2007 College Football Preview

Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

There's little doubt about Virginia senior defensive end Chris Long's abilities now. | See a closeup

Virginia

• Experience brings excitement
• Chris Long: Casting his own shadow
• Virginia's schedule

Virginia Tech

• Seniors eye longtime goal
• Helping heal thy brother
• Bud fosters defense's thump
• Virginia Tech's schedule

Other stories

• Ferrum: Panthers look to regain 2005 form | Ferrum at a glance
• VMI: More the merrier for VMI | VMI at a glance
• Washington & Lee: Generals eyeing return to top of ODAC | W&L at a glance
• Southern Virginia University: Youth is name of game for Knights | SVU at a glance

The ACC

• Changes galore for Hurricanes, Seminoles
• ACC predicted order of finish
• 10 ACC games to watch

Graphics

• Timesland players now likely college starters

CHARLOTTESVILLE — One year after the fact, Al Groh confesses that he had a feeling Virginia’s 2006 football team might struggle.

“Long before I got to camp, I had a foreboding of it,” he said. “For me to come out and say, 'OK, here’s what I think,’ all that does is paint a low level of expectations for the players, [but] the worst thing a coach can do is fool himself.”

Presumably, if Groh had the same feeling about his 2007 football team, he also would keep that to himself.

“I think we have a club that’s further down the road than last year’s,” Groh said earlier this month.

“We have four offensive linemen getting ready to start — again — who had never started before. We have a quarterback getting ready to start some more games who had never started before. We have four or five defensive players who had never played before.

“That’s a little more positive than anything we had on record to go on last year. That’s not to say I’m expressing any unbridled optimism or any deep foreboding.”

On paper, it’s a different team.

In some respects, it’s a wonder that the Cavaliers finished 5-7, given that their redshirt freshman quarterback started nine games with a wrist injury that required surgery after the season.

Their tailback was a converted fullback who admitted late in the season that he was an epileptic, and their top returning receiver suffered a broken foot in the first week of preseason practice.

An injury to the team’s top receiver in August hasn’t changed. In the first week of spring practice, wide receiver Kevin Ogletree suffered a torn ACL and he later underwent reconstructive surgery.

Deyon Williams, who had 58 receptions in 2005, could have taken a redshirt year. Instead, he elected to come back and finished with 10 receptions in 10 games.

No wonder Groh expects — and probably wants — Ogletree to take the redshirt year that he has at his disposal.

However, Ogletree had 52 receptions last year and no other returning UVa wide receiver had more than six (Maurice Covington). Andrew Pearman had seven in four games, but Pearman recently moved to running back.

He will back up Cedric Peerman, who has averaged only 3.4 yards on 116 career carries.

There was a feeling that Peerman’s weight training had left him too muscular and the Cavaliers tried a different approach last winter, when he competed for the track team. Peerman was the Group A 100-meter champion as a junior and senior at William Campbell High School outside Lynchburg.

“He had 15 straight good performances in the spring and he’s had six so far this fall,” Groh said Aug. 12 at UVa’s Meet the Team Day.

“He’s running instinctively and he’s running in his own way. He’s not trying to be anyone else. We’ve tried to assure him that a good Cedric Peerman is all we need.”

If it comes down to controlling the line of scrimmage, the Cavaliers are way ahead of last year. All five starters return on the offensive line, as does a trio of tight ends.

The defensive line includes a pair of ends, senior Chris Long and sophomore Jeffrey Fitzgerald, who stack up with the best of Groh’s six-year tenure.

Long and Fitzgerald are backed by a quartet of linebackers who all started 12 games in 2006.

For the first four years of the Groh tenure, the inside linebackers and outside linebackers had separate coaches and separate meetings.

Following the 2005 season, Groh elected to hire just one linebackers coach, Bobby Diaco, while taking a more hands-on approach himself. Inside and outside linebackers meet at the same time, usually with Groh in attendance.

Virginia loses only one starter, Marcus Hamilton, off a defense that yielded 289.5 yards per game last year. That was the low by a Virginia defense since 1979.

Conversely, Virginia’s 257.2 yards in total offense was the lowest since 1977.

Some of those statistics can be attributed to NCAA speed-up rules that resulted in a reduction of more than 15 percent in the amount of time that UVa’s defense was on the field.

“If there are less plays run against your defense or for your offense, it certainly would take away some of the production,” Groh said, “but we certainly would hope that it would reflect the fact that our defense played better than it has around here for quite some time.”

A stout defense is a year older and the offense should be able to protect Jameel Sewell, who might need extra time to look for his targets. The X-factor might be a kicking game once considered automatic when Connor Hughes was 21-of-24 on field goals in 2005.

Successor Chris Gould, brother of Chicago Bears place-kicker Robbie Gould, certainly has the pedigree.

It’s not as if winning football is foreign to the Cavaliers. Groh had taken Virginia to four straight bowls before 2005 and the Cavaliers have had only two losing seasons in the last 20.

“We have a saying and we tell the players, 'The worst thing a coach can do is fool yourself.’

“There were some issues that we knew we were going to have to go through. We didn’t think they had to remain that way. We hoped to accelerate the progress. In some cases it happened; in some cases it didn’t.

“I try very hard not to put myself in a case where I’m kidding myself, but [the players] seem to be conducting themselves with a much higher level of confidence, as opposed to optimism. Confidence comes from being optimistic about things but also from being realistic.”