Sabre Roundtable: Feeling Good After a Loss?

1) If you were to give Virginia a grade for its overall performance against Miami, what would it be and why?

Jed: B+. All the moral victory clichés apply. Team played hard. Effort was excellent. Gameplan was sound. This club could have cashed it in after the Virginia Tech humiliation and instead opted to demonstrate its collective pride, taking Miami down to a last-minute onside kick. But A’s are reserved for superlative performances. This was merely a solid one.

Nick: C. At first, I was hardly disappointed with the final result. The team played hard, kept it close and gave itself a chance to win the game. It was, in fact, a “moral victory”. That kind of attitude is so dangerous, though – a loss is a loss. The players certainly don’t play the game to look respectable and I’m sure they would grade their performance as a D or an F because they lost. Expecting a loss, and then getting it, doesn’t earn a good grade in my book.

Dan: Let’s see … A for effort, C for result/execution, which gives them a solid B overall. If you look at the drops, two big special team blunders (more on that later), penalties and several missed tackles, a B makes it seem like this game was graded on some sort of VT curve. But in spite of those miscues, this was an above-average performance coming off one of the worst defeats of the Groh era. I didn’t see a hangover out there. What I did see was a team that came out of the gate strong by laying some wood and pulling off some gutsy play calls. While I wasn’t exactly pleased with the end result, the display of intestinal fortitude was a sight for sore eyes.

John: B-minus. The ‘Hoos played hard but I wouldn’t say they played particularly well. They had far too many penalties (8), drops, missed tackles, punt coverage problems and other mistakes to pull off the upset against a good Miami team that wasn’t playing its best football either. Sure, give the Cavs credit for showing some heart on the road. They could have tanked after the VT debacle, but I’m not going to go overboard in praising their resolve. Shouldn’t effort and energy be expected?

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