The final week of spring ball has arrived and for the Cavaliers that means putting the finishing touches on a segment of time that has been critical the first three years under Bronco Mendenhall.

UVa will return its starting quarterback, easily the best in the Coastal Division, while also bringing back a number of major contributors from last year’s 8-4 team and one that won the Belk Bowl 28-0. That being said, there are a number of young kids seeing a lot of reps this spring, setting the table for solid succession down the road.

Given the injury situation facing Virginia this spring and the reality therein, there aren’t many hard and fast takeaways we can glean from what we’ve seen thus far in 2019. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some.

If you watched Monday morning’s practice and expected UVa’s wide receiving corps this fall to be solely those participating in front of you, you’d probably come away somewhat concerned. With Joe Reed and Ugo Obasi out this spring and now with Billy Kemp also dinged up, the pickings are somewhat slim. But several receivers are set to join the program this summer, meaning the group is going to look very different come fall camp when they arrive plus when their more experienced teammates return. Mendenhall also said Monday that he’s expecting the Wahoos to add help at that position via the grad transfer route. When those two names get announced, the wide receiver room will look even more favorable. All told, the Cavaliers have plenty of horses at wideout—Hasise Dubois is going to be all over the place—and they will look dramatically different come camp. But for now, that’s not the case and that was evident at times yesterday.

UVa returns a lot of pieces on D and that includes three of the team’s four starting linebackers. Matt Gahm seems like the most likely choice to replace Chris Peace now that he’s exhausted his eligibility and Gahm has looked good this spring. But with Charles Snowden having suffered a mild concussion last week, he wasn’t available on Monday and Taylor seemed to make the most of the opportunity. In fact, per Mendenhall, he’s been doing that all year. He was one of the standouts in winter conditioning, moving up not just one level in the team’s performance hierarchy but jumping an entire rung on the ladder. That is a first for the program, Mendenhall explained, and it speaks to how Taylor is coming into his own physically. But he’s also showing on the field that he’s ready for a bigger load and that brought a lot of energy out of Mendenhall when discussing the Silver Spring (MD) native. With Jordan Mack, Robert Snyder, and Zane Zandier inside and Snowden, Gahm, Elliott Brown, T.C. Harrison, and Taylor outside, there’s a lot to like about this group of backers and what they’ll look like come fall.

Look, I don’t want to make the case that this spring is meaningless or something. That’s a hot take I’m not going to give you. But watching so many backups getting so many reps this spring, it’s evident that the football team UVa puts on the field at Pitt to open the season will look and feel drastically different. And that’s a hard reality to lose sight of. As such, this is the most inconsequential spring that I’ve covered in terms of immediate impact and yet it’s important in ways that might not necessarily seem apparent today. It’s critical that these backups get so many reps and also too that the coaches get so much film on them going into summer workouts. But in terms of the key players, there are more than a dozen that aren’t out there, which is more than half of the potential starters from scrimmage. The long and short of it is that UVa’s 2019 season will be dictated by the play of a number of guys who aren’t available this spring but its long-term impact will be felt far after.

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