I was disheartened to find out a few weeks ago that the Virginia football team was picked to finish fifth in the ACC Coastal Division by the members of the media who gathered in July for the ACC Media Days.\nBut with the landslide, four-game losing streak the team ended 2008 on, the large number of questions surrounding this year's team and the strength of the rest of the Coastal Division, it was unlikely that Virginia would be picked to finish much higher.\nThere are many reasons to believe the Cavaliers will suffer through a losing record this year. There also are, however, reasons to be hopeful.\nFirst, some stats. The following list consists of Virginia's average offensive yards per game during each year of coach Al Groh's eight-year tenure: 2001-345; 2002-357.1; 2003-385.9; 2004-423.4; 2005-366.2; 2006-257.2; 2007-330.4; 2008-299.8; average from 2001-2005: 375.5; average from 2006-2008: 295.8; average for all eight years: 345.6.\nNotice the big drop-off from 2006-2008? Well, I don't want to point fingers or anything, but those are the three years during which Mike Groh was the offensive coordinator. He certainly was not the entire reason that Virginia suffered through two 5-7 seasons in three years. I'm not claiming to know everything when it comes to the football team's woes and this is only a correlation, but, looking at the entire body of work of Al Groh's offenses, they were the worst three in terms of average yardage.\nThe 2007 team that eclipsed 330 yards per game and went 9-4 was probably helped by a monster defense anchored by All-American defensive end Chris Long. It could be argued that Al Groh's defenses, which have been consistently strong, were what managed to pull the 2006 and 2008 teams to respectable 5-7 records.\nNow, Mike Groh is no longer the offensive coordinator and the program brought in spread offense guru Gregg Brandon to take his place. Before arriving at Virginia, Brandon was the head coach at Bowling Green for six years. Before that, he was the offensive coordinator and assistant head coach under current Florida coach Urban Meyer for two years at the same school.\nNow, here is a list of the offensive yards per game of the offenses Brandon was involved with at Bowling Green: 2001-383.9; 2002-448.9; 2003-496.9; 2004-506.3; 2005-427.7; 2006-345.8; 2007-402.5; 2008-359.8; average for all eight years: 421.5.\nThe worst Brandon offense was still as good as Al Groh's average offense for his entire career at Virginia, and the average Virginia offense cannot even get a whiff of the best Bowling Green offense. The Cavaliers may have had offenses from 2001-2005 that were better than ones from 2006-2008, but they were by no means great. The Hoos made a great hire in Brandon and he can get the Cavalier offense back to its 2001-2005 level of production - and possibly higher.\nJust looking at the numbers, it's not too hard to believe that the Virginia offense will start looking like its old self in 2009. Al Groh has the chance to show everyone that the subpar offenses from 2006-2008 were neither products of his coaching nor oversight, but rather the product of an offensive coordinator who was just not ready to lead an entire offense.\nIt seems as though Virginia fans have grown accustomed to bad offenses and solid defenses under Al Groh, but that has not always been the case. In 2001, Al Groh's first team went 5-7 but compiled more yardage than 2007's 9-4 team. Granted, Al Groh was able to work with a couple great starting quarterbacks - Matt Schaub (2001-2003) and Marques Hagans (2004-2005) - but the offense got better and better each year, with the exception of 2005.\nAl Groh teams at Virginia have had good offenses. With a solid backfield consisting of senior running back Mikell Simpson, senior quarterback Jameel Sewell (fitting Hagans' style of a scrambling quarterback) and cornerback-turned-quarterback Vic Hall (fitting Hagans' in both style and stature) available for playing time, Brandon has some versatile tools to use. Sure, he may not be able to duplicate all the success of his Bowling Green offenses - at least not right away - but I'd be willing to bet our offense will see a major improvement this year.\nPair Brandon's offense with a stout Al Groh defense, and there's reason for optimism this season.
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