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Sorting out expectations for Virginia Football in 2015

With kickoff in Pasadena just two weeks out, let’s take some time to talk about expectations for the Virginia football team’s 2015 campaign. In four months time, which win-loss records will leave us satisfied with the season, and which will leave us ranting on Twitter about the hole into which the Virginia Athletics Department has dug our proud fanbase?

Barring outstanding morale issues, the athletes and coaches on every team in every sport expect to compete for championships, and comments made to various publications throughout training camp suggest the same for the 2015 iteration of the Cavaliers. That’s not very interesting. But what about the rest of us — the fans, the University and college football experts arounds the nation? What do we expect for this year?

Expectation is an interesting word in that it has somewhat contradictory meanings: both what one thinks will happen and what one thinks ought to happen. I’ll discuss both, mostly in terms of wins and losses.

What are the experts are saying?

Earlier this week, I stopped by the University bookstore to pick up a couple of the annual college football preview sports magazines to see what the people who devote their lives to this stuff are saying about the team. Sportswriters, with a few exceptions, are firmly in the “what one thinks will happen” camp for posting expectations, and people who claim to, “know what they’re talking about” have set the bar pretty darn low for the Cavaliers.

Sports Illustrated pegs Virginia to finish 2-10 (1-7 in the ACC) — good for dead last in the Coastal. ESPN likewise projects Virginia will finish last in the Coastal, with its Football Power Index (FPI) giving the team just a 2.4 percent chance of winning the division (Virginia Tech leads the Coastal with a 28.9 percent chance of heading to Charlotte for the conference championship game). On a brighter side, Virginia ranks 55th in FPI, ahead of Duke, Syracuse, Wake Forest and Boston College, and FPI projects 4.7 total wins for the season.

Ranking 55 out of 128 FBS teams isn’t that bad, so how do the experts justify these dismal win-loss predictions? Namely, the Cavaliers have one of the toughest schedules in college football. Simply going off 2014’s combined win-loss of opponents, Virginia has the 12th toughest schedule in the FBS for 2015, and 6th toughest excluding SEC teams.

Looking at F/+ rankings — a respected all-encompassing rating system developed by the website Football Outsiders — SB Nation’s Bill Connelly writes, “of course, a breakthrough would be a lot easier without a schedule that features home games against teams projected 16th, 19th, 26th and 27th, and road trips to teams projected seventh, 28th, 32nd, 38th and 44th.” The realist in me agrees wholeheartedly.

Saving Mike London’s job

Maybe the most relevant set of expectations are those for coach Mike London, who could very easily lose his job at the end of the season. But what exactly athletic director Craig Littlepage is looking for out of his sixth-year coach isn’t clear — I would have suspected three straight losing campaigns and zero career wins against Virginia Tech would have been enough to oust him last December.

Other writers agree, with London featured prominently in just about every national “hot seat” article out there. CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd pegs London as one of just two FBS coaches actually on the hot seat, and in one of the most widely shared pieces from the summer, Grantland’s Matt Borcas writes: “[London’s] seat should be the hottest in the country, so perhaps he’s physically resistant to heat? How else to explain the utterly baffling phenomenon that is his continued employment by the Commonwealth of Virginia?”

SB Nation’s Pete Volk says to keep his job, London needs six wins or to at least beat Virginia Tech. This will put Littlepage in a curious situation, considering the Cavaliers are almost universally believed to be a sub-.500 team — especially given their schedule — and Tech is considered, by most, to be the Coastal Division favorites and, by some, to be ACC favorites.

While writers’ evaluations of Mike London and Craig Littlepage’s evaluation of Mike London are clearly very different things, six wins seems about where the Cavaliers will need to get for their head coach to keep his job. In the statement Littlepage issued last November announcing London’s return for 2015, he made clear that progress was something he valued highly. “It's important for each of our sports programs to continue to show progress and follow a plan to compete for conference championships and in postseason competition to support the department's goals,” Littlepage said in that statement.

After two straight years of regression in 2012 and 2013, London did indeed up his win total from two games to five games last year, which, along with decent recruiting and a convincing long-term plan, was a big part of what Littlepage found promising. Given the harrowing schedule ahead of him, another five-win season could certainly be considered progress. However, bringing a head football coach back after four straight losing campaigns would literally be unprecedented at U.Va. The only way I could possibly see London coming back without a trip to a bowl would be, as Volk wrote, a win against Tech — the first in 12 years.

But what about the fans?

Unless Virginia can notch six wins, the Class of 2016 will have never witnessed the Cavaliers achieve bowl eligibility. Since Virginia went to its first bowl in 1984, that’s never once happened to a graduating class. Four years is also a long time to wait in the perspective of Athletics Foundation donors and season ticket holders. We students and fans need to know that these last few years of “progress” have been worth something, and I’m not sure that even a trip to the Beef ‘O’Brady’s Bowl will make everything better.

As a life-long Virginia football fan and now in my last year at school here, I think it’s fully reasonable to expect seven or eight wins. I expect any college program to experience some lows, but that comes with the expectations of some highs every now and then as well. So while five or six wins may exceed expectations for sportswriters, the gambling public and Craig Littlepage, it certainly won’t for me.

Matt Comey is a weekly Sports Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at m.comey@cavalierdaily.com. Follow him on Twitter @matthewcomey.

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