When Virginia junior quarterback Michael Rocco committed an intentional grounding penalty in what the referees loosely deemed the “endzone” with 4:19 remaining in Saturday’s home tilt against Miami, you could almost hear 45,870 brooding, exasperated fans thinking to themselves, “not again!” After the Cavaliers pilfered a win from Penn State Sept. 8, their three ensuing home losses to Louisiana Tech, Maryland and Wake Forest roughly followed the same script: flashes of sublimity from coach Mike London’s squad intertwined with moments of comical ineptitude, capped by a glimmer of hope in the fourth quarter which some inane, fatal, self-inflicted error ultimately extinguished. The safety and the stupefying decision to punt the ball to Duke Johnson — whose scintillating play served as a constant reminder to Cavaliers fans that anything involving the name “Duke” should not be trusted — seemingly added another woeful, redundant chapter to the story of Virginia’s deflating season.
The appeal and potency of sport, however, arise from its ability to illuminate and inspire us even when we think we know the script inside-and-out. And sure enough, as you likely know unless you live under one of the cubbies in Clemons First Floor, Rocco and company pulled a fast one on us. The much-maligned signal-caller bookended his finest day as a college quarterback with a stunning 10-yard lob to wunderkind sophomore tight end Jake McGee, who miraculously stuck a foot in the back of the endzone with six seconds remaining to clinch a memorable 41-40 Virginia victory. Considering the win preserves the Cavaliers’ still razor-thin chances of bowl qualification and unshackles them from the morbid formula that had defined their preceding home games, forgive London for his exuberant sentimentality post-game.
“I’d just like to say what a blessing that is to see something like that come to fruition at the end of the game, where there have been a couple of times we’ve come on the short end of that: muffed punt, or interception or something,” London said. “To see the players and coaches be really resilient, I’m just so elated, so happy for these guys.”
The obvious explanation for why this game turned out differently from the previous three home defeats is so simplistic I recommend you read it in your best Lou Holtz voice: Virginia is simply playing better football than they were three weeks ago. On the heels of a 33-6 victory at N.C. State as shocking as it was impressive, the Cavaliers executed one of their best conceived gameplans of the year and ripped apart a soft Miami defense like a Christmas Day present, finishing with 482 total yards of offense and — for the first time all season — zero turnovers.
“It was a big time win, two weeks in a row, guys stepped up and made plays when their names were called,” sophomore quarterback Phillip Sims said. “We expected it from ourselves all season long and I think we are starting to come together.”
That explanation, though, inadequately accounts for how a team that reacted with the poise of “The Boom Goes the Dynamite” guy’s shy cousin in highly similar situations less than a month ago thrived under pressure Saturday. It both assumes too much about an uneven overall showing Saturday and denigrates the many adequate aspects of Virginia’s play during their six-game losing streak. What truly swung the balance in the Cavaliers’ favor Saturday, in fact, was their decisiveness in the face of adversity. Ultimately, Saturday’s contest strayed from the standard, defeatist script in 2012 because the coaches and players chose not to follow it.
Ironically, the most striking example of Virginia’s resolution involves the passing game’s play, an emblem this season of the team’s crippling indecision. The old standby about having two quarterbacks meaning you have none be darned, the Rocco-Sims dueling banjos experiment has largely succeeded due to London and offensive coordinator Bill Lazor’s ability to employ the two gunslingers in ways that highlight their respective skills. Saturday, Rocco gouged Miami’s soft zones with slant routes and posts, finding a groove on two first quarter scoring drives that enabled him to make decisive, assertive plays when he had to improvise later in the game. Many of his school-record 18 straight completions and 29 overall were pitch-and-catch, timing-based completions, but many more — especially on the 16-play, 87-yard game-winning drive — were broken plays that required a moxie which Rocco’s early exploitation of the zone helped instill.
“In regards to the coverage, we knew that their safeties were playing relatively deep,” London said. “The crossers and the underneaths and the high-low combinations were there … it goes back to a guy who knows how to throw in the windows.”
Sims, although less effective than Rocco, nevertheless avoided mistakes and moved the ball by trusting in the screen game — only yielding to his deep-ball instincts on a few occasions. Overall, Virginia assailed the Hurricanes with a clear plan of attack, one that allowed its quarterbacks — criticized this year for indecision and inconsistency — to play decisive, fearless football.
“I think we had a great gameplan coming into this week and we just felt confident in executing it,” Sims said. “Both of us did a great job in the first half and throughout the game getting the ball to different guys and making plays when we had to.”
But for the quarterbacks to have finished a scorching 40-of-51 for 388 yards and four touchdowns, the wide receivers needed to bust out of their season-long malaise. Once erratic and prone to more drops than an AT&T call, this receiving corps dug deep, cleaned up its routes and thoroughly dominated a talented Miami secondary. Sophomore wide receiver Dominique Terrell’s performance, in particular, demonstrated a persistence and commitment that many others would have lacked. Beset like his fellow receivers by drops and inconsistency all year, Terrell chose to keep pushing and enjoyed a career-best nine-catch, 127 yard day as a result.
“That’s something we have been working on all year, it’s something we stress,” sophomore wide receiver Darius Jennings, who caught two touchdowns, said. “After our six-game losing streak, we rallied together and said, ‘We are going to start from scratch.’”
Meanwhile, if the passing game was mimicking a high-octane Big 12 offense in the first half, the defense surely resembled a paper-thin Big 12 defense. For much of the first three quarters, the relentless athleticism of freshman phenom Johnson — who finished with 364 all-purpose yards, nearly all of the “this guy is terrifyingly fast” variety — and the steady hand of quarterback Stephen Morris reduced the Virginia defense that stymied its last three opponents to a grasping, backpedaling mess.
“Today we had some missed tackles,” senior linebacker Steve Greer said in a massive understatement. “I’m sure we will work on it in practice.”
In the fourth quarter, nevertheless, the defenders who appeared so slow and overwhelmed for the game’s first 45 minutes singlehandedly preserved the game for Virginia with two monumental stops. After struggling to contain Miami’s incendiary skill players all day, the Cavaliers refused to let 38 offensive points discourage them. Rather, with the squad’s bowl hopes on the line, they pushed even harder.
“We made some stops when we needed to do it,” Greer said. “We have been talking about that all season, making an identity for our defense.”
Notably, both the offense and defense excelled after the safety — the play that, according to the script, was supposed to spell doom and gloom. The defense’s huge stop and the offense’s dramatic, nerve-destroying game-winning drive resulted from a single, all-important choice: the choice to keep playing even under the imminent threat of failure and ridicule. It’s not a matter of effort — the Cavaliers have never lacked for that this season — but of steadfastly resolving, after every mishap or calamity, to press on. And though this decision never guarantees victory on the field, it sets the groundwork for the trust and confidence which embodies true champions in all walks of life.
“All along we kind of knew deep down that the game was in our hands,” Jennings said. “We had to take control of our own destiny. Once we got the ball with two minutes left, we knew we were going to go down there and come out with a win.”
So far before McGee soared higher than the B-52 bomber which flew overhead during pregame for Rocco’s game winning pass, Virginia had turned the corner. Sure, the Cavaliers remain imperfect and will struggle to defeat a formidable North Carolina squad on short rest after the elation of Saturday’s win. But they have realized that, in the end, they can always choose to endure.
They can always choose to disrupt the script.
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