Take Two: Breaking down the loss at Duke- Pres. by MPF

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The Result: UVa dropped its second straight game and third road contest of the season, falling at Duke 38-17. The loss drops the Hoos to 2-3 on the season and 0-2 in ACC play. Duke’s win snaps a seven-game winning streak in the series for the Hoos, which began in the 2015 season, and was its first ACC win in 14 tries.

The Turning Point: UVa was already in a 14-0 hole, but when Demick Starling fumbled the ball on what was going to be a big kick return, the game slipped away from the Cavaliers for good. Duke took over in UVa territory and marched down the field for another score, going up 21-0. Had Starling held on to the ball there, maybe UVa goes down and scores and then trails 14-7 or better at the half before getting the ball coming out of the locker room. That didn’t happen though and Duke took full control (more on that in a bit).

The Stat That Tells the Story: The Blue Devils controlled the line of scrimmage, rushing for 248 yards (269 when adjusting for negative plays) with four rushing touchdowns in the win.

Wahoo of the Week: It’s Nick Jackson, who had 10 tackles in just one half of football after sitting out the first half for a targeting call last week.

Offense: What can we say here that hasn’t already been said? The offense is five games in and hasn’t turned the corner yet. The question now is will the Wahoos turn it at all? They once again failed to reach 300 yards of offense in the losing effort. Brennan Armstrong again completed half of his passes give or take, going 19 for 37 for 202 yards with one touchdown and an interception. UVa rushed for just 93 yards and 3.7 yards per carry, though Armstrong’s 23 yards on eight attempts did spoil the average a bit. Perris Jones rushed for 41 yards on eight carries, just over 5 yards per attempt, leading the team. One positive statistical note was that UVa went 8-for-14 on 3rd down.

The passing game continues to be frustrating to watch. Armstrong is far from being in any sort of rhythm, with an oddly-high number of passes batted down at the line of scrimmage against Dyke. The receivers continue to put up forgettable performances. Lavel Davis caught just one pass on four targets. Dontayvion Wicks caught four on eight tries. Keytaon Thompson was again the top target, but finished with just 61 yards on six receptions, despite being targeted 11 times. Billy Kemp wasn’t out there long before getting banged up again. Drops continue to plague the group, and very rarely do we see a player catch the ball in space and put up yards after the catch.

The entire operation demands review at the bye week. The offensive line has shown steady improvement, though it still has work to do, so that excuse isn’t really flying at this point. If I felt that the offense was close to turning the corner or was showing improvement week over week, I’d say stay the course and things will fall into place. But despite having some talent on offense and an experienced quarterback, UVa isn’t just a step back from where it was in 2021: The Cavaliers look like a totally different group.

Excuse the very off-the-wall movie reference here, but an exchange from the ‘40 Year Old Virgin’ stuck with me when watching the game last night. Steve Carell’s character says “This doesn’t feel right,” and Romany Malco’s character responds with “Of course it doesn’t feel right! What has felt right for you doesn’t work. You need to try some wrong, dawg.”

I think it’s time for Tony Elliott and the offensive staff to try some wrong. Because, for whatever reason, and I’m sure there are several, what they’re trying to do isn’t working.

Grade: D

Defense: After doing a lot of things right at Syracuse last weekend, UVa’s defense regressed in in this one.

Some of the statistics don’t look so bad: Duke finished with 377 yards of offense and just 129 yards through the air. The Blue Devils were 5-for-13 on 3rd down. But they won the battle in the trenches and had a big day on the ground. And while the Hoos did a nice job playing bend but don’t break defense at Syracuse, they had no such luck against Duke.

The Blue Devils converted a number of back-breaking short-yardage scenarios throughout the game and were efficient in the red zone. The got to the red zone five times and on their first four trips, they scored touchdowns before finally settled for a field goal on the final score of the contest. Really that’s the difference between this game and Syracuse: UVa forced the Orange to kick five field goals while Duke finished drives in the end zone. That’s the difference between allowing 38 points and 22 points.

