'Hoos Hungry to Prove Themselves in Charlotte

Jeff White’s Twitter | Belk Bowl Central | Purchase Belk Bowl Tickets | UVA’s Belk Bowl Partnership with Boys & Girls Club

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
 
CHARLOTTE, N.C.– Later this month, Virginia head coach Bronco Mendenhall and his football team will spend nearly a week in this city. His visit Thursday lasted only a couple of hours, but it gave Mendenhall an opportunity to tour Bank of America Stadium, home of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, and meet the head coach who’ll be on the opposite sideline on Dec. 29.
 
At a press conference for the Belk Bowl, which will match UVA (7-5) and South Carolina (7-5), Mendenhall and Will Muschamp sat side by side while they took questions and later posed for photographs together.
 
“My team is, I would say, wildly excited about this opportunity,” said Mendenhall, who’s in third season at Virginia. “They view our matchup against South Carolina as one that is an occasion to rise to.”
 
Not since the 2011 Chick-fil-A Bowl, in which the Cavaliers lost to Auburn, have they faced an opponent from the Southeastern Conference.
 
“I’m really excited about the matchup,” Mendenhall said. “We know about the SEC brand. I think all of us do [in] college football.”
 
This has been a season of triumph and heartbreak for UVA. The Cavaliers, who lost by four points at Indiana in September, ended the regular season with back-to-back overtime defeats, the first at Georgia Tech and the second at Virginia Tech. 
 
The Wahoos could “possibly have been a nine- or 10-win team,” Muschamp said.
 
His team’s record could be significantly better, too. South Carolina lost by three points to Texas A&M and by four to Florida.
 
“I think the two programs have had similar seasons [with] so many close games,” Mendenhall said. “I think you’ll find two really hungry football teams that think this game is meaningful, important and impactful, and for both teams eight looks a lot better than seven.”
 
This is Muschamp’s third season with the Gamecocks, who finished 6-7 in 2016 and 9-4 last year. 
 
Starting in 2002, the Cavaliers won at least eight games in three straight seasons. (Virginia closed the 2002 and ’03 seasons with victories at the Continental Tire Bowl in Charlotte). Since then, however, the ‘Hoos have reached the eight-win mark only twice: in 2007, when they finished 9-4, and in 2011, when they went 8-5.
 
In December 2015, Mendenhall took over a program that had posted four straight losing seasons. There was no immediate turnaround. Virginia finished 2-10 in 2016 before improving to 6-7 last season.
 
The ‘Hoos have taken another step forward this season, and the Belk Bowl represents an opportunity to build more momentum for 2019, when a strong core of proven talent, including quarterback Bryce Perkins, will be back.
 
His players, Mendenhall said, are “hungry, and they have a really clear idea what they want for UVA football. They want to win the conference. They want to win the Coastal [Division], and they want to be a national contender, and they’re learning what the work looks like to pull that off. And they like that. And so not only are they meeting [the coaches’] expectations, they actually want higher expectations now, which is a difference.”
 
Tuesday morning at the McCue Center, several UVA players said the hungrier team is likely to prevail in the Belk Bowl, echoing a point Mendenhall has made to them since the end of the regular season.
 
“I think it’s going to come down to who wants it more and our preparation and how hard we work through four quarters,” Perkins said.
 
In last year’s Military Bowl, that team was Navy. On a frigid afternoon in Annapolis, Md., Virginia’s Joe Reed ran the opening kickoff back 98 yards for a touchdowns, but Navy went on to win 49-7.
 
From that bowl experience, UVA’s All-America cornerback, Bryce Hall, said Tuesday, “I learned that the hungriest team and the team that has the most to prove is going to come out on top.”
 
Navy, coming off a loss to arch-rival Army, was determined to redeem itself in the Military Bowl. The Cavaliers were more content simply to have earned a bowl invitation, and it showed.
 
Mendenhall said Thursday that, in preparing for the Military Bowl, he underestimated his team’s depth and “the amount of work that was needed with our roster at that point.” Also, he said, “I underestimated simply the newness and the novelty of going to postseason for this team, and what that would do and how it would affect their mindset.
 
“This feels a lot more like business as usual. There’s more maturity. There’s a higher level of expectation. They already have some point of reference as to what postseason looks like.”
 
The loss to Navy, Hall said, “showed us exactly where we were and what we needed to improve on moving forward to get to where we want to go. Essentially it humbled us, it exposed what we were weak at, and I think it helped us propel into [2018].”
 
Injuries have ravaged South Carolina’s defense this season, but its offense comes into the Belk Bowl averaging 440.2 yards per game. Quarterback Jake Bentley has passed for 2,953 yards and 27 touchdowns this season. He threw for 510 yards and five TDs in South Carolina’s 56-35 loss to second-ranked Clemson on Nov. 24.
 
“They go at NASCAR tempo,” Mendenhall said of the Gamecocks. “They go fast, and if you don’t adjust well, they’re talented, and the ball can get behind you or around you really fast. That’s what happened to Clemson. They struggled with a few adjustments and as a result gave up a lot of points.”
 
South Carolina’s top wide receiver, Deebo Samuel, has decided to skip the Belk Bowl, worried that an injury might hurt his NFL stock. Samuel, who this week was named a first-team All-American as an all-purpose player, has 11 touchdown catches this season and also excels on kickoff returns. Even without Samuel, though, the Gamecocks are formidable on offense.
 
“So it’s really going to test us as a secondary, and we look forward to the challenges,” said Hall, a junior.  “Like Coach says, the hungriest team is going to come out on top, so we’re just hungry and preparing ourselves for that matchup, because it’s going to be a good one.”
 
Virginia, of course, has an exceptional quarterback, too. Perkins, a junior who enrolled at UVA in January, received the Dudley Award, given annually to the state’s top college player, at a banquet Wednesday night in Richmond.
 
Perkins suffered an ankle injury in the first half of Virginia’s game against Georgia Tech. He returned after missing a series but was clearly less than 100 percent. Perkins wasn’t full strength against Virginia Tech, either, though he put up impressive numbers.
 
“It was frustrating, but that comes with the game,” Perkins said Tuesday. “It was just a matter of pushing through. I think I did a pretty good job of still being mobile. I still made some big plays with my feet.”
 
Perkins said he’s benefited from the break that followed Virginia’s Nov. 23 regular-season finale. He’s considerably healthier now than he was in Blacksburg, and that’s good news for the Cavaliers.
 
“You see how dynamic of an athlete he is,” senior running back Jordan Ellis said. “When he’s 100 percent, he’s kind of unstoppable, especially running the ball, and that opens up everything in our offense.”
 
Hall said: “He’s a dynamic athlete. He’s a good leader, he’s a good person, and his energy, the way he plays, is just infectious to the whole team.”