Significant Challenge Awaits Hoos on Road

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — On its first visit to Conway, S.C., the University of Virginia football team expects to encounter hot, humid conditions, a capacity crowd and a formidable opponent.

Coastal Carolina, which competes in the Sun Belt Conference, hosts UVA at 2 p.m. Saturday in a game to air on ESPN+. The Chanticleers, who are 3-0 for the fourth time in five seasons, have won 23 of their past 27 games at 20,000-seat Brooks Stadium.

“You’ve got a group that’s confident,” Virginia head coach Tony Elliott said. “They’re used to winning. They’ve been to four straight bowl games.”

The Wahoos, meanwhile, haven’t finished above .500 since 2019. They won their first two games this season before losing at home last weekend to former ACC rival Maryland.

Elliott said he’s briefed his players on Coastal’s winning tradition. “Now, the question is how they’re going to respond to the information that they receive … It starts with us taking care of what we need to take care of from a preparation standpoint to go 1-0 this week.”

This will be the first time UVA and Coastal have met in football. The Chanticleers were scheduled to play at Scott Stadium in November 2022, but that game was canceled after the shooting that took the lives of three Virginia players: Lavel Davis Jr., Devin Chandler and D’Sean Perry.

Virginia will host Coastal in next year’s season opener.

M*A*S*H UNIT: Injuries have ravaged an offensive line that was expected to be much improved this season. McKale Boley, Virginia’s returning starter at left tackle, has yet to play this season, and right guard Ty Furnish left the Maryland game with an injury that’s expected to sideline him against Coastal, Elliott said Tuesday during his weekly press conference at the Hardie Center.

Two transfers who joined the program this year—Drake Metcalf (Central Florida) and Ethan Sipe (Dartmouth)—are out with season-ending injuries, as is Noah Hartsoe, a valuable reserve. Another lineman, Charlie Patterson, is out with an ankle injury. All of which has limited offensive line coach Terry Heffernan’s options.

“I’m really proud of Coach Heff for managing that,” Elliott said, “because you’re constantly trying to find the best five to put out there. … It’s been a chess match trying to figure out the moving parts. As soon as you kind of get settled in, bang, one goes down. He gets banged up … But they’ve given us a chance in all three games, and that’s all you can ask, and we’ll keep pressing them to improve, and hopefully over the next couple weeks we’ll get some guys back and have a little bit more depth to help us out.”

POWER OUTAGE: After building a 13-7 halftime lead, UVA failed to score in the final two quarters against Maryland at Scott Stadium.

“We just came out flat and we didn’t attack the fourth quarter,” quarterback Anthony Colandrea said Tuesday, “and we just have to change that … We just need more juice.”

Mistakes plagued Virginia’s offense against Maryland. UVA turned the ball over four times, and normally sure-handed players dropped passes. Colandrea said the Hoos can’t hang their heads when adversity arises.

“People are going to drop balls,” he said. “People are going to miss blocks. It’s football. Bad plays happen. We’ve just got to keep going and keep playing … All 11 have to be one. We can’t have just one player doing this, one player doing that. We have to be a group and execute as an 11.”

WORK IN PROGRESS: Through three games, Colandrea has completed 71 of 103 passes for 901 yards and five touchdowns. He’s also thrown four interceptions, some on ill-advised throws.

“He and I just sat down and talked, and really it was, ‘OK, what did you learn? What did you learn from the game?’ ” Elliott said. “What he’s learning is that there’s some plays, man, you’ve just got to let them die, and some plays you want to keep them alive. That’s where through experience he’ll figure out that balance, because if we tell him, ‘Well, don’t keep plays alive,’ then that takes away a lot of what makes him special.”

Elliott said Colandrea, a sophomore, takes responsibility for his mistakes. “There’s nobody that wanted to win that game more than AC, and there’s nobody that was more disappointed that we didn’t win the game than AC,” Elliott said. “So we’ll coach him, and we’ll balance it. But we’re not going to take away what makes him special. We’ll just use every opportunity to learn and present it to him, and hopefully he receives it, responds the right way, which I believe he will, and you’ll see him improve.”

SETTLING IN: Five players have at least eight receptions each for the Cavaliers this season: wideouts Malachi Fields (13) and Trell Harris (13), tailback Kobe Pace (nine), wideout Chris Tyree (nine) and tight end Tyler Neville (eight).

Tyree is a graduate transfer from Notre Dame, where in 49 games he totaled 3,284 all-purpose yards (1,161 rushing, 945 receiving, 119 on punt returns, 1,059 on kickoff returns). His UVA career has started slowly—Tyree has eight yards rushing, 44 yards receiving, 11 yards on one punt return, and 98 yards on four kickoff returns—but against Maryland he flashed the speed that made him such a threat for the Fighting Irish.

“The biggest thing with Chris is just getting him comfortable with the system,” Elliott said. “I think there’s a lot of flexibility, and as he continues to just grow within the offense, I think you’ll see more opportunities.”

Tyree said he’s focused on “continuing to get opportunities and taking advantage of those opportunities. I think when we started the season, I was really excited to make a play and not really focused on the most important part, which is catching the ball and getting up field.”

Elliott said he hasn’t sensed any frustration from Tyree, a graduate of Thomas Dale High School in the Richmond area.

“Chris is first and foremost one of the best human beings I’ve been around,” Elliott said. “He’s an unbelievable young man. He carries himself the right way. He’s a very unselfish guy, and the best thing about what he did is he said, ‘I’m going to focus on me and what I need to do to get better,’ and I think that’s why you’re seeing his confidence continue to grow, and the same thing on punt return. Each time he catches one, he just becomes more confident, and that’s going to be another way for him to touch the ball and impact the game.”

NEXT MAN UP: Slot receiver Suderian Harrison missed the Maryland game with a hamstring injury and probably won’t play against Coastal Carolina, Elliott said. That’s created an opportunity for Kam Courtney, a true freshman from Northern Virginia who caught two passes for 36 yards against the Terrapins.

“For a first-year, he’s a developed guy,” Elliott said of Courtney, who’s listed at 5-foot-10, 193 pounds. “He’s strong, fast, really, really football smart, has savvy, and that’s what we saw. He proved to everybody, which we thought we knew, but the lights weren’t going to be too [bright] for him. We had seen that.”

Courtney, who enrolled at UVA in January, missed a significant chunk of training camp with an injury, but “he’s starting to get his legs back underneath him,” Elliott said.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: On their 12 trips into the red zone this season, the Cavaliers have scored 10 times. Five of those scores, however, have been Will Bettridge field goals.

“The object is to score every time you’re down there,” Elliott said, “and right now we’re not hitting our percentage of touchdowns, which impacts games, because if you go down there twice and you come away with 14 points as opposed to six, it’s a little bit different. It changes the dynamics of the game potentially.

“We’re evaluating that. We’re evaluating third down, too. We’ve kind of masked it in a couple games because we’ve been so explosive and we’ve overcome it with the explosiveness, but we’ve got to do a better job [on third down].”

For the season, the Cavaliers have converted only 9 of 40 (23 percent) third-down opportunities, in large part, Elliott said, because they haven’t been productive enough on first- and second-down plays. They’ve regularly found themselves in third-and-long situations.

“We’ve identified what the factors are,” Elliott said. “Now we have to just go to work to improve those.”

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