UVa also didn’t get much pressure on the Blue Devils. The defense finished with just one sack, a shared effort between Ben Smiley and Aaron Faumui. Virginia did record seven tackles for loss, and oddly three of them belong to CB Anthony Johnson. Virginia also had just two QB hurries and forced no turnovers in Saturday’s loss in Durham.

Jonas Sanker continued to flash, finishing with 11 tackles, and we already mentioned that Jackson had 10 in the second half once he was able to enter the game.

Overall it was a pretty forgettable night for the defense. They weren’t able to create negative plays and lost on crucial downs too often. Duke came in with a solid game plan and maximized its opportunities. UVa still has a lot of issues in the other two phases of the game and was put in a few difficult spots with Duke starting in good field position off of turnovers, but it wasn’t as bad as the Syracuse game and the defense’s output was far worse, particularly in the red zone.

Grade: D

Special Teams: Special teams again stood in the way of a win more than it helped. Daniel Sparks had a punt blocked around midfield with the Hoos down 7-0, which led to a shorter field and a touchdown drive for the home team. We already mentioned Starling’s fumble on the kick return that set up a score to put the Cavaliers in a 21-0 hole. And those two plays pretty much sum it up. The punting and kicking were otherwise okay, but it’s tough to make up for two big special teams mistakes like that, both of which led to touchdowns.

Will Bettridge made his extra points and his only field-goal attempt of the night (the first of career), so there’s a positive to speak of. But other than that, special teams again weren’t very special for the Hoos.

Grade: D

Coaching Staff: Last year, UVa beat Duke 48-0, marking their seventh-straight win over the Blue Devils. Mind you, that Cavalier defense that shut the Blue Devils out allowed just under 32 points per game, making the outcome even more remarkable. Both Duke and UVa made coaching changes in the offseason, with Elliott and Mike Elko being hired within hours of each other. Both were first-time head coaches who had to assemble a staff, manage the roster and so on. Both teams had players that returned and some who left.

And despite the fact that UVa entered the season with much higher expectations than Duke, if you go by what Vegas and others thought, it’s clear that Duke is well ahead of Virginia in its transition. Despite no truly significant roster additions for Duke, like at QB for example, the Blue Devils flipped a 48-0 loss into a 38-17 win in front of a crowd of just 15,152 that couldn’t have possibly accounted for the big one-year difference.

Every program is different but Duke started off in a much worse place under similar circumstances and a very similar timeline, and is 4-1, now with a lopsided win over UVa.

So what’s going on with this staff? Scheme changes do take time to sink in, there’s no doubt about that. But the regression on the offensive side of the ball is downright alarming. A slight drop off would be expected and I doubt anyone would kick up a fuss if UVa simply went from scoring 30 points per game to 25 and looked otherwise competent.

But that’s just not what’s happening here, despite all of the skill talent that returned.

To put things in perspective, UVa’s offense went from 34.6 points per game in 2021 to 18 through the first five games of this season, and that’s with many more difficult opponents left to play. For comparison, Georgia Tech averaged 33.6 points per game in 2018, then scrapped the triple-option in a complete rebuild of what they were doing on offense, with far less talent to work with, and averaged 16.7 points per game in Geoff Collins’ first year at Tech.

A dropoff in a radical scheme overhaul like that is to be expected, but that’s not what happened at UVa in the offseason so this is much less acceptable.

The defense is going to be a work-in-progress and have had good moments and bad. I won’t spend a lot of time blaming the defensive staff for what happened on Saturday, but there is clearly plenty of work to do. Special teams weren’t very good last year and they certainly haven’t improved. In fact, through four games, it’s much easier to find examples of how they cost teams games than how they helped them win.

And that takes me to one of the two biggest problems I see with the team right now.

