Cavaliers Look to Get Back on Track

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — It’s too early to say for sure who’ll start at quarterback for No. 20 Virginia against Duke in Durham, N.C., but head coach Tony Elliott sounded optimistic Tuesday when asked about Chandler Morris’ status.

UVA’s seven-game win streak ended Saturday night with a loss to Wake Forest at Scott Stadium. Morris, the Cavaliers’ No. 1 quarterback, took a blow to the head midway through the second quarter and didn’t return to the game.

At his weekly media availability Tuesday at the Hardie Center, Elliott said that No. 4 was at practice Monday evening. Morris “obviously didn’t participate, but looked good, says he’s feeling good,” Elliott said. “Today will be another day going through the protocol, but he’s exercising, which is a positive, and we’re hopeful that by tomorrow we’ll have him back in practice.”

Virginia, one of five ACC teams with one conference loss, has two regular-season games left. The first is Saturday at Wallace Wade Stadium, where UVA (8-2 overall, 5-1 ACC) meets Duke (5-4, 4-1) in a 3:30 p.m. contest to air on ESPN2.

Elliott said he’s also hopeful that offensive tackle Ben York, who missed the Wake game with an injury, will return to practice this week. Four other Cavaliers who are recovering from injuries—wide receiver Jayden Thomas, tailback Noah Vaughn and offensive linemen Kevin Wigenton II and David Wohlabaugh Jr.—won’t play in Durham, Elliott said, but might be available for the Nov. 29 regular-season finale against Virginia Tech at Scott Stadium.

Wohlabaugh, a transfer from Syracuse, has yet to play this season.

Redshirt sophomore Daniel Kaelin, a transfer from Nebraska, took over at quarterback when Morris left the game Saturday and finished 18-for-28 passing for 145 yards. Kaelin, who had a 54-yard run, wasn’t intercepted, but he lost two fumbles, each one after being sacked.

“I know he wants about two plays back,” Elliott said. Otherwise, though, he said he thought Kaelin handled the situation as well as he could have.

During practices, Kaelin has taken snaps with the first-team offense, tight end Sage Ennis noted Tuesday, “so I would say for the most part everybody’s gotten reps with Danny at some point in time during this year, just based on the rotations … They’ve tried to do a good job of incorporating Danny in throughout the season, making sure that he’s still good and on time, so I think he’s already got some chemistry established.”

Any time Kaelin is behind center, Ennis said, his teammates are “going to do everything we can as an offense to make sure we rally behind him and give him confidence.”

NO TIME FOR SELF-PITY: For the first time since early September, when the Wahoos reconvened on Monday, they did so after a loss. Still, an observer “wouldn’t have been able to tell a difference from the week before in terms of energy,” defensive end Daniel Rickert said. “It was back to work. It’s not like we’re down in our feelings or anything. We’ve been through this before with the NC State loss, and it’s just kind of like, get back to work and make the most of it this week.”

Elliott, who’s in his fourth season at UVA, said players and coaches have “owned” the loss and are eager to make amends.

“All of us are disappointed,” Elliott said. “Don’t like that feeling, but I felt like the guys responded the right way, and that’s really all you can do. We talk a lot about Mindset Monday … Regardless of the result on Saturday, you have to own the mistakes, correct them, try not to get too high on the positives, but figure out a way to continue to build upon them, and then you gotta get your eyes forward.”

Elliott acknowledged that “we earned the result that we got. You tip your hat to Wake Forest, they won the game, but we still feel like Virginia beat Virginia, because we were uncharacteristic in some areas. And so now we’ve got to fix it, go back to work, and everything rises and falls on leadership. And it’s important that they set the example.”

The Wahoos’ captains are Morris, Ennis, defensive Jahmeer Carter and linebacker James Jackson. Carter spoke to the team at the end of practice Monday, Ennis said, and said more effort and more energy are required at this stage of the season.

Elliott echoed that message Tuesday. Every game the Hoos have left “is a championship-level game,” Elliott said. “And so we’ve got to have that mindset. We’ve got to have that level of effort, that level of intensity. And again, not to say that the guys weren’t playing hard, because we had a lot of guys that were playing hard. It just takes a little bit more this time of year. I told them before last week’s game that everything we did up to this point doesn’t matter. In the month of November you’ve got to go to another level. You’ve got to find something deeper inside of you to push you, to motivate you.”

