With the loss of three top-12 teams this past weekend -- No. 6 West Virginia, No. 7 Ohio State and No. 10 Tennessee -- Virginia, previously ranked No. 12 in nation, has moved into the top 10 for the first time this season. The Cavaliers are ranked 10th nationally in the Associated Press poll and 9th in the country by the most recent ESPN/USA Today Coaches poll.
However, the Cavalier players and coaches said they don't pay attention to the opinions of sports writers and other college coaches.
"We're in the top 10 at the end of November, then that's when it means something," senior right guard Elton Brown said. "Right now, the rankings don't matter to us. We're just trying to play Florida State undefeated."
To get to the Seminoles with their record unblemished, the Cavaliers will have to go through the Clemson Tigers. The Tigers come to Charlottesville for a nationally televised game on ESPN this Thursday night. Clemson came into this season with high expectations after finishing last year on a four-game winning streak and with a No. 22 national ranking. But the Tigers have fallen to a 1-3 overall mark this season, including a 1-2 conference record. Clemson hasn't won since its first game of the season, a 37-30 triumph over Wake Forest in double overtime. Nevertheless, the Tigers are still worthy challengers.
"We're going through a stretch where the competition is going to continue to get more and more intense," Virginia coach Al Groh said. "When you get into conference play and you're fighting for the championship or you're jockeying for position in the standings to determine what your postseason opportunities might be, the team that you're playing, they got the same aspirations you do."
If Virginia football players enjoyed their bye weekend by watching college football, they saw some upsets, including Northwestern's first win over Ohio State in Evanston since 1958 and Virginia Tech's 19-13 triumph over No. 6 West Virginia to spoil the Mountaineers' quest for an undefeated season.
"Obviously it's true in many cases that occur in the first five or six weeks that in games when the score comes across the ticker and everybody thinks it's an upset based on what the preseason poll was, come December we see the team that won was really the best team in the first place and it really wasn't an upset at all," Groh said. "We haven't discussed rankings in any way to this point. I don't really see that that has really great relevance to us right now. The Clemson situation is threat enough to us."
News and Notes
Junior Kwakou Robinson will make his first start of the season versus Clemson. The 6-foot-4-inch, 327-pound defensive end from Brooklyn N.Y. will start in place of the injured Chris Canty, the team leader of solo tackles and tackles for a loss. Robinson started six games overall in 2002 including the Continental Tire Bowl because of injuries to Canty and was named to the 2002 ACC All-Freshman team by The Sporting News. Canty was lost for the season after undergoing knee surgery Thursday for an injury he suffered versus Syracuse. ... Deyon Williams is back in the starting lineup after missing the Syracuse game because of a hamstring injury he sustained during practices in the week leading up to the contest against the Orange. ... Coach Groh said Clemson will be the most athletic and fastest team Virginia has faced this season, but added that he'll probably say that two more times this year. ... Upon being told by a reporter that Marques Hagans said he wanted Virginia to become the best bootleg offense in the country, Groh said, "I think he's sending me a message." ... Groh used former NFL player and coach John Garrett's statement to describe Hagan's 54-yard on-the-run bullet throw to Heath Miller: "It's one of the greatest throws I've ever seen, anyplace," Groh recalled of Garrett's statement.
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