Cavs need to correct mistakes

One of the many facets of a head football coach’s responsibility is to keep everyone in the program positive and build confidence.
In past years, Virginia’s Al Groh has done a masterful job in those particular aspects, bringing back teams that suffered near-disastrous season openers only to shine at season’s end.
Groh may need to put together the best coaching job of his career to get this edition of the Cavaliers back on track, while staring down the barrel at one of the toughest schedules in the country.
Should he turn Virginia around, his supporters won’t be surprised.
If he doesn’t and the team gets off to a poor 0-3 start, there are already rumors that UVa could pull a Clemson and replace Groh with one of his assistants during the bye week.
Turning it around
The Cavaliers put forth a disappointing effort in a 26-14 home loss to FCS member William & Mary on Saturday night. Plagued by seven costly turnovers, Virginia’s receivers struggled to get open and its offensive line turned in a putrid performance, especially considering four of the five starters returned from last year’s squad.
So, Groh and his staff’s focus this week will be to try to correct the mistakes made against W&M, while bracing for the nation’s No. 17 team coming to town, Texas Christian University. Trust us when we note that the visiting Horned Frogs will show no mercy on the Cavs if they repeat the same mistakes of a few days past.
Surely the UVa coaching staff has submerged into the McCue Center and practice fields, trying to find a way to get this thing turned around. All the while, they’ll have to do it with negativity swirling all about.
Dealing with the bad
Having experience in this sort of thing, Groh always conditions his players during the off-season to deal with the criticism, the negativity. Still, there’s no real simulation for getting booed, jeered, or thrashed on talk radio and elsewhere.
“One of the things that we tell [players] before the season ever starts is a team collectively and the players individually have to be prepared to handle both the love and the hate, because both of them come during the course of the season,” Groh said during his weekly press conference on Monday.
“Every week the team is going to get one or the other,” the embattled coach said. “If you’re 12-0, the team has to be able to tune out the love. And if you’re 0-12, a team has to be able to tune out the hate. Either way affects how the players think and all the players can think about is what they need to do to do their jobs.”
Groh would have been remiss if he had not brought up past reversals when he addressed the Cavaliers on Sunday. The team had to have been bummed out when it returned to the McCue Center for meetings a day after losing and not looking so good in the process.
In 2002 and 2007, Groh managed to lead UVa back from awful starts, and nearly did it again last year before turnovers sabotaged potential home wins against Miami and Clemson.
The 2002 turnaround was quite dramatic as it dropped a home opener to Colorado State, then was hammered at Florida State only to come back and reel off six consecutive wins. That Matt Schaub-led squad won nine games, including an upset over 15th-ranked West Virginia in the Continental Tire Bowl.
It all started with a home upset over Lou Holtz’s No. 22 ranked South Carolina team.
Marc Verica, one of three Cavalier quarterbacks to see action in Saturday’s loss to the Tribe, remembers the other big season comeback in 2007.
“There’s a lot of guys on this team that have seen the highs and seen the lowest of lows,” Verica said. “That experience is something you can rely on in a situation like this.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve been in this circumstance where the first game didn’t go as we had hoped,” Verica pointed out. “We really only had each other. Everyone else was against us. This situation is no different. I would just tell
people not to forget that. One of our best seasons here was after a pretty devastating loss in Laramie when we lost 23-3 and put together a pretty unbelievable season.”
Verica said the older players on the team will use that as a source of motivation, which seems to be the logical thing to do.
He was referring to a classic “trap” game at Wyoming in 2007.
It may have been the worst performance this columnist has ever seen by a UVa team. However, the Cavaliers came back and won seven straight games, won nine for the season and nearly won the 10th, losing to high-scoring Texas Tech in the Gator Bowl.
Even the younger players on the squad can relate back to last season when most everyone gave up on Virginia after it lost three of the first four games, including a
lopsided second-half setback at Duke. The Cavs seemed dead in the water, but came back and stunned Maryland, 31-0 the following week, the start of four wins in a row, including upsets over nationally ranked North Carolina and Georgia Tech.
“Definitely similarities between those games (Duke and W&M),” Verica said. “Hopefully we can bounce back the way we did last year because that was a pretty defining moment in our season last year, how we came back and fought through that adversity.”
However, it’s easier said than done.
As quarterback Vic Hall said after the loss Saturday, all of Virginia’s mistakes in that game are correctable. Coaches have to keep the confidence up, but the players have to fight their way out of the quagmire of negativity.
“Any time you lose a game as bad as we lost to Wyoming or the other night, you’ve just got to stick together and trust each other, trust your teammates, trust your coaches, and trust yourself,” Verica said.
“Things aren’t always going to go as planned, so it’s important to have faith in the system and faith in yourself to win the confidence back.”
It’s going to take more than faith to beat TCU. Virginia must execute at a high level and eliminate the plethora of mistakes it committed against William & Mary.
Verica said the beauty of football is that there’s always a chance for redemption.
Well, if this team doesn’t redeem itself quickly, it may just cost its head coach his job.