same plays that will get the most, if any, airtime during film sessions. You have to keep in mind the purposes of film study: to learn from your mistakes, build on what you did well, and prepare for the next week. There is not much to learn in team film sessions from the plays that resulted in Marc Verica ‘s or Cedric Peerman ‘s fumbles late in the game, for example, when it comes to the fumbles themselves. Sure, the individuals are likely to take a look back at those plays and see what they may have done wrong with how they protected the ball but for the team, it is likely that they can learn more from the blocking on the play than they can from the fumble itself.

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