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Fresh off an exciting 24-17 come-from-behind victory over No. 21 Georgia Tech last week, Al Groh’s Cavaliers return home against Miami Saturday for their annual Homecoming contest. Kickoff is slated for noon and the game will be televised on the Raycom/ACC network.
Virginia has won its last four games and is 5-3 overall this season and in first place in the ACC’s Coastal Division with a 3-1 conference mark. The Hurricanes have put together a three-game winning streak and stand at 5-3 overall. They trail the Cavaliers in the Coastal Division by one game.
Cavalier head coach Al Groh held his weekly press conference Tuesday. Here are some of the highlights as he talked about this weekend’s match-up.
Q: What’s been the big difference in Miami from the time you played them last year? Is it the freshmen or just another year in the system?
Groh: That transition year can be very tricky in terms of a coach having all of the players fully on board with exactly how he wants to do it. It’s always going to be different than the previous year, even the coach was part of previous staff. It’s always going to be different. Sometimes there is resistance; sometimes there’s no resistance, it’s just not a complete buy in.
Randy’s a year deeper into, this is the way things are going to be,’ and clearly with these freshmenso talentedto be able to play so much so early, they don’t know any other way. So it’s probably a case where the team belongs to him to a much, much greater percentage than a lot of times would be the case in just the second year.
I know a friend of mine … who was with a coach whose team is in the top ten this year and very good; it’s been there eight or nine years, who told him last year that last year was the first year that he felt that the team truly belonged to him. That’s not to say that its going to go seven or eight years every place, but it gives it a little insight of how long it takes to make that complete transformation.
So getting this influx of lots of young players in there who are strictly Randy Shannon’s guys and know no other way, certainly would be helpful.
Q: Would the interception that Vic Hall made at the end of last week’s Georgia Tech game been one that that he necessarily would not have been able to make last year or is that kind of indictive of the strides he’s made this season?
Groh: Most likely it’s an indication of the strides in more confidence than physically. Vic is very confident in his game, he is one of the players who prepares the very most diligently for games. And as his skills have developed and his understanding of what’s going on on the other side and how to fit every coverage on it, he’s become just that much more assertive in situations.
Q: Talk about Miami coach Randy Shannon. When you see Miami starting to win more recently, they’ve won three in a row, and they’re getting pretty hot right now. Is this an example that maybe things are coming together a little bit sooner than many people first thought?
Groh: Most likely. There are a lot of young players in there who have been playing from the start and they’re highly skilled.
We went through this in our second year and we started nine freshmen. But they were highly skilled players and they elevated the talent level on the team. That was the tradeoff for them getting some on-the-job-training: to put increased talent level on the field. It’s always talent that comes number one and in watching all of the games that would seem to be the case.
Q: The way that you marveled in what Chris Long did last year, have you done the same at times for Clint Sintim in his ability just to be consistent from play one of the season until now?
Groh: Really it shows his maturity as a player (and) how’s he come along. It was certainly this way along the way. Last year was a very good year him obviously.
But in the beginning when Clint was first here, it was just all about flashes of ability. Even when he got to playing early as a redshirt freshman it was still about flashes of ability. But he’s very, very, very zoned in on his performance. Monday is our day off, and he is in there every Monday for a couple of hours on his own watching tape of the upcoming team (because he) wants to get a head start on it. Players lift Sunday (and) work out Sunday (and) he comes in Monday for an extra work out. He has a professional’s take on how to get ready for games without being a so called professional.
Q: Have you had a better all around linebacker here than Sintim?
Groh: The way he’s playing right now he’s right up there with the best of what we’ve had. Angelo Crowell in his last year was on every aspect of his game for sure. Darryl (Blackstock) was very good at it but he left (early and) there were a few rough edges that could have been knocked off.
Q: Do you feel Sintim hanging around Chris Long as long as he did had an impact on him? Do you see a lot of Chris Long in him?
Groh: Definitely. I think just not only being around Chris but being around the whole familyHowie, Diane, Little Howie, Kyleit’s definitely had a very positive impact on him.
Q: Obviously you would like to see every player progress and get better as they go into the program, but how enjoyable is it as a coach to see Sintim kind of go from that flash to the complete football player and do you see that happen and your coaches have a part in it?
Groh: (It’s) fun to see him. I mean that’s what we have fun (with) seeing the players experience success. In his particular case because of the position he plays and the amount of years that I have spent involved with the position, I’ve had the opportunity to really have more day-to-day and nuts-and-bolts work with him on his play at the position, maybe than say (if) he was playing wide receiver or offensive tackle or something like that. We’ve spent a lot of time together during the course of his career, probably more so than is the case in many circumstances for the head coach to be able to do.
