Something was missing from Virginia's interview area Saturday after the Cavaliers' second home football victory of the season.

None of the requested players was holding a game ball. That's because no balls were awarded.

Head coach Al Groh said UVa refrained from that activity, in which it has not been unique among ACC schools, at the request of its compliance office.

"After one of our games, somebody wrote that recipients of the game balls were so-and-so and so-and-so," Groh said Wednesday, "We didn't think we were doing anything that you couldn't do because it's been a tradition in football.

"I can remember my high-school coach giving out game balls, but I guess my high school wasn't in the NCAA, so it was OK."

The footballs that Virginia already had awarded this year have been retrieved, although, in one of the cases, quarterback Jameel Sewell had given his football to tight end Tom Santi.

"It's not specifically in the rule book that you can't give out a game ball," UVa compliance director Steve Flippen said, "but there are a lot more interpretations than there are rules and that's one of the interpretations of the extra-benefits rule.

"At the end of the year, if a team had a player of the year and awarded him a game ball, that would be OK, but not on a game-by-game basis."

Four hours next?

By the time the final horn sounded Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia and Georgia Tech had been playing for three hours and 50 minutes, hardly the direction that rules makers have wanted the game to go.

"To me, that's what we were trying to avoid and we haven't avoided it at all," Yellow Jackets coach Chan Gailey said. "I've always said that that's a problem in the college game. In the fourth quarter and sometimes in overtime, we're putting the kids in a dangerous position with the game going that long."

ACC associate commissioner Mike Finn said the average time for an average ACC game for the first four weeks has been 3:20, with the Wofford-North Carolina State game also going 3:50. The average time for an ACC game last year was 3:06.

Some of the speed-up roles were relaxed after last season because the number of plays had dropped dramatically.

Recruiting

Sylven Landesberg, a 6-foot-6 swingman from Holy Cross High School in Flushing, N.Y., has scheduled a news conference today at which he is expected to announce his school of choice -- either Virginia, Georgia Tech or St. John's. ... Another Cavalier target, 6-10 John Brandenbury from St. Louis, has postponed his announcement in order to take an official visit to Stanford, which he visited unofficially over the summer.

Honored

Roanoker Garland Berry, a distinguished football official and a baseball and basketball coach at Cave Spring High School, will be inducted into the Ferrum College Sports Hall of Fame next month.

After his 1962 graduation from Ferrum, which was a junior college at the time, Berry went to Lynchburg College. Berry, retiring this year after 20 years as a Southern Conference football official, received the Silver Whistle Award as that conference's top-rated official in 2005.

n William Fleming graduate E.J. Webb, a linebacker at Georgia Southern, was named Southern Conference freshman of the week after recording eight tackles, two pass break-ups and a shared sack in an overtime loss to Tennessee-Chattanooga. Webb, a starter since the second game of the season, leads the Eagles in tackles with 16.

Down on the Irish

The Sagarin college football power ratings published Tuesday by USA Today had 13 Division I-AA teams rated ahead of No. 114 Notre Dame, including the two teams that will be playing in Harrisonburg this weekend, James Madison and Villanova. Even Duke, which has lost 23 of its last 24 games, was rated ahead of the Fighting Irish at No. 104.

Local update

Kirsten Hagen, the Group AA 3,200-meter champion when she was at Christiansburg, is in her final season at Florida State. Hagen has been a regular contributor for the Seminoles' cross-country team, which is ranked 12th in the nation.