Which Cavs will show up?

Film director Victor Fleming would be proud of the looming showdown.

After haplessly strolling through back-to-back road defeats, Virginia’s football team showcased its best Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde impression on Saturday in a 31-point win against Maryland.

Which brand of Cavalier football should be expected on Saturday at noon against East Carolina, a program riding a two-game losing streak?

Your guess is likely as good as Al Groh’s.

“The only way that [Maryland-type performance] can happen is that collectively we’re the same guys and we’re the same team this week throughout the course of the week that we were last week,” Virginia’s football coach said. “That will get us back to that point and probably that point won’t be good enough to continue to beat some of the teams that we’re playing. So if we want to do better than we did last week, we are going to have to do better.

“If we want more, we are going to have to do more to get there. But we did more than we did the week before, so we got more back. I would say the competition will continue to step up, so not only does our team, in and of ourselves have to progress, we also have to be ready to match the increased level of competition as the teams get better and better.”

Virginia (2-3, 1-1 ACC) did, in fact, enter the Maryland game with the nation’s worst scoring offense and was ranked near the bottom in numerous other categories.

Yet after allowing the Terrapins to register more offensive yardage than what was managed by Duke, which beat UVa 31-3, the Cavaliers emerged with their first league win in front of a sparse, yet energetic crowd.

“It would be a little rash to say that we’re going to win them all 31-0, but we certainly did see on a play-to-play basis our ability to execute different schemes, whether it’s on offense or defense, that if we do it the right way we can execute the scheme and get good results with it,” Groh said. “One of the words that you hear coaches use all the time is, ‘consistency.’

“Once you find out that a player is a consistent performer, then you find out that your team is a consistent performer. Then you have a better sense of what you’re going to get every week.”

East Carolina (3-2, 1-1 Conference USA) has been as mysterious of late as the Cavaliers. The Pirates upended Virginia Tech and West Virginia, a pair of programs that played in BCS bowl games last year, and Tulane to open the season before falling to N.C. State and Houston.

“We take our reading that at this stage that the two highly most rated teams that they played are Virginia Tech and West Virginia,” Groh said. “Those are the teams that they beat and played their very best against. “So, we take our reading off of their performance against those two best teams as to what East Carolina is capable of, so we can see what the benchmark is for their performance and clearly we have to aim at that, and above that benchmark, to be competitive in the game.”

Inside the play

Virginia quarterback Marc Verica likes to think of himself as a mobile quarterback.

No threat to join the Virginia track & field team, the redshirt sophomore danced past a Maryland defensive end and sprinted to the end zone for the Cavaliers’ first rushing touchdown in two games.

“It was a read play where during the exchange between me and Cedric, I’m reading the defensive end,” Verica explained. “We leave him unblocked. If he rushes up the field, my job is to pull it and run with it and if he stays wide, I can give it to Cedric and there will be a good running lane there.

“He kind of played it in between, but I thought I could beat him so I pulled the ball and I think I made a move on him there and kind of froze him and then I just outraced the next guy to the end zone, so that was exciting.”