The film review is going to be fun this week, and I think in part that is because Coach Pry finally sent a message about accountability. I will share an example. Harrison St. Germain got a lot... a lot of playing time in spots where Dae'quan Wright played last week. Germain and Gosnell both struggled (luckily Tuten showed the world why he is such a good talent with some really sharp cuts and effort), but Wright, when he got reps, blocked his ass off. I have already seen two really good effort plays from him blocking and I am just getting into the second quarter. Other guys who I have been suspicious of their effort (Kendricks, Pollard) played well. And the big issue that sustained (OL play), Bowen worked around it with scheme and, for as bad as they may be, the OL worked hard to stay engaged even if there were plays where they looked rotten.
Pry and Accountability
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Here's hoping that Pry is establishing a culture that will pay dividends in the long run, even if it's an ugly slog right now.
Exactly this. The optimistic expectation this year was 7-5 with a dreadful schedule. Most had us as 5-7 or 6-6. I don't give a damn about maximizing wins in a year like this. I want to do what is necessary to maximize wins down the road. That means showing recruits that we are making progress and establishing the culture.
It was a good win. They looked like a team, linebackers were notably flying to the ball . tuten is a beast, he will play in the NFL with that leg drive, many times getting four extra yards sticking his head down and plowing. Pry looked like a coach engaged in the moment, would still love for him to take points instead of going full riverboat on 4th down, but hey it payed off this week. Great team effort, good teams respond to coaching and criticism
It was great seeing a head coach with some fire on the sidelines.
I used to love watching Beamer get pissed off and throw his hat on the ground when I was a kid. You knew shit was getting serious when the hat came off lol
Beamer would get mad every now and then, but the most entertaining was Bud.
For as long as I live, I will never forget him fracturing that white board into pieces down the stretch of the 2001 BC game after the defense gave up a few garbage time TDs. Iconic.
My favorite angry Bud moment - if you rewatch the 2004 GT game, when Josh Morgan scores the long go-ahead TD, Vincent Fuller ran down to greet him in the end zone and risked getting a 15 yarder.
You can hear Bud scream clear as day "Goddammit Vincent Fuller get your fucking ass out of the end zone!!"
Damn, you know he's mad if he's calling you by your full name.
Use that last name alone and half the sidelines/stadium thinks you're talking to them.
Mine was at a pre-UVA press conference "What is it 10 in a row now"? lolololol. Bud hates UVA as much as I do, and that's why he is the GOAT.
Was really cool when my friend and I ere at the Purdue game and were outside the gates when the team was heading to the buses; Bud sa us, waved, and remembered seeing us after other away games earlier. Genuinely nice guy who I'm certain would be awesome to hang out with in an informal setting like a cookout.
This was the first game in a while where everyone in the bar was commenting on the playcalling and scheme in that you could tell we were using what Pitt was doing against them. They started the game selling out to stop the run so we popped them with a play action bomb over the top. Later, we caught them in the same tendency so we ran a clear out route to our best receiver 10 yards downfield and he housed it untouched.
That legitimately was a great game by our coaches. This is the progress we've been desperate to see.
Watched with my BIL, and goes 'Damn, who's your OC, he's good' and I just laughed
This is the first time in the Pry era I'd say we looked well coached.
This is the first time in
the Pry eraalmost 10 years I'd say we looked well coached.FIFY
2016 was fun......
Except for the massive number of penalties, I agree.
Yes- still way too many there. Have to clean that up. No excuse
Felt like the receivers blocked well last night too, which was necessary with trying to get the backs outside the tackle box a lot
Receiver blocking has been pretty good all year. The TE blocking has been a much bigger issue.
I hammered Wright last week. The effort blocking was there last night. He isn't Mark Bavaro, but he doesn't have to be. Get your body into position and stick with it. Last night he did, and it helped contribute to several important plays.
I half wonder if Pry and the coaches accidentally oversold how much more important ACC games are and guys just didn't feel the motivation for Marshall.
I don't think it's that. I think Drones kind of needed some coaching. In the Marshall game, there was one 4th and 3 where he passed the ball to a guy who was triple covered, when he could have easily run for the first down. I think this game he definitely ran the ball if that's what was given, and it worked a lot better. I feel like if we played Marshall again now, we win that game.
