Virginia showed resilience in their OT win over Syracuse - SCACCHoops.com

Virginia showed resilience in their OT win over Syracuse

by UniversityBall.org

Posted: 10/19/2015 6:07:02 AM


Pretty much every Virginia fan that I know wants Mike London deposed sometime between right now and the end of this season. I’m with them, if somehow retroactively firing him after the 2013 season isn’t possible, and I know that continuing to lose games is the way to make sure that message gets through to the sympathetic suits running this operation. In spite of this, I can’t go as far as to actually root against the team.

With Syracuse looking like this group’s best chance to grab a win in 2015, I was rooting hard. I was at a wedding with a large group of people with Charlottesville connections on Saturday, and I’m pretty sure that the joy that erupted following Jordan Ellis’s plunge to paydirt was the next best thing to actually being in Scott.

No one is going to mistake a triple overtime win over a bad Syracuse team as a season saver. No one is going to mistake another game chock full of penalties, clueless offensive calls, and ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL FAKE PUNT BY AN OPPONENT as something that will save Mike London or his band of merry men. What it was, though, was a burst of fun — triple OT! good players making plays! — which is something we haven’t seen much of this season, and something you need as a fan to be able to keep maintaining the faith when your team makes the same mistakes over and over and over again.

What separated this game from our others this season is that guys kept bouncing back. I’ll admit that it’s easier to bounce back against Syracuse than it is against Boise State, but this was a spirited effort from a team that hadn’t shown much resilience.

Smoke Mizzell shook off a fumble that was returned for a Syracuse touchdown to open the scoring to run — angrily and decisively — for 58 yards and two touchdowns (including an eleven yard score on the very next drive) and catch 10 passes for 69 yards. The touchdowns were Smoke’s first rushing scores of the season and made for the first multi-score game of his career. It’s frustrating that it comes and goes like it does (wisping in and out like actual smoke), but when he makes hard cuts upfield — a la Miami last season or yesterday — he’s dangerous.

Matt Johns was on his way to a third straight subpar performance after three quarters before stepping up in the pocket and playing pitch and catch instead of waiting for pressure to come to react to it, which is where he starts to go wrong. I’m guessing the play calling triptych of Fairchild, Beatty, and Hagans had something to do with it, along with a reshuffled offensive line that grew stronger as the game progressed. Johns’s touchdown throw to Canaan Severin that kicked off our scoring in the overtime sessions was a textbook example of what people love about him: a look to his first option (T.J Thorpe), some maneuvering to buy space, and then a well thrown ball to a receiver that he saw breaking open late. He got us back into this game with his play late, and played a major role in locking down the win.

Plenty of other guys came through and made plays — Mike Moore and Wil Wahee, Kwontie Moore, Keeon Johnson, Charlie Hopkins, Ian Frye, David Dean — and it was great fun to watch and, for a weekend, assume they were all actually as good as I want them to be.

This game probably isn’t going to slingshot us to bowl eligibility or save the season or our coach’s career, but it felt good to get an ACC win in the books and hit one lonesome high note. UNC is up next. T.J. Thorpe owes us one. 

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