Hoos Take Step Back in Frustrating Loss

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — For the University of Virginia football team, it had all the makings of a memorable occasion: a much-anticpated game against a traditional rival in front of an amped-up student section on a spectacular late-summer night at Scott Stadium. And for the first two quarters, it looked like the Cavaliers might remain unbeaten.

Then came a disastrous second half. In its first game at Scott Stadium since 2012, Maryland outscored UVA 20-0 in the final two quarters to secure a 27-13 victory late Saturday night.

Virginia, which was looking to improve to 3-0 for the first time since 2019, turned the ball over four times against its former ACC rival. The Terrapins (2-1), meanwhile, had no turnovers on a night when they stretched their non-conference winning streak to 14 games.

The Terps sacked quarterback Anthony Colandrea only once, but they applied pressure for much of the game and succeeded in disrupting the Cavaliers’ offense. In the second half, Maryland totaled 250 yards on offense, to only 82 for UVA.

“I’ll know better after I watch the film … but it’s just like we couldn’t establish a rhythm,” Virginia head coach Tony Elliott said. “We missed a couple throws, and when we tried to run the ball to get ahead of the chains we weren’t clipping them off like we were in the first half.”

The Wahoos had an opportunity to gain separation early in the game, but their inefficiency in the red zone proved costly. Three times in the first 25 minutes, the Hoos drove inside the Maryland 15-yard line, but they turned those possessions into only six points, on field goals of 19 and 29 yards by Will Bettridge.

“I don’t know if that would have ultimately made the difference in the outcome of the game,” Elliott said, “but any time you’re in the red zone, you want touchdowns. You want to put a seven on the board whenever you can. In the first half, we were excited to get points, because the No. 1 objective in the red zone is to score points, but you want to have a higher touchdown percentage than you do field goals … and you need touchdowns, especially when you’re playing a good team.”

After Maryland scored a TD with 54 seconds left in the second quarter and went up 7-6, Virginia’s offense finally broke through. Colandrea opened the Cavaliers’ 71-yard touchdown drive with a nine-yard run, and he ended it with a daring 10-yard scramble. He crossed the goal line with one second left on the clock, and Bettridge’s extra point sent UVA into the break with a 13-7 lead.

Virginia’s lone TD drive also included a 13-yard run by tailback Kobe Pace and a pass from Colandrea to tight end Tyler Neville for a 39-yard gain to the Maryland 10.

The Hoos went into intermission knowing they’d get the ball first in the third quarter. They’d struggled in the first half in the red zone, “but finishing that drive late in the first half with the touchdown gave us all the confidence in the world,” Neville said.

Alas for the Cavaliers, they couldn’t sustain that momentum. They went three-and-out on their first possession of the second half, a sign of things to come.

“The least important thing in a game is the score at halftime,” Elliott said. “It didn’t matter if we were up or we were down, we’ve got to come out and play the best second half that we possibly could, and tonight we didn’t do that. And I haven’t done a good job the last two weeks of having these guys ready to go, coming out of half, in the third quarter.”

Even so, it was a seven-point game when Virginia took possession early in the fourth quarter. A week earlier, the Cavaliers’ fourth-quarter heroics had carried them to a comeback win at Wake Forest, but there was no such magic against Maryland.

Virginia’s fourth turnover gave the Terps possession at their 48-yard line. To that point, the Hoos’ defense had kept Maryland from turning turnovers into points, but not this time. A 36-yard completion moved the Terps to the UVA 16. Seven plays later, Billy Edwards Jr. scored on a quarterback sneak, and Jack Howes’ extra point made it 27-13 with 7:10 to play.

The Cavaliers’ goal always is to play complementary football, and “tonight we didn’t put it all together,” Elliott said.

Colandrea finished 21-for-37 passing for 247 yards, with two interceptions. He also lost a fumble on a third-and-goal run, a turnover that derailed UVA’s first trip into the red zone.

“We’re not gonna panic and have a knee-jerk reaction here,” Elliott said. “We’re gonna coach [Colandrea], but there’s some good things he did, too. He made a lot of plays for us as well. And so each one we’ll dissect individually and try to coach him from a fundamental standpoint, from a situation standpoint, but he’s a competitor and there’s nobody in that locker room that’s probably hurting more than him. And he wants to go out and do everything that he can to help the guys and he’s shown progress, and we’re going to be confident that he’s going to continue to progress.