The ol Frank Beamer "preseason" sell.
they'll get after ya!
Marshall is a better team. It is what it is at this point. They are better. we need to keep improving
Standing in Lane, it was easy to see this was our best called offensive game. Drones needs some refinement, especially in the passing game, but he definitely makes this offense go so much better. I do have concerns about running him 20 times a game, though. The next step is to get a little more production out of the RBs and slot receivers to keep Drones from getting beat up. I also love them working in lots of different receivers. Need that depth to keep guys fresh. Right side of the O line is a mess still. I thought Meadows held his own, though, which was great to see.
Tuten did his part. We need other RBs to stand up and help out.
Thomas had a decent game too imo. There's only so much an rb can do with this line.
Thomas seems to get better the more touches he gets (was like that in 2021 too). He was starting to grind that last drive but we kept having penalties on I think 2 big runs he had
Part of Drones running I think is situational and we don't want to limit it. If the defense is covering the receivers down field and leave an opening for him to run 20 times, that's the right thing to do. Since you were in Lane and didn't get the benefit of the announcers mentioning he must have been told what to do based on what the end was doing - run in certain situations - pass in others. I don't know how many designed runs there were for him, but quite a few were because the defense gave it to him.
Drones has to be a consistent running threat so teams have to account for him. Just the threat of his running opens up opportunities for both him and the TB.
Also we need to institute a Philadelphia Eagles/style QB power attack for goal line situations. It cannot be stopped.
Except for all the times other teams try it and get stopped?
unfortunately, we do not remotely have the OL for that
I suppose that is one nice thing about Wells getting healthier is that we can afford to let Drones run more.
Tuten had himself a damn day. I finally saw something that I liked out of Strong. He had two really good pass breakups that I can remember at the moment. Fun game.
It looks like he got some accountability from his coaches too. It looked like we actually schemed correctly tonight.
LB fits were definitively better and sliding Delane over to Safety with Stroman back really settled the defense down. Having Canteen able to step in at CB made that possible. Braylon Johnson got a little run, but Canteen played most of the snaps at CB and played pretty solid. Payne definitely got more snaps and remained productive. That would be a big development for the middle of he can give us quality reps.
It's amazing how much better you can feel about the team in a week. In the other hand, I have a bad feeling we are going to really regret dropping all three of those early losses later in the season.
Meh, whatever happens is fine. Would it be nice to get to a bowl this year? Yea, it would be.
But, if the team shows growth this year, does it really matter if we win 4/5 games vs 6 games? Does winning the extra 1-2 games impact how good this team will be in '24 or '25? I'd argue not.
The final record won't matter IMO, but the extra practices would sure be nice for this group.
Yea, that's fair. Didn't think of that.
Mission should be to get better every week. Who cares about the independence bowl? If you get better each week, that will take care of itself
Payne looked like what I feel all of us expected him to look like when he transferred in. It'll be interesting to see if he starts to get the largest share of DT snaps.
So, film review is off to Joe for editing. Didn't have the bandwidth to dive deep on every good performance, but I took care to highlight Wright's efforts. Tisdale, Pollard, and Kendrick's picked things up on defense, and I liked how Cole Nelson played even when he wasn't completely unblocked on stunts. Also, I thought Braylon Johnson looked assertive even though he didn't get a ton of reps.
Offensively, Tuten of course was great. Receivers blocked well, although B. Gosnell and Saint Germain struggled some. OL was a mixed bag. Schick and Clements had some absolutely horrific moments, but Schick also had a couple of nice blocks. Still, it would be great if they could find a higher upside option at that spot. Kaden Moore played much better, especially in the first half, moving his feet more against a pair of good DTs. As the game wore on, some bad habits re-immerged. His footwork is improving but he his pad level is still too high and he gets stood up. Meadows was ok, which was an improvement from last week. I am getting more intrigued by Chaplin... I think he could be an upside guy with more work because you see flashes where he can deliver blows and move differently than the other OL.
It was nice to see Felton have a big day, although it would have been a chef's kiss if Drones could have hit the flea flicker (it was there.) Drones had a couple of other missed reads in the passing game, but his value as a runner was critical to the method the Hokies used to give Tuten space.
