The Virginia football team is off to its best start in more than a decade. With season-opening wins against Pittsburgh, William & Mary, and Florida State, the Hoos are 3-0 for the first time since 2005. The latest victory marked the first time UVA won as a ranked team since 2007.
In other words, the Cavaliers have gotten off to a good start. They’ve put themselves in a position for a huge Coastal Division showdown with Miami in three weeks. Before that next conference games arrives, though, Virginia has a home date with ODU this weekend and a trip to Notre Dame for a likely top 25 showdown.
With those two games looming, it’s time for a checkup with the season 25% complete.
Offensively, UVA scored 30, 52, and 31 points in the three wins. The middle game against W&M marked the first game with 50+ points since the Temple contest of 2005. The Hoos are averaging 37.7 points, which is tied for 32nd nationally. Virginia hasn’t finished in the top 50 nationally in scoring offense this decade so that’s a big step forward at this point in the season.
The Cavaliers rank 82nd in rushing offense at 155.0 yards per game, but they’re 57th in yards per carry at 4.65. They’ve also scored 7 rushing touchdowns, which is tied for 28th. Virginia is tied for 54th in passing offense at 257.0 yards per game, but the offense is 32nd in completion percentage at 68.2%. UVA’s 5 touchdown passes are tied for 59th. That adds up to 412.0 yards of total offense, which ranks 70th nationally.
UVA has allowed 5 sacks, which is tied for 60th and 16 total tackles for loss, which is tied for 61st. The Hoos’ 5 interceptions are tied for the fourth most nationally.
All in all, there’s some good news and some bad news in those statistics. That may be why Virginia Offensive Coordinator Robert Anae doesn’t think this year’s team has found its identity yet. There just hasn’t been enough consistency in any one area from game to game or quarter to quarter to lock in at this point. The Hoos have been good in the second half of both ACC games with 38 combined points after halftime, however, and that’s been enough to fuel the 3-0 start.
“It’s still not clear as to who we are,” Anae said Wednesday. “Still not clear. I’m not convinced we’ve played our best football. We’re still a ways. There’s a drop for how we practice and how we perform. There’s a slippage. We get better, more consistent things on the practice field than we are getting on the game field. So we’ve got to train higher so when we slip on game day, it’s not that far.”
Flipping to the defense, Virginia allowed the most points of its season to date in last week’s 31-24 win against Florida State. The D has allowed 14, 17, and 24 points the first three weeks. The Hoos have allowed an average 18.3 points per game, which is tied for 39th nationally. That’s slightly behind last season’s final ranking of 21st nationally at 20.1 points per game despite giving up fewer points, but that likely will settle itself out as teams get into conference play and averages change.
The Cavaliers rank rank 16th in rushing defense at 78.67 yards allowed per game and they’re 17th in yards per carry allowed at 2.51. That was a major emphasis in the offseason and is a vast improvement from the first three years of the Bronco Mendenhall era. UVA’s best finish was 47th nationally last season so if this pace continues, it will represent a climb from outside the top 100 to a top 20 rushing defense in a three-year span.
The passing defense checks in at 36th nationally by allowing 183.0 yards per game, but the Wahoos have allowed just a 52.7% completion percentage so far this season and that’s No. 18 in the national rankings. UVA’s 4 passing touchdowns allowed is tied for 50th. The total defense adds up to 261.7 yards per game allowed and that ranks 16th.
Virginia has been disruptive in a major way. The Cavaliers have 3 interceptions, which is tied for 25th in the nation. They also have ripped off 14 sacks in just three games and that’s tied for No. 2 nationally. The Hoos are on pace for more than 50 sacks, something that just two teams accomplished last season and no one did in 2017 and just eight teams have done in the last five years combined. With 28 total tackles for loss, they’re tied for No. 7.
A quarter of the way into the season, there’s a lot to like. UVA Co-Defensive Coordinator Kelly Poppinga said the ability to get the job done defensively in multiple ways has been the strong suit of the defense so far in 2019.
“I see a team that has been successful with blitzing, but also being successful with just our base zone stuff,” Poppinga said Wednesday. “I think there’s been a good mix of having success when we want to create havoc by blitzing, but also when we want to just play base zone, I think our guys have done a good job with that. I think we can keep offenses guessing if we can do both of those things really well. Be able to just play our base zone and then be able to blitz when we want to and be able to get production out of both of those. We can’t sit there and blitz the whole game and you can’t sit back and play base zone the whole game. A mixture of both, a complement of both, is I think what we’ve seen success with in the first three games.”
Nice story.