You can call what happened Saturday a choke job, self-destruction, missed opportunities galore or just unfortunate luck. The bottom line, however, is that Virginia gave the game away to a young Miami team. The Hurricanes were able to capitalize on several Cavalier mistakes and stunned the 53,308 fans in attendance – which, by the way, is an extremely disappointing turnout for a game, let alone a Homecomings game involving two teams with better than .500 records in contention for an ACC title.
If this game proved anything, it showed that your quarterback must make accurate throws and make great decisions, that you must be sound in the kicking game, and that although your defense could have played three quarters of excellent football, it’s the fourth quarter — and eventually overtime — that matters. Virginia found this out the hard way.
Quarterback Marc Verica’s stat line on the surface isn’t bad – 27 of 41 passes completed for 240 yards and a touchdown. However, there were some throws he absolutely had to connect on and just wasn’t able to do so. More frustrating though, were two boneheaded plays Verica made in the fourth quarter that doomed the Cavaliers.
The first one was on a third-and-2 from the Miami 27-yard line. In that situation, as a quarterback, you cannot — let me repeat, cannot — take a sack, and even though Verica had an opportunity to throw the ball away, he took a 12-yard sack that forced Virginia to punt instead of either going for it on fourth down or attempting a field goal. His second big mistake was on Virginia’s final drive in regulation, at the Miami 32-yard line, in field goal range: He fumbled rushing the ball and Miami recovered.
“I should have done a better job securing the ball there,” Verica said. “It’s obviously unacceptable and it definitely contributed to the loss.”
Even though Verica did have some missed opportunities, so did the special teams. Field goal kicking was a huge concern heading into the season, and those concerns reared their ugly heads in this game. Virginia kicker Yannick Reyering missed two field goals in the game from 38 and 47 yards, and there is a good chance that the Cavaliers would have won the football game if Reyering had been able to hit one of them.
“When you miss one or two field goals, I wish I could go out there a second later and hit another one,” Reyering said. “But unfortunately that’s not the case in football.”
On the second miss, there was a bad snap, which often can affect a kicker’s timing, but those misses hurt regardless, especially considering that on the two drives in which Reyering missed the field goal, Virginia started on the Miami 38-yard line and its own 47-yard line, both of which are great starting field positions. Reyering is now 3 for 8 on field goals of 30 yards or longer on the season, and that has to be concerning for Cavalier fans wondering whether he can be counted on to make a clutch field goal like Chris Gould was able to do.
Then there is the defense, which played three great quarters of football, but for whatever reason in the fourth quarter decided to allow Miami to march down the field and tie the score. The Hurricanes had the ball with 8:01 left in the game at its own 5-yard line and went on a 15-play, 95-yard drive that in the future could be seen as the turning point of Miami’s resurgence back to prominence.
Much like Virginia’s drive against North Carolina in which it was pretty much all Verica, the Hurricanes relied largely on true freshman quarterback Jacory Harris — who should be the starter from now on — to make plays. Virginia had Miami right where it wanted — third and 13 at the 2-yard line — but Harris was able to make a beautiful 13-yard throw to Sam Shields, starting a gut-wrenching drive for the Cavaliers. Harris then completed passes of 6, 10, 17, 18 and, most importantly, a 26-yard touchdown pass on third and 15 to Laron Byrd, which stunned Virginia fans and allowed Miami to tie up the score. When you allow a young team to drive 95 yards down the field in convincing fashion, that’s inexcusable, no matter how you played leading up to that. What made it worse for the Cavalier defense was that after Verica fumbled the ball with 31 seconds left, it allowed a 30-yard pass to Travis Benjamin, which helped set up a 51-yard field goal opportunity that Matt Bosher missed. In overtime, however, the defense allowed Miami to score a touchdown on — you guessed it — a third-down pass to Aldarius Johnson. Fitting of Virginia’s performance in the game, the normally dependable Cedric Peerman fumbled the ball on Virginia’s first play in overtime, Miami recovered, and Virginia was left stunned wondering what just happened.
Instead of having a happy Homecomings, Virginia now must regroup after relinquishing control of the Coastal Division. After all of the Houdini acts the Cavaliers pulled during the last two seasons, they had one pulled on them, and the players have only themselves to blame for that.
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