Q: I know John Phillips played quite a bit contributed quite a bit before this season, but has he maybe surpassed any expectations you might have had for him for this particular season or did you sort of expect him to step in and kind of be that next big contributing tight end?
Groh: Yes, we thought that now that he was hitting in the clean up spot, we expected that his production would be very good.
Last year our tight ends caught 93 passes and that was shared amongst three guys. Now that was a high number because the wide receiver production was down, so some of those 93 catches, fortunately for us, have gone to Maurice (Covington) and to Kevin (Ogletree) and to a few other players.
The tight end position won’t produce 93 (catches this year), but it’s probably going to be 50-55 before the year is over which is going to make him amongst the leading tight end catchers in the country. We saw him in that role and we moved into some different roles that were left empty by the departure of his predecessors. Not only has been the expansion of his game as it was before, but he’s been able to move into some other slots and get some other balls that way, too.
Q: Is that where you’ve seen his game expand the most, just sort of that versatility?
Groh: Definitely. He was really slotted into a singular role last year. Not because he couldn’t do the other things because he has showing this year that he clearly can, but because those other players had very defined positions as fit their skills, and they had been in them before he was.
We stayed with that and it is working out for both of those guys. They have proven what they can do and they are getting a good look here this year where they are. We are kind of looking down the path at that position. We like that position pretty much and so we are really trying to do a good job with developing the next line here pretty soon.
Q: Can you talk about the offensive line and how far they’ve come?
Groh: (It’s made a) big huge leap, a leap that was … as we evaluated it back on August 4th, a leap that was going to be necessary. (It was) expected but not guaranteed.
You know it’s going to be necessary. When there’s a degree of progress thats possible, the odds are it’s going to occur, whether enough of it occurs or not, but there’s no guarantee that any of it will. Fortunately really every one of the five … is playing better now than he did in the beginning and collectively as a group they’re playing much more cohesively and together.
Q: Is a team more easy or more troublesome to prepare when you’ve won four games in a row than maybe after a game like the Duke game? You kind of prepare the same all the time, but which is more challenging for a coach or maybe more worrisome?
Groh: Anytime that your team is able to prepare from a foundation of confidence is a more advantageous circumstance and confidence only comes from demonstrated performance. They’ve got some performance to reinforce them, reinforce them with their confidence that if we do the right things here this week, it’s good enough and yet I think that this team certainly understands that there’s no guarantee of anything. It has been hard enough in each one of them that we can see that the margin is very, very small and if we do anything less than what we’ve done for the previous four games it probably won’t be enough.
Q: Was there a sense at all during the period of time when you guys started 1-3 that there were even small pockets of players on the team that lacked confidence in what was being done and how they were being directed?
Groh: It was probably a more sense of players lacking confidence in themselves. I mean, there were some players who had never been in games before and no matter what any of us did for the first time, we were waiting for the first success. We are all reinforced by the first success. And when it comes, we feel a little bit better about the next time we attempt it.
I think there we a lot of players that just hadn’t had anyit wasn’t that they had experienced failureit was just that they hadn’t had any tangible success before then, they were waiting to see that. One of the things that did get us to this point was that the players were always listening to the message. And they with it and we’re appreciative of that and give them a lot of credit for it.
Q: The running back for Miami, Graig Cooper, seems to be a good fast young kid that they could build a team on. Would that be a fair assessment of him?
Groh: You’ve got it right. There’s not much more to say than that. He’s good, he’s fast and they’re building their team around him.
Q: Do you have to prepare for both quarterbacks, even though one is very limited in what he does; he runs the two-minute offense very well.
A: They’re both very athletic players. They’re very effective outside the pocket. As a result, Miami conducts the same game with both of them. (Jacory) Harris played two-and-a-half quarters in the Duke game, so we had plenty of continuous plays to see him. Everything looked, in terms of the style of play, looked to be much of the same.
Q: When people talk about Miami, they talk about their speed, Is that something you have to be prepared to adjust for or is it not that big of a difference?
A: Oh, it is a big difference. It’s what these young players have brought in, particularly at the skill positions. What they lack in polish at this early stage of their career, they’ve got raw speed. When you see these tapes and you can see some guys. There might be 18 guys that are all moving and the camera is on the same speed for them, and there’s three or four guys that clearly are moving faster than everybody else, you know those guys are fast and there’s three or four of them out there at the time now.