Experienced Offensive Line Looking to Lead

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In each of its final five football games last season, Virginia started the same five offensive linemen: McKale Boley at left tackle, Noah Josey at left guard, Brian Stevens at center, Ty Furnish at right guard, and Blake Steen at right tackle.

All five came out of the season with eligibility remaining, giving offensive line coach Terry Heffernan a solid foundation on which to build. Of that group, though, only Steen was healthy enough to take part in spring practice this year. Boley, Josey, Stevens and Furnish were recovering from surgeries.

That made the Cavaliers’ first practice of training camp noteworthy Wednesday. For the first time since the 2023 finale, Stevens, Boley, Furnish and Josey were back on the field, alongside Steen. In the spring, while Steen piled up reps on a makeshift line, the other four trained away from the rest of the team, along with Jimmy Christ, another lineman who was recovering from surgery. Christ is healthy again, too.

“We’ve been through the wringer, being out together,” Stevens said Wednesday evening outside the new Hardie Center. “I think that just builds the bond between us.”

Virginia opened training camp, its third under head coach Tony Elliott, with close to a full complement of offensive linemen. Noah Hartsoe and Drake Metcalf are out with injuries, but Heffernan has no shortage of options, with Boley, Steen, Christ, Houston Curry, Jack Witmer, Ben York and Dane Wieklinski at tackle, and Josey, Stevens, Furnish, Ugonna Nnanna, Grant Ellinger, Ethan Sipe and Cole Surber at the inside spots.

Nnanna started six games last season—the first five at right tackle—but he’ll be a full-time guard this year, Heffernan said. Charlie Patterson will swing between guard and tackle.

For Steen’s counterparts on the first-team line, the first practice featured some rough moments. “We’re trying to acclimate back in,” Stevens said. “It takes a few days. We haven’t played football in six months, and it was a little rough at the start. But it’s nice when you’ve got that trust automatically. You know the guys next to you know what they’re doing. That brings a comfort level too.”

After practice, Elliott said he was pleased not only to see all five returning starters back on the line, “but to have more than one unit, where you feel like you can go out and practice and it’s competitive.”

It’s important, Elliott added, to have linemen who “can go out day in and day out and push each other to compete, because we’re going to need more than just five to be able to get to where we want to go.”

When camp opened last year, the offensive line was probably the team’s biggest question mark. Heffernan, who’d coached at Stanford in 2021 and ’22, had been in Charlottesville for less than eight months, and UVA had only one returning starter up front: Furnish. Stevens (Dayton), Nnanna (Houston) and Christ (Penn State) were transfers, and Stevens and Christ had not been on Grounds for spring practice.

“So I feel significantly better and very different from where I did a year ago,” Heffernan said. “I think part of last year was trying to convince yourself, ‘Hey, we’re going to be able to make this thing work,’ as opposed to saying, ‘OK, I feel good about at least where we’re going to start as a group.’ I feel good about knowing these guys a lot better and them knowing me. It’s a very, very different situation this year to last.”

How the Wahoos fare this fall will hinge in no small part on how the offensive line performs.

“It’s mission critical, because you win in the trenches,” Elliott said. “I firmly believe that. Regardless of all the great skill players that I was fortunate to be around in my career, [it’s hard to win] if you don’t have those guys up front. And really, I think the next step is the cohesion. Can those five guys, whoever it is, cohesively play together? Because when you go back and you evaluate in the offseason, a lot of times it’s not necessarily what your opponent did, it’s what you didn’t do. And that’s that cohesion.”

Virginia has capable quarterbacks in Tony Muskett and Anthony Colandrea, and the coaching staff is high on the team’s wide receiver, tight end and tailback groups. Still, those skill players won’t produce at a high level “if the guys up front don’t give them a chance to compete,” Elliott said.

“I’m not trying to put all the pressure on them, but for us to get to where we want to go, the offensive line and the defensive line, in my opinion, have to lead the way, because that’s where the game is really won. If you can win in the trenches, then you have an opportunity on the perimeter to do the things that the skilled guys can do. Without [the linemen], the skilled guys, they look good and they’ve got a bunch of potential and talent, but they can’t perform, because the big guys up front don’t give them a chance.”

The offensive line struggled in UVA’s first two games last season—losses to Tennessee and James Madison—after which Heffernan shifted Stevens from right guard to center and Furnish from center to right guard. That stabilized the line, whose performance steadily improved as the season went on.

That progress stopped abruptly in the Nov. 25 regular-season finale. In a 55-17 loss to Virginia Tech at Scott Stadium, UVA gave up six sacks and rushed for only 41 yards.

It didn’t help that the offensive line limped into the Hoos’ annual rivalry game, with four of the starters playing through injuries that would require offseason surgery. But as painful as it might be for the O-line to reflect on, “it’s a game that you bring up and say, ‘Hey, the last time we took the field, that was what we produced,’ ” Heffernan said.

“Every guy is embarrassed by that. Every guy. But I think there’s a balance between beating guys over the head with something they’re ashamed of and motivating them. So that’s a motivational tool. We did some good things [last season], and we could put a [film] cutup together where we look like a really, really good group, and then you can put together a cutup where we were terrible. So, who do we want to be, and how do we get to be there more consistently, game in and game out?”

The season finale was “real disappointing for us,” Stevens said, “especially being the last game of the year, against a rival. Virginia Tech’s a good team. They played better than us that day. I think moving forward, we’ve got a lot of games on the schedule we want back.”

Not only is the O-line more experienced this season, it also has a new home. Until the Hardie Center opened, the various position groups on the team would spread out inside the George Welsh Indoor Practice Facility and sit on folding chairs in meetings with their coaches. Now each position group has its own meeting room in the Hardie Center.

“I think it’s something that we’ve been excited about and anticipating for so long, it’s almost overwhelming to be in there now,” Heffernan said, “and what you’ve seen with our players is they don’t want to leave. They’re in there lifting, they’re in there getting extra mobility [training], but they’re also playing pool, they’re playing video games, they’re hanging out, they’re eating together in the shared space where they can eat.

“For us, the greatest part is that there’s an O-line room. That’s been our O-line room for most of these guys’ career”—Heffernan pointed to a corner of the indoor facility—”and their creature comfort was getting one of the [sturdy] folding chairs as opposed to one of the shaky ones. Now they’ve got a space to go, and they can shut the door and they can be themselves as an offensive line. It’s so exciting, and I think the guys are just very, very appreciative of having those things. It’s the first time these guys have really had a place that they can consider their home.”

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