Saturday afternoon, I had the “joy” of following my beloved Cincinnati Reds leave around 98 runners on base, blow a lead, lose to the Pittsburgh Pirates, and clinch starting the playoffs on the road in Pittsburgh in a one-game series … and that was the best part of my Saturday afternoon when it came to the City of Pittsburgh. I’m sure you understand, as I cannot imagine that you enjoyed the UVa-Pitt game anymore than I did.

A Game Thing

Well, the defense did its job, eh? I mean, I would have liked to have seen the defense hold the Pitt offense to field goals in “sudden change” situations and the fourth quarter didn’t exactly start well but all in all, we can’t really complain about the defense, can we? Let’s see, 7 sacks, plenty of pressures, 3 turnovers forced, 8 rushing yards allowed on 0.2 yards per carry, less than 200 yards of offense allowed on the road, stopping 13 out of 18 third downs, yet another Brent Urban pass break-up, knocking the opposing quarterback out of the game, few missed tackles, only one offensive drive of more than 27 yards allowed (and that resulted in zero points) … we’ll take all that, won’t we?

What about everything else? Not so good.

On offense, things were summed up by the connection, or lack thereof, between David Watford and his receivers. For most of the day, Watford was throwing an inaccurate ball … which was a pretty bad thing because his receivers were having trouble catching even the accurate ones. On top of that, Watford often was throwing late into windows, an issue we discussed last week and that reared its ugly head this week, too. Those inaccurate/late throws made things all the harder, set some receivers up for downfield hits, and cost the team some very important yards when receivers had to turn and twist to catch balls with defenders closing, costing the receivers the opportunity to turn upfield (including on 3rd-and-2 near the goal line on what basically was UVa’s last-chance drive). So you put that one on Watford … but would it have mattered? Could the receivers have made the catch regardless? In terms of a catch that really helped out the quarterback, I can think of one all day, that being Jake McGee’s stretch catch when Watford put a ball into triple coverage. But that’s all I can remember. And that’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

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