When Bronco Mendenhall was asked about the second cornerback spot where Nick Grant won the starting job heading into last week’s game at Pitt, he made it clear that Grant’s hard work and refusal to be beaten was a big part of why.

Now, coming off his first full game as a starter, the Spotsylvania native is settling in for the long haul.

“I would say that it was more of just natural work ethic,” Grant said Monday when asked about winning that job. “I’ve been at it for—this is my fourth season here—and competition is something that comes natural. I feel like I was one play away my second year from starting, one play away in my third year from starting, so it finally just all came together. Nothing’s really changed. I’ve just always had a natural hunger for playing.”

“Nick is a relentless worker,” Mendenhall said in the preseason, “[and] just simply wouldn’t relinquish the spot. He’s the most-conditioned player, I would say, on our team, he’s the most consistent worker currently on our team, and he’s made the most plays at corner. Whoever we throw in the mix to stack against him, he just seems to outperform them over and over and over again. Then he’s running down on kicks and running down on punts and he’s not tired and he’s back competing at corner again. So, he’s just doing more better than anyone else.”

All told, earning the No. 1 jersey was a product of all that hard work and something he’s very proud of.

“My first year, I didn’t get a number until Week 9 when we played Wake Forest and that’s when I wore No. 69 at DB,” Grant said. “Ever since then, it’s just been a hungry process. I’ve always just been a hungry individual in general so after that I picked No. 20. I was No. 1 in high school, actually, and I’ve always put that in my mind. I saw J.E. get No. 1, hardest working player on our team the past couple of years. So I’m like ‘I want that to be me. I want to be known for my work.’”

The 6-foot-1, 200 pounder finished with five tackles in the 30-14 win over the Panthers and noted an 85.9 tackling grade in the win, per PFF.

“I’m going to be honest with you,” Grant admitted with a smile. “I was kind of nervous…After I got that out of my system, it was just done. I just have big confidence in who’s playing around me and I just know at all times that my boys have got my back. That kind calmed me down as the game went on.

“After the first drive, I would say [the jitters were] just gone,” he added. “Obviously, I had never started in a game before. I’m the only person on defense that hadn’t started a game before. I had high confidence out there with people who were well seasoned, like Jordan Mack, Bryce Hall, Eli (Hanback), three-year starters, four-year starters. So, I wasn’t really too worried. I feel like it only took a couple plays to get that out of my system so I feel like that was really nice.”

Grant initially was slotted at safety and his experience there has helped him now that he’s made the full-time move to corner.

“I would say that it really helps with my continued development,” he explained. “Just the understanding of the defense as a whole, because when you’re in certain spots you’re going to have to know who’s playing around you and where you fit in so you know what’s really going on around you. So, play recognition and stuff like that and where you need to be positioned to make plays, it really enhances when you know what’s around you.”

So too has spending more time around Hall, whose film room habits are bordering on legendary at this point.

“The more you hang out with people, the more you act like them. Lot of people say you are who you surround yourself with.”

His confidence in Hall and the others on D is a big reason why Grant says they weren’t rattled Saturday night when Pitt took the lead going into the half.

“I would say we went in confident,” he said. “We were trailing by one point. We just knew that most of their success came from our mistakes and we knew that in the second half, if we wanted to come away with a victory, it was going to come down to us just making plays and executing with communication and a lot of just being on the same page. So going into the second half, we just knew it had to be a high-energy, high-communication type deal.”

The general vibe is due to a team that has a great sense of who it is and what’s required.

“I would say this year’s team is probably our most mature team,” Grant said, “in the aspect of being composed when trailing. There really didn’t need to be anything said in the locker room. There wasn’t really any ‘rah rah’ speech. We knew what we needed to do. We knew what we needed to execute. We went out there in the second half and made the plays that we needed to make.”

Now the attention shifts from what it took to win in Pittsburgh to what it will take to win the home opener on Friday night, when UVa plays host to William & Mary (8 p.m., ACCN).

But for the players, that page has long been turned.

“As soon as the game’s over, we try to watch the film,” Grant explained, “whether it’s on the bus coming home, whether it’s on the flight coming home. So, Pitt was pretty much dead in my mind by Sunday morning. So I’ve already watched [W&M’s] first game. It was pretty unusual. They started the game with a trick play, so we’ve already seen that. Throughout the game, we’ve noticed a couple different things. They’ve played a couple different quarterbacks. They run a pretty unusual shotgun option sort of deal.”

“Once you watch the film and once we get with our coaches, we usually put calls to what they have,” he added. “I have an idea. They like to run the ball obviously and any team that likes to run the ball likes to take play-action shots.”

Given everything he’s experienced during his time on Grounds, Grant’s vantage point in the transformation of the program has been something unexpected.

“That’s a pretty loaded question,” Grant said with a smile when asked about that experience. “It’s honestly crazy how much the culture had changed since my first year, especially with it directly correlating with wins. We started out 2-10 my first year. It’s mind boggling to sit here and think we were really one of the worst teams in the FBS. Now that we’re like—I wouldn’t say homogeneaic in nature but we’re all pretty much on the same page as a team. There’s not really any outliers. We’re all pretty well put together. We’re brothers. We’re a band of brothers. We’re family. It just wasn’t like that my first year.”

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