Cavaliers can't let their focus stray

In a season when Virginia’s greatest football successes have come on the road, the Cavaliers can only hope that trend continues Saturday at Pittsburgh.

Virginia enters a 12:30 p.m. kickoff as a three-point underdog, perhaps the best odds it will face with a brutal November schedule on the horizon.

Overconfidence won’t be a factor for a UVa team that entered last Saturday’s play as a seven-point favorite over Boston College and was routed by the Eagles, 41-10.

Virginia (5-2, 2-1 ACC) has to hope that history doesn’t hold. In five previous meetings, the Cavaliers had never beaten BC and they are winless in four trips to Pittsburgh (3-5, 1-3).

Second-year UVa coach Bronco Mendenhall was quick to recognize the similarities between UVa’s back-to-back opponents.

One week prior to the Boston College-Virginia game, Eagles running back A.J. Dillon rushed for 272 yards in BC’s 45-42 upset victory at Louisville.

This past Saturday, Pittsburgh junior tailback Darrin Hall rushed for 254 yards and three touchdowns in the Panthers’ 24-17 victory at Duke.

Hall, a 5-foot-11, 220-pounder had rushed for a total of 108 yards in Pitt’s first seven games.

He had a total of 31 carries before he got the ball 24 times against Duke.

“He ran like his hair was on fire,” Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi said. “He did a lot of little things right, not only with his footwork before he got the ball but what he did after he got the ball in his hands.”

BC’s penchant for running the ball is no secret.

“A year ago, we had [former ACC rushing leader] James Conner in there getting all the reps,” Narduzzi said, “and really nobody wanted to take [No. 24] out of the game.”

Conner was the ACC player of the year in 2014 and came back from a knee injury and a cancer scare in 2015 to rush for more than 1,000 yards last season.

Hall is one of Pitt’s quickest backs “and he’s big,” Narduzzi pointed out. “It’s not like he’s a 180-pound guy running through there and nobody can [chase] him down.”

For all of its issues against Boston College, Virginia was able to contain Dillon, who finished with 24 carries for 89 yards.

“It’s actually good timing,” Mendenhall said of the back-to-back games against BC and Pitt.

“Pitt uses bigger personnel sets and there’s different motions and shifts and different things like that, a lot of which we saw last week.”

While Virginia was giving up two 76-yard touchdown plays to Boston College, Hall was reeling off 79- and 92-yard scoring runs against Duke.

“That won the game for us; that’s for sure,” Narduzzi said.

With a win this week, Pittsburgh would put itself on the brink of bowl eligibility, a position that Virginia knows from the 5-1 record it took into the Boston College game.

“If [the Cavaliers] were looking or anticipating to get win No. 6 and that took anything off their focus, that’s a valuable lesson,” Mendenhall said.

“Any thought, any moment, any conversation that’s not [about] our practice, our focus, our assignments … actually eliminates any chance for us to have success that week. That’s not where the program is now.”

Source: roanoke