The sky over Charlottesville was perfectly clear Saturday afternoon, but somehow a steady rain beat down upon Scott Stadium. Fans groaned as yellow flags inundated the field and subsequently washed away all hopes of a Virginia bowl berth.
At the end of the day, the Cavaliers committed a whopping 16 penalties, one short of the school record set in 1968. If Maryland had not declined two of them, the tally would have reached 18. It all added up to 145 yards stacked against the squad. Sometimes teams get away with such mistakes, but those yards cost Virginia dearly.
A pass interference penalty on Chase Minnifield and a roughing the passer call on Matt Conrath helped the Terps take a 7-3 lead early in the first quarter. Just minutes later, a Maryland penalty on a punt turned into a re-kick because of a block-in-the-back call.
No matter, though. With two minutes remaining in the third quarter, Robert Randolph split the uprights to give Virginia a 23-21 lead. Despite 10 penalties to their name, the Cavaliers were still on top. They may have been shooting themselves in the foot, but no bullets had pierced their head. Yet.
A face mask penalty on LaRoy Reynolds on the ensuing kickoff scooted the Maryland offense 15 yards up the field to the 44-yard line. The Terps scored on that drive. Then a holding penalty on B.J. Cabbell erased a Virginia first down and backed them up to their own seven-yard line. After a sack on third down, the Cavaliers were forced to punt from their own five-yard line, leading to Maryland starting their next drive from the Virginia 42. The Terps scored on that drive, too. Two drives later, cornerback Devin Wallace committed a pass interference penalty that brought Maryland to the Virginia 34. I'll let you guess what happened after that.
Saturday's penalty-palooza was befuddling for several reasons. After two straight weeks of 10 or more penalties, Mike London came under fire by reporters wondering what the coaching staff would do to cut back on its team's mistake-ridden style of play. He said although judgment calls like late-hits are difficult to control, simple procedural errors such as false starts could be reduced by constant teaching and re-enforcement. Coaches do all kinds of things to heighten players' football smarts in practice, he said, including blaring music to teach the offensive line the art of blocking out distractions. Add that to the fact that they played this game in the friendly confines of Scott Stadium and one has to wonder - why the flurry of false start penalties Saturday?
The high caliber of this coaching staff leads to even more head scratching. Mike London is an intelligent, composed, national-championship-winning coach, and he surrounded himself with men of similar excellence. His defensive coordinator, Jim Reid, has been in the business for 36 years. Then there are guys like Anthony Poindexter and Shawn Moore, former Cavalier greats who know exactly what it takes to succeed at Virginia. Surely these men are teaching all the right things to this football team.
Yet London claims all the blame should fall on the coaches.
"It's frustrating to have 16 penalties," London said at the post-game press conference. "That's directed on us coaches - what we teach and how we teach it, getting it across to the players about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable."
On this point, London is wrong. Coaches can yell and scream and fine-tune all they want, but in the end, it's the players who are making things happen on the field, not the coaches. The young fellas may be naive, but they know the rules. Just about every single player on that Virginia sideline has been eating, sleeping and breathing football since they could walk, and even the less experienced ones have been drilled time and time again in practice to play the game the right way.
You might say that London gets his guys too amped before games, resulting in them being more excited than focused when kickoff ensues. But what coach doesn't get his players' juices flowing before the bone-crushing, adrenaline-pumping dog fights that characterize football games? London can talk his players up all he wants but he cannot control what they do on the field. That's why the content of his self-deprecating post-game speech displays more humility than truth.
With 84 penalties this season and two games remaining, Virginia is on pace to break the school's all-time single season mark of 90, a lamentable benchmark set by Al Groh's 2001 squad. Similar to London's situation, that was Groh's first year at Virginia, and his team finished 5-7.
London's brief two-year coaching history at Richmond, however, might carry brighter implications. His team totaled 77 penalties during the 2008 season but bounced back the following season with just 56 penalties. Oddly enough, the 2008 side won the FCS national title, seemingly rendering penalties as trivial as the time of possession stat. Unlike Virginia, however, that 2008 team had enough talent to make up for its occasional carelessness.
Coaches will spend this entire week thinking up new ways to instruct the team to play smart football. But if Virginia players really want to find answers, they should look in the mirror.
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