Three key takeaways now that UVa's schedule is finally out

When the Atlantic Coast Conference released its 2020 football schedule on the morning of January 22nd, it included 56 league matchups and 56 non-conference games. ACC teams were set to face 29 non-conference opponents that played in a bowl game last season, the most of Power 5 league.

Of course, that never came to pass. After announcing a 10+1 scheduling model for the fall, the ACC came back roughly a week later and released the revised schedules in full on Thursday morning.

For UVa, the schedule doesn’t seem to set up too poorly given the way the road games appeared when they were stacked up in the matrix released by the league. Still, if the Hoos are fortunate enough to play them all, it’s going to be a challenging season of games.

Here are the three key takeaways for the Cavaliers and their brand new slate.

In a conference that (for this season at least) has scrapped its divisions and will instead pit the top two teams against each other in its title game, there’s certainly a different calculus that must be considered when trying to figure out what “success” looks like for the reigning Coastal Division champs. UVa won’t have to contend with a November matchup at home against Pitt, which will boast arguably one the nation’s best defenses, but the Wahoos will have spend a lot of time away from Charlottesville in the first half of the season. After kicking things off on Friday, September 11th against VMI, UVa gets to travel to Blacksburg, Clemson, Winston-Salem, and Miami Gardens over the course of the next six weeks. Granted, Virginia gets an open week before the games at Clemson and Florida State but still, that might be a tall task for a program replacing its best offensive player ever. If the Cavaliers have any chance at getting back to the ACC Championship Game, they’ll have to find a way to make some hay early on away from Scott Stadium.

The schedule is that bad outside of that tough cluster on the road at the front end. The two open dates come in decent spots, with one coming before the Hoos they head to Death Valley on October 3rd and the other before they head to Tallahassee on November 28th prior to the season’s final two games. In most any other year, a three-game homestead in the heart of the season—against North Carolina (No. 19 in the preseason Coaches Poll) Louisville, and Duke between Halloween and November 14th—would be huge. If the thing plays out as designed, that could be the case. Carolina figures to have one of the league’s better teams and Louisville will be improved over 2019 in Scott Satterfield’s second year. If the Hoos want to have any shot at getting back to Charlotte in December, they’ve likely got to find a way to win all three of these.

This is, of course, the elephant in the room. For starters, this will be only the fourth season UVa has ever hosted long-time ACC foes UNC, Duke, and NC State in the same year with the latter being a matchup that was added just last week. The biggest outlier in terms of the schedule UVa received nearly seven months ago and the one it will actually play is the Tech game. Instead of closing the regular season at Lane Stadium, the Hoos will head down on September 19th. The Week 2 matchup will rank as the earliest Commonwealth Cup showdown since 1987, though technically that game—also played on September 2nd—was in Week 3. So, while this will be the sixth time the two have met in September, it’s just such a dramatic departure from how this game typically feels. Relatedly, finishing the season with a Senior Day matchup against Boston College—only the third time the Eagles have visited Charlottesville since joining the league 15 years ago— just feels wrong. Lastly, there’s also the fact that some of the league’s best players, like Virginia Tech CB Caleb Farley and Miami DE Greg Rousseau, could and likely will choose not to play. That would make some tough games on paper feel even more different once the time to play rolls around.

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