Before the season started, Virginia football coach Tony Elliott said he had challenged senior receiver Malachi Fields to rein in some tough throws, to play toward his powerful frame, and to make more of the contested catches. Always fairly quiet off the field, Fields let his play do the talking in the opener. And it was loud. Very loud.
Fields posted his first career 100-yard receiving day with 5 receptions for exactly 100 yards. The style of those catches matched Elliott’s expectations too. Fields took a couple of basic throws to the flat and muscled through two defenders for more yards. He ran a solid route and pulled in the pass on the sideline on a deep out.
The crown jewel, though, was a spectacular diving catch along the home sidelines that buzzed all around social media this week. Check it out.
That grab impressed Elliott just as much as anyone else who replayed it since.
“I’ll say I haven’t seen a play like the one Malachi made, that diving play, like, since Mike Williams did it his freshman year against NC State,” Elliott said of his time at Clemson. “Unbelievable, full extension play. It’s wet. No gloves. That was a big-time play to be able to come down with that ball.”
A quick trip to YouTube makes it easy to see why that comparison came to Elliott’s mind. Williams catch looked remarkably similar.
Of course, a glance at last year’s Fields’ highlights show a slightly less full extension dive for a touchdown too.
Trell Harris Makes Immediate Splash
While Field posted some big numbers, Trell Harris made an immediate impression in his first game as a Cavalier. Harris transferred in from Kent State this offseason where he had 39 receptions for 535 yards and 2 touchdowns in two years of action. At KSU, he had 1 touchdown per year.
Harris has carved out a role in the rotation quickly at UVA. It didn’t take long at all, in fact, for him to match his season-best touchdown totals for the Flashes. On the first pass of the season, Anthony Colandrea sent a 35-yard touchdown pass to Harris in the end zone, the first time in program history that the first pass went for a score. Harris had a hunch that he’d get a shot to make that play as the pre-snap reads unfolded.
“From studying film, when we go in motion, we’d see the corner would slide in a little bit so from there I knew he’s sliding into one-on-one looking at the safety and I knew that if AC saw it was one-on-one, he was going to give me a shot,” Harris said. “I was able to make that play.”
Harris finished with 2 receptions for 38 yards in his debut.
Anthony Colandrea Getting Down For Virginia
Making his first start as the official QB1 for Virginia, quarterback Anthony Colandrea did not disappoint. In addition to that touchdown pass to Harris, he also hit Jack Griese on the sidelines for an improvised play that turned into a 57-yard touchdown sprint. In the end, he completed 17 of 23 passes for 297 yards and 2 touchdowns with another throw that could have been a score, but tight end Sackett Wood Jr. bobbled and dropped it near the goal line.
Colandrea also added 49 rushing yards with 1 touchdown, a 7-yard draw play in the second half of the win. He did take 2 sacks, both of which Elliott pinned to the quarterback vs. the offensive line. On the more egregious one, Colandrea tried to avoid a defender and then circled backward again toward the middle of the field before getting sacked. That one play cost 20 yards and knocked UVA from the 7-yard line on 1st-and-Goal all the way outside of the red zone. A simple throw-away there would have left two or three plays on the table from inside the 10 instead.
Still, most of the decisions from Colandrea on the day appeared to be good ones. That proved to be particularly true on scrambles downfield when extra yardage wasn’t really available. Instead of lowering a shoulder and taking unnecessary contact, the sophomore quarterback immediately dropped into a feet-first baseball slide or stepped out of bounds. It’s something that had been emphasized to him, but unlike some quarterbacks that have a hard time translating it to live game action, Colandrea appeared to understand the choices right off the bat in game one.
“We’ve been harping on him pretty hard to like protect himself because he is a competitive kid. I mean if you remember back to Georgia Tech, he tried to run a safety over,” Virginia offensive coordinator Des Kicthings said. “So we tried him to coach him up. That’s growth. That’s some of the growth we’ve been talking about with regard to him and his maturation. He does a great job extending plays, off-schedule plays but now you don’t need to take an unnecessary hit. Get yourself down and let’s line up and play again. He’s done a good job with that.”
Twitty At Tight End
Colandrea spread the ball around against the Spiders with 10 different players targeted and 9 players making a catch. Among them was Dakota Twitty, who doubled his production from last season. Twitty made 2 catches for 17 yards in the victory to top his lone reception from 2023 that went for 7 yards.
One interesting part of that story is that Twitty did it at a new position. After playing as a receiver earlier in his career, Twitty switched to tight end for practicing necessity this spring when UVA needed more bodies to be able to practice effectively at that position. Twitty made the move and then decided to stick there, which brought flashbacks for Coach Elliott who had recruited him as a tight end back at Clemson.
At 6’4” and 239 pounds, the four-star recruit out of high school looks the part of a receiving tight end that can cause some potential matchup challenges for defenses. And after missing time due to knee injuries, he has three years of eligibility remaining to grow in the role.
“I’m excited for him. So awesome to see him play have a couple of catches,” Elliott said. “You think about Dakota for two years, man, he had two knee surgeries. Then he had a hamstring. He’s just the epitome of perseverance in the way that he battled to be in that position. He does bring a different skill set to that room, which we like because it gives us versatility at the tight end position because we have four guys that we can roll in there. … I’m excited for Twitty. He is just only going to get better the more time he spends at the position.”
On Virginia Tackling
UVA held Richmond to 257 total yards and 4.3 yards per play in the opener. A large chunk of that production came on the second to last drive for the Spiders when Zach Palmer-Smith got loose for a 43-yard carry.
In other words, the defense turned in a good first act for the 2024 season. From Pro Football Focus, that was particularly true with tackling where the analysis gave Virginia an 83.0 tackling grade that was above average. It ranked 16th nationally for the week. That stacked up as the third best grade of the John Rudzinski defensive coordinator era to date, behind an 84.2 (Duke) and 83.2 (Syracuse) from 2022 and ahead of an 82.1 (North Carolina) in 2023. Those are the only games in the 80’s to date.
“I think it was pretty solid. Like I said, we left some opportunities out there but overall for the first game, I think it was a pretty decent job,” Virginia safety Antonio Clary said. “The slick grass and rain didn’t help toward the second half. I think it was pretty solid, but definitely can be better.”
“For a first game, I felt like the tackling was pretty good,” UVA defensive end Kam Butler said. “Obviously they had that long run there towards the end of the game, but aside from that I thought our tackling was pretty good. We were getting hats on the football, we were forcing some fumbles so yeah for the first game, I thought it was pretty good.”