All and all, the Hokies looked like a confident and aggressive football team for the first time this season. I get Pitt was bad (boy, that OL and Jurkovec looked rotten often.) But, the Pitt defense is a good one, and the Hokies carved them up at a lot of key points.
Every time I notice the oline for a positive reason it's Chaplin. If we can keep Crooks for a few seasons I think he will be really good for us.
Drones has the skills to run the RPO well, he just needs to settle into it. Im sure there will be games where it feels like a regression from him, or defenses start to counter. But its good to see it can come together.
Look, I'm not sure why it had to get this far for a message to get across but let's hope it's a turning point.
Probably not bowling but if I see a team that played with the level of effort as last week, I can live the record at the end of the year.
We are far from great but for the first time in a long time, it looked like we really wanted it more than the other team and VT football was enjoyable to watch.
Now to keep the fan base from overreacting to next game against FSU.
Why? Shouldn't we be excited when we beat FSU?
SP+ has us covering the spread, which alone would be a nice surprise I think. FSU has a pretty average defense at least statistically this far, albeit two of those games were LSU and Clemson so not like cupcakes were running them all over the field
They also gave up 29 points to BC.
Edit: BC did get a defensive score, so FSU's D only gave up 22. Still.
Did you have a breakdown of that QB power w/ toss option play? I'm assuming it might be a read for Drones on that but wasn't sure. Looked really well designed to me w/ LBers flowing away from toss if keying on pulling OL.
I'd agree and Hasselbeck said that was the read during the broadcast, but also it wouldn't be the first time he said something wrong
I know when you talk accountability you mean player accountability. I wonder if our refined offensive approach also shows Pry is holding Bowen accountable.
I would guess so, not necessarily like "hey, your job is on the line," but he's said in interviews that he knows we needed to do better on offense. My guess is he worked with Bowen on scheming, and the early season wanting to get Drones on the field also may have been testing him out for the capabilities he offers. Now that Bowen has seen what Drones can do and how well the plays went, I gotta believe Bowen knows what's best for the team (and his job).
I think we'll be seeing Drones primarily now, maybe Wells on a series to give Drones a breather if he did a lot of running and there was a fast 3 and out, but I think there's a distinction we'll see with this staff. After the calling in that game, I think Bowen knows how to call games, but may have felt limited with what Wells gave him.
Cornelson tried the same things over and over and relied on individual players to make it work. Unfortunately, I don't think he could identify the skills and attributes and recruit the players that had those things, he just lucked into it sometimes (like Evans and Herbert).
Bowen has taken Drones' abilities and the weaknesses of our line and made things work. As the line play improves, we may see other things, but we may see him trying things that aren't working as he gauges whether the line is improved enough to do what he wants. And my guess is that Wells' mobility level AND a weak line made it more difficult to find things the offense was capable of.
But ultimately I think this games shows that Bowen CAN make things work and the why of it (to me the reason Cornelson and Fuente seemed so unsure of anything in 2021, neither of them understood). And Pry clearly wants to win and has been up front about what he perceives as weaknesses. In the post game interview, as well as we played, he mentioned there were things he saw we still need to work on. I take that as a good sign.
Sorry for the novel...
🐍-Ky' is the new j.Evans (or: to a slight extent... HenBoss).
He gettin' a lot outta... 'them'.
(Observe penalties went up with mo' emotions, to boot).
FREE (VT)'s: "Strike hard! Strike first!!"
A far far better look than catching shots.
💯
b.street
Re: the taunting/celebration penalties. These guys have been sucking for a while and I can understand the emotions released by finally getting it together. I don't hate a little swagger from the defenders either.
In the context of the Pitt game, I ain't mad. That's done now, though. You had your celebrations, now it's business. Coaches need to rein it in before FSU.
I'ma gettin' ready to publish the FREE-view Eye in the Sky...
...and I mostly agreed.
They were tighter than a tick... ready to pop.
Tho' let us see where it goes/does not go, from here...
b.street
God damn you're getting more and more legible and I can't decide if I like it or not!
You're a real one, not that you need my affirmation. Leg.
Or else you're learning to speak b-st. I've been reading his posts for 20 years going back to early TSL days, you get the hang of it eventually.
well, Eye'ma humble nobody.
Though even this little ole nobody knows... that if you start turning down compliments or invitations?
Well, they stop turning, up.
thanks!!!
b.street