The first is the lack of detail-oriented play in all three phases. On offense, it’s clear that the details are still not in focus. Receivers and their QB are often not on the same page, the offensive line continues to learn and grow, there are far too many drops, turnovers and penalties and so on. And despite the defense’s improvement, that group lacks some of the fundamental discipline needed to play at a high level. Smiley has committed, by my count, at least four hands-to-the-face penalties this season. Faumui picked up a senseless post-whistle penalty early in the game, not his first this season, and was pulled out of the contest at least briefly. And while there have been plenty of bright spots, some of UVa’s young defenders continue to take bad angles at times or miss assignments. That’s to be expected and isn’t as alarming as what’s happening elsewhere, but there’s still work to do. And on special teams, UVa has had a litany of errors. Punts and kicks have been blocked. There have been special teams turnovers. Missed kicks. Muffed punts. Guys not knowing they are supposed to be on (or off) the field on different special teams units. It’s all contributing to the results we’ve seen.

If a team goes out and plays a clean football game and comes up short, it’s easier to swallow that sort of defeat and move on. But that isn’t what’s happened here.

The Wahoos committed 12 penalties for more than 100 yards at Syracuse. Luckily for them, the Orange were nearly as undisciplined themselves, which helped keep UVa in the game. Against Duke, one team played relatively clean and the other was worse: Duke had just three penalties for 38 yards, and UVa had six for 87 yards. There have also been mistakes by the coaching staff through five games. These sorts of things, along with fumbles, missed assignments, and others are perhaps my biggest concern at the moment.

This team is either not being taught how to focus on the little things or they are and whatever they’re being taught isn’t sinking in.

And that takes me to my second major issue, the perceived (and sometimes stated) lack of buy-in. It can be different to change a culture, but let’s not pretend that this staff inherited a broken program that was completely lost. In the offseason, Des Kitchings commented that the team knows how to work because of good habits instilled in them by the previous staff. This isn’t the same as what Bronco Mendenhall inherited in 2016, when he took over a program that didn’t really know how to win and had just one winning season in its last eight. There were certainly things that could be done better, particularly on the defensive side of the ball, but since this staff arrived other parts of the organization seem to have gone backwards in the pursuit of the culture that Elliott wants to create.

UVa has veteran players, including a quarterback that came into this season with 20 starts under his belt, and the coaching staff hasn’t been able to leverage that into success in implementing their culture and schemes.

And this is purely my opinion, but when I watch this team, it feels like a group of players that simply aren’t responding to the message. Elliott’s tact is far different than Bronco, who strove to create a culture of accountability (succeeding at times and failing at others, in fairness), but was stoic on game days and kept things in house. Elliott is driving accountability out in the open, calling players out in press conferences for mistakes, gathering the team together on Saturday to let them have it over some bad play in the first half, and so on. There’s more than one way to lead a football program, and which approach is right can be in the eye of the beholder, and both can succeed and both can fail. But it’s clear so far that the team hasn’t responded to their leadership and turned that into success on the field. We’re still seeing thoughtless penalties, poor ball security, misunderstanding of scheme assignments and play that simply isn’t winning football.

The players ultimately have to decide whether they are going to buy in and work to get on the same page before the season is up in smoke, but make no mistake: The lack of buy-in is something that falls at the feet of the head coach.

Players that aren’t in with both feet need to be replaced by those that are. Mistakes have to be corrected during the week with demonstrable improvement between the lines on Saturdays. The coaching staff also need to recruit players they can win with and coach them up, too.

Sometimes an organization has to take a step back and strip things down a bit before they can move forward. We saw that in 2016 when Bronco came in and went 2-10, but it still felt like most of the players (some left, obviously) bought into what the staff was selling and trusted that they were giving them instruction that would make them better. If the current staff isn’t breaking through to the players in this way, it’s on them to come up with a different approach.

Maybe that’s more humility or a different tact in public; maybe it’s more accountability or more flexibility with scheme and personnel. It’s up to the staff to make that happen and soon, or this team will be lost, which could lead to some bigger problems once the season ends.

Grade: F