DAY OF REMEMBRANCE: Thursday marks the third anniversary of the mass shooting on Grounds that took the lives of Cavalier football players Lavel Davis Jr., Devin Chandler and D’Sean Perry after they returned from a class field trip. Two other UVA students—Marlee Morgan and Mike Hollins, a tailback on the football team—were wounded in the shooting and later recovered.

“Tough week for a lot of folks,” Elliott said. “We’ve still got about 20 players on the roster that were here in ’22, and so it’s gonna be a tough time for them.”

Several memorial events will be held on Grounds on Thursday, and team members have the option of attending them, Elliott said. About 100 players on the current roster were not in the program in 2022, he noted, and might not fully understand what the program experienced three years ago.

“But we’ll make sure [when the memorial events are held] that we don’t have anything football-related, so that anybody, staff or player, that wants to pay their respect will have an opportunity to go over to the chapel or go over to the memorial site or just grieve and pay their respects in their own way,” Elliott said.

PROLIFIC ATTACK: Duke leads all ACC teams in passing yards per game (312.9). Quarterback Darian Mensah, a transfer from Tulane, has completed nearly 70 percent of his throws, for 2,794 yards and 24 touchdowns, with only four interceptions. His favorite target is wide receiver Cooper Barkate, who has 50 catches for 824 yards and five touchdowns.

“It starts with the quarterback,” Elliott said, “but I think what probably doesn’t get as much attention would be the front. They don’t let many guys get to the quarterback. So he has time, he has clean pockets, he doesn’t feel a ton of pressure, and then he can make every throw … He’s very accurate on the run. He’s got great touch with his ball, so he does a lot of really, really good things that are natural that you can’t necessarily coach, but you love to have a guy that can do it.”

Duke has a strong running game as well. Nate Sheppard and Anderson Castle are averaging 6.6 and 5.5 yards per carry, respectively. “And so they’ve got a really, really good one-two punch,” Elliott said.

The Blue Devils are averaging 35.2 points per game.

PIVOTAL PLAY: The only touchdown Saturday night at Scott Stadium came on an 88-yard punt return by Wake Forest’s Carlos Hernandez late in the second quarter.

After Daniel Sparks’ punt landed in front of him, Hernandez fielded the ball on one bounce and took off running. A string of Virginia breakdowns followed.

Some Cavaliers relaxed after seeing the ball bounce, Elliott said, and that’s “on the coaches. We gotta do a better job of coaching them to play all the way through. That’s a natural tendency, when that ball hits the ground, you think that everybody’s gonna relax. But you gotta remember, as a punt-coverage team it doesn’t matter if the ball hits you.”

Another Cavalier “lost containment,” Elliott said, and then Sparks took a bad angle in trying to slow down Hernandez and allowed him to continue running down the right sideline.

If Sparks had forced Hernandez back toward the middle of the field, Elliott said, “then we might have had a chance to down the ball right there at the 50-yard line. But we took the wrong angle and we got blocked, and now it’s on the sideline and we only have one defender coming from the backside that that couldn’t down it. So there’s a lot of opportunity for us to coach better from a fundamental standpoint, from a schematic standpoint, from the situational-awareness standpoint, and then an opportunity for our coverage guys to grow from that costly lesson.”

ROAD WARRIORS: The Cavaliers are 3-1 away from Scott Stadium this season. The loss came on Sept. 6, when NC State rallied for a 35-31 win in a non-conference game at Carter-Finley Stadium.

“I think the key to playing well away from home, and really just playing well overall, is just getting into a routine, getting into a rhythm, and then going from there,” Ennis said.

“You’re not really worried about anything else, but taking it one day at a time … So Monday really through Thursday, it doesn’t change. It’s really Friday and Saturday where it kind of changes a little bit … You hone into the details that you have each day, and then you go to Friday, and the schedule’s gonna change a little bit. I might have to wake up a little bit earlier, but you can adjust. And I think what really has helped this team is not looking too far ahead. Taking it one day at a time and understanding that before I get to Friday or before I get to Saturday, I have to go through Tuesday. I think that’s really helped this team.”

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