“It’s a long season … He wants to be successful, he wants to lead his football team, and there’s gonna be some nights where you got to learn some tough lessons, and I’m sure he will.”

Safety Antonio Clary made a career-high 14 tackles to lead Virginia’s defense, which broke up eight passes. Also finishing with double-digit tackles were linebacker James Jackson (12) and safety Jonas Sanker (11), and cornerback Jam Jackson (no relation to James Jackson) had a career-best nine stops.

Defensive tackle Jahmeer Carter recorded Virginia’s only sack, corralling Edwards for a 10-yard loss in the third quarter. The Cavaliers’ defense made plenty of plays, but its inability to come up with a takeaway was a major storyline in a game when their offense struggled.

“We practice it every day, [how to] get the ball out,” James Jackson said. “We’ve got to be more conscious of it. We’ve got to be more aware of it. We had opportunities to pick the ball off, chances, and we’ve just got to take advantage of those. And they come. They’re rare, but when they happen, we’ve got to be able to capitalize off that. And we’ve got to be more aware of the ball, punching the ball out. That’s something we’ve got to be better at on defense.”

SIGNS OF PROGRESS: Wide receiver Chris Tyree, a non-factor in Virginia’s first two games, showed glimpses Saturday night of the explosiveness that made him so productive at Notre Dame.

In the first quarter, Tyree caught a short pass from Colandrea and raced down the left sideline for an apparent 65-yard touchdown, but a holding call against UVA wideout Malachi Fields wiped out the play.

Tyree caught five passes for 33 yards, carried once for eight yards, and returned two kickoffs for 46 yards.

“I thought he did look like what we expected out of him,” Elliott said.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN: Virginia, which defeated Wake Forest on Sept. 7 in Winston-Salem, N.C., visits Coastal Carolina next week.

In a game to air on ESPN+, the Cavaliers (2-1) meet the Chanticleers (3-0) at 2 p.m. Saturday at 20,000-seat Brooks Stadium in Conway, S.C., about 15 miles northwest of Myrtle Beach.

This will be the first meeting between these programs. Coastal was scheduled to play at Scott Stadium in 2022, but that game was canceled after the shooting on Grounds. The Hoos will host the Chanticleers in next year’s season opener.

Coastal defeated Temple 28-20 on Saturday in Philadelphia.

 SOUND BITES: The loss to Maryland was the fourth straight for UVA in a series that started in 1919. Among the postgame comments from the Virginia side:

* Elliott on his defense’s response to the offense’s turnovers: “I’m really proud of those guys for just playing the next play, not worrying about the situation. And that’s the mentality that we’re trying to establish. It doesn’t matter where the ball is. If you get an opportunity to run out there on defense, just be excited to play.”

* Elliott on Colandrea’s decision to run on a play that started with nine seconds left in the second quarter:

“So what I was thinking was, ‘OK, we got timeouts, we can stop the clock, we got nine seconds, and let’s call something that’s pretty safe, and if it’s tackled short of the end zone, we’re gonna call a timeout and come away with three points.’ And so I’m glad that he made a play, but the first thing when he came off, I said, ‘Hey, bud, you gotta understand the situation.’ You gotta be absolutely right in that situation, which he was, because if not, if we’re running around in that situation, we could run the clock out and come away with no points. So excited to see him make a play, but again, it’s another opportunity for us to teach.”

* Elliott on his team’s 3-for-15 showing on third down: “Third down is a function of getting behind the sticks on first and second. So when you’re averaging long yardage conversions in third down, it’s very, very difficult. Your percentages go way, way down.”

* UVA wideout Trell Harris on the offense’s red-zone woes: “Six is better than three, so we’ve definitely got to step that up.”

* Neville on the offense’s second-half struggles: “I had two awful drops in that last drive. I’ve got to help out a young quarterback, make his job easier. The opportunities are there; we just have to capitalize on them.”

* Neville on UVA’s defense response to the turnovers: “You never want to make those mistakes in the first place, but it’s nice to know we have a defense that can have our backs. The defense played their [tails] off, and we didn’t help them at all. We put them in bad situations.”

* James Jackson: “We’re a really close team, one of the closest groups I’ve been a part of, and I think you learn the most from times like these when you feel like you really could have taken advantage of some opportunities and you missed some opportunities. And we’re going to learn a lot from this.”

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