Veterans give UVa a boost

Should Virginia’s football team get on a real roll the next few weeks, something akin to the seven-game winning streak in 2007, the Cavaliers will be able to precisely pinpoint the moment of their turnaround.
The veterans of the team had noticed during the bye week, following the loss at Southern Mississippi, that the Virginia locker room had lost something and they wanted to restore the excitement they remembered from years past.
A new attitude
Before the Cavaliers took the field at North Carolina, things changed in the pre-game locker room and only intensified prior to UVa’s homecoming game against Indiana last Saturday. While it would be premature to credit the rowdiness that fired up the players for back-to-back wins, the new attitude certainly didn’t hurt.
“That was one of our points of concern,” said fifth-year senior Aaron Clark. “Our locker room just wasn’t what it had been. Everybody was anxious (before the first three games), but I think some of that anxiety was in a bad way.”
Clark said the captains decided to do something about it and refocus the locker room to get everyone ready to play.
“It’s a battle out there and you’ve got to go out at the highest intensity level that you can muster,” the linebacker said. “I think it was a good change.”
Turning it around
The locker room decision coincided with players attempting to change the energy of the team during practice and Coach Al Groh’s decision to take a more conservative approach to offense after the 0-2 start.
“I think everybody made the decision that enough’s enough,” Clark said. “We needed to turn it around.”
Some of it started prior to the trip to Southern Miss, some of it changed during the bye week that followed, but where it all came together was the locker room in Kenan Stadium before the Carolina game. Virginia was a two-touchdown underdog and essentially won the upset by two touchdowns before going on to stun Indiana, 47-7.
“I’m sure all of you guys would have liked to have been a fly on the wall in the locker room before [the Indiana] game,” Clark said. “It was incredible. It went from two or three of us screaming and yelling, trying to get everybody jacked up, to the entire locker room out of their chairs and jumping around. It was something to see ... something I will remember.”
Fifth-year senior linebacker Denzel Burrell, who splits time with Clark at one of the starting spots, was the first to get things started in the locker room before the Indiana game. He was bouncing all over the room, encouraging his teammates to get ready, challenging them.
They responded.
All the screaming and yelling and other antics would be meaningless if there wasn’t determination and execution behind all the noise. Virginia backed up its words with action.
“You can go out there jacked up to the moon if you want to, but if you get beat on the first couple of plays, then that energy is going to deflate pretty fast,” Clark said. “You have to go out there and make plays.”
On the fifth play of the game, UVa cornerback Ras-I Dowling did just that, stripping a Hoosiers receiver of the football with Cavalier secondary mate Rodney McLeod picking up the fumble and racing to the Indiana 38, setting up Virginia’s first touchdown. Dowling, who was named ACC defensive back of the week for his exploits, intercepted a pass midway through the second quarter to set up another Wahoo TD.
Players on both sides of the football was fired up as the Cavaliers clicked on all cylinders for the first time this season.
Quarterback Jameel Sewell was on his mark and passed for more than 300 yards, receivers stepped up and the Cavs put forth an impressive ground game highlighted by tailback Mikell Simpson’s four rushing touchdowns and a strong performance before he left the game with an injury.
It was easily the offensive line’s best performance of the season, particularly UVa’s tackles, Will Barker and Landon Bradley, who were charged with the responsibility of keeping Indiana’s star bookend defensive ends, Jammie Kirlew and Greg Middleton, off Sewell’s back. IU flips those ends from side to side, so both of the Cavaliers tackles did an admirable job in protecting their QB. In fact, the
coaching staff nominated Barker for conference offensive lineman of the week honors.
For the past two weeks, the offensive line has begun to get its act together, far from resembling the first couple of weeks when it seemed completely disjointed.
“I think it really just came to the point where as a team we weren’t going in the direction we wanted to go, and as an offensive line we take pride in the offense and getting that going,” Barker said. “The last couple of weeks we’ve come to practice with a different mindset. We want to be more physical, control the tempo, and bring the fight to them.”
Virginia’s players like an expression that Groh tosses around to describe what the Cavaliers have experienced, and Clark explained that during Monday’s media session.
Groh’s expression is: The bull doesn’t care what you did last week.
“What [Groh] is saying is that when a cowboy is riding a bull, the bull doesn’t know who’s on his back, doesn’t care. The bull doesn’t know if you rode the last 100 bulls before him. All he knows is he’s trying to throw you off. That’s kind of how we approach things now — it doesn’t matter what we did last week, we just want to win.”
Right now, the bull is a two-game winning streak heading across the Potomac to face Maryland this Saturday.
Sometimes the bull wins.