UVA football team looking for more

What seemed like enough to complete the mission suddenly crumbled in crunch time at Southern Mississippi.

The lone leg that Virginia had to stand on through its first two setbacks was timely defensive strength.

With a bend-but-don’t-break attitude, Virginia (0-3) seemed to manage ill-timed turnovers created by its offense, forcing William & Mary and Texas Christian into attempting 10 combined field goals, seven of which lead to points in the season’s first two games.

Having allowed 93 points thus far in three games, which ranks 100th in the nation thus far, the results appear misleading for the best unit the program has to offer.

In a defense spearheaded by coach Al Groh, one of the issue lies in the results, or lack thereof, relative to what is demanded from the linebackers.

To date, the rotating foursome at Groh’s favorite position has accounted for just two of the team’s five sacks.

The Cavaliers did, however, enter the season needing to replace the production of former outside linebacker Clint Sintim.

“If I have this information correct, he led the country in linebacker sacks last year, and that’s a lot of big plays,” Groh said. “He was really a playmaker linebacker for us.”

Outside of what Sintim accomplished as a wrecking ball for quarterbacks, Virginia boasted mainstays for three years at inside linebacker in Antonio Appleby and Jon Copper.

“In Copper, we had a player who had some really awesome plays during the course of his career, but we can’t check them off as sacks as such, but … One of the things that comes to mind is two years ago, we played Connecticut here and we turned the ball over in the first two possessions and we have a chance to be in the hole 14-0 right away,” Groh said. “And the defense holds both times and they kick field goals and it’s 6-0.

“That’s a tremendous difference. On each one of those plays, Jon makes a third-down stop. One caused a field goal, and at the end of the half, Jon strips a receiver in the red zone on like the last play of the half and we get the ball, so there’s X amount of plays that are not going to show in the national statistics, other than a tackle for Jon. But those were game-changing plays.”

In all, Copper and Sintim accounted for 171 tackles and 18 tackles behind the line of scrimmage.

“Those two players, in particular, contributed to a lot of plays that really changed the course of the game where it helped us manage the game,” Groh said.

Nationally speaking, Virginia enters Saturday’s game at North Carolina (3-1, 0-1 ACC) ranked 25th in passing defense, the sixth-best total in the league. The program sits at No. 102 in rushing defense and has struggled against the run, however, after TCU and Southern Miss used their ground attacks to torture the Cavaliers.

It did not help the Cavaliers that Southern Miss operated fluidly in the Wildcat formation on countless occasions.

Stopping that prior to league play was a point of emphasis during the bye week.

“This week we worked on areas that we thought we didn’t do well on. The Wildcat was definitely something that we needed to improve on so we worked on that a lot,” Virginia sophomore safety Rodney McLeod said. “We just need to stay composed. Everybody sees a running back back there and says, ‘Oh my God, it’s Wildcat.’

“We just have to chill out. It is basically the same play. We just have to work on that, the gaps and where to fill in and stuff.”