As a reporter for The Cavalier Daily, it's my responsibility to cover the Virginia football team, including its road games. But for a team whose offense promised some sort of divine fusion of The Beatles and U2 to traverse the ages but has instead delivered something along the lines of the Jonas Brothers' Christmas Special, I figured, why the hell should I bother to do my job?
I was wrong.
I did not travel to Hattiesburg, Miss., for the Virginia game against Southern Mississippi. Rather, I stayed in Charlottesville and watched the game at Rivals Sports Bar near Fashion Square Mall. And for those of you who didn't get a chance to watch the limitedly televised game (unless you're 40, were drinking a bucket of Bud Light and smoking roughly 9,000 packs of cigarettes in between each beer, you weren't at the bar) you missed, well, another Virginia loss.
That's the short story. Stop reading if your worldview is limited to 'Groh must go,' or, the social equivalent - 'Any girl that does not hook up with me is a skank.' Virginia lost again? Groh must go. Failed your first test? I'll be damned - Groh must go! Walked home for the second-straight morning from first-year dorms? Maybe you've become a bit more open-minded - You've gotta be kidding me! Groh has GOT to get the HELL OUTTA HERE!!!
Maybe this game does fall on coach Al Groh. Virginia did indeed relinquish a 17-point halftime lead with 8:01 remaining in the fourth quarter. Some of that can be traced back to the coach and the defense he coordinates.
But this game wasn't about the head coach - at least not from where I was sitting (in a booth with a few friends and 32 45-cent chicken wings). It's about quarterback Jameel Sewell.
After last week's 30-14* loss to TCU (asterisk denotes points put up against scrubs), Sewell said he was not going to predict a win against any particular team. I was right there with him. But he did make one guarantee.
"We're gonna win some games," Sewell said. "We're definitely gonna do that. That's no doubt about that. Nobody's gonna back down."
The Cavaliers came so close Saturday. They can thank Sewell for that.
It started with what everyone thought the spread offense was supposed to bring - a downfield passing game. In a near replica of the pass play that resulted in a 26-yard touchdown to freshman wide receiver Tim Smith in the dwindling minutes of Texas Christian's victory, Sewell reconnected with Smith on his third pass-attempt of Saturday's game for an even longer 69-yard touchdown completion down the left sideline.
A couple Virginia-forced fumbles gave Sewell two opportunities in the red-zone to put more points on the board in the first quarter. Although his shots to the end-zone were incomplete, his sheer aggressiveness early in the game was an improvement upon his first half performance against TCU, which featured a grand total of seven pass attempts.
The aggressive play-calling paid off again on Virginia's first possession of the second quarter. After converting back-to
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