Thursday, September 20, 2007
Groh to look into Long's sack gesture
Cut out the lollygagging, Groh preaches
Doug Doughty
Doug Doughty's UVa Insider is exclusive to roanoke.com and is posted by 5 p.m. Thursdays in season.
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To be honest, when I saw Chris Long celebrate after a sack in the second quarter Saturday at North Carolina, it looked like any other fist pump I’d ever seen.
Leave it to Roanoke radio host and longtime Virginia antagonist Greg Roberts to make a federal case out of it.
“Who’s a better player in college football than Chris and who’s a better person on a team than Chris?” Virginia football coach Al Groh said Thursday. “It’s unfortunate that it seems like there’s a mentality of always finding something wrong with people.”
Roberts said on his radio show Wednesday that he had spoken with two officiating contacts who said that Long was running the risk of an unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty by the way he was celebrating big plays.
Long had said during an interview Tuesday that he was making the “L” sign, for “Long,” as something of a bond with his younger brothers.
Long referred to it as a “little L,” and it was so inconspicuous that Groh hadn’t even noticed it.
I wouldn’t have noticed it until Kris Wright of thesabre.com asked Long about it at a Tuesday news conference.
“I’m glad you brought it to my attention,” Groh told one of the reporters – not the strangely absent Roberts – on a Thursday teleconference.
“I haven’t really noted it as being an overt attempt to bring attention to himself, but I’ll mention it to him.
“There can be some natural, emotional reaction to it. Excessive. I think that’s the word in the rulebook: ‘Excessive celebration.’ But, I’ll bring it to his attention.”
MY IMPRESSION during Virginia’s 22-20 victory at North Carolina was that the Cavaliers seldom looked smooth on offense. Groh used the word blasé.
Most of that was reflected by 10 penalties for 85 yards. In addition to the holding penalties that have mounted in recent weeks, there were two penalties for illegal formations when freshman wide receiver Dontrelle Inman lined up incorrectly, at least one delay-of-game penaly and several other occasions when UVa just beat the time clock.
Then, there were the two times that freshman quarterback Peter Lalich turned the wrong way and was tackled for losses, which overshadowed some of the good things that he did.
Groh’s explanation: “Just a young guy, only in his third game and hasn’t had a season to sit around and watch everybody do it.”
But, the Cavaliers’ starting quarterback, Jameel Sewell, is a redshirt sophomore who is in his third year in the program. There are veterans from one end of the offensive line to the other.
Sloppiness hasn’t been a problem in the past, not even last year, when Sewell was a first-time starter. And, according to Groh, it doesn’t derive from the new NCAA speed-up rules.
“It’s the personality of the players,” Groh said. “I guess that’s how I’d say it. I don’t mean this as a negative to the quarterback position, but it’s up to the quarterback to get the other guys in the huddle and get the play called for them, so we’re not having to take valuable timeouts or get delay penalties.
“Get them to the huddle. Get them from the huddle to the ball. As active and aggressive as that group was after the snap of the ball last week, we are kind of having to herd them along to get them going. We’ve made it a point of issue for quite some time.”
When delay penalties are called, fans frequently blame the offensive coordinator for not being decisive in his play calls. In this case, because the offensive coordinator is also the head coach’s son, he’s an even easier target.
“We’ve monitored ourselves in terms of how quickly the calls were getting downstairs and getting signaled in,” Al Groh said, “and they were right on schedule.”
That operation also includes No. 3 quarterback Scott Deke, who does the signaling..
“We’ve actually shown tape to the players,” Groh said. “Most of the time, on the coaching copy we get, there’s not a lot of footage before the snap. But, we do have some stuff from the past that does show the guys coming up to the line at a pretty brisk pace.
“Our pace is not the same and we’ve emphasized, ‘This is what we’re looking for. We want a good tempo. Let’s go’ It’s probably been heard in the triple digits over the last three days out there.”
