College Watch: Virginia Cavaliers
Keith Payne, shown here soaring in the air for a touchdown in 2007, had a lot of high expectations when he came into Charlottesville. After leaving the team for a year, he's worked his way back up the depth chart where he re-entered the two-deep.
JasonOWatson.com
As it stands now, UVA is in a real rough patch. I mean a seriously bad rough patch.
Last year's head coach Al Groh was fired (don't feel bad, he walked away with a 4.3 million dollar severance package) and their team looked, at times, embarrassingly bad. A two touchdown season-opening loss to William & Mary, a school which doesn't even compete at the FBS level, and having the nation's third-worst offense were, as we said, embarrassing.
I could go on with how they also managed to lose to Duke for the second year in a row or how they fell to rival Virginia Tech for the sixth straight year, but that's just piling on.
The big picture in all this recent turmoil is that their recruiting suffered. Being a state school, their success heavily relies upon in-state recruiting, but it's no secret that Groh turned off various high school coaches with what can be described as an arrogant attitude. I don't have a source for that, because no coach in their right mind would ever go on record to actually say Groh is a jerk, but it's almost widely considered as fact among anyone who has followed recruiting.
In just their latest recruiting class, UVA received 18 commitments but only eight of them were from the Commonwealth. Compare that to Virginia Tech, who had 19 commitments among which 13 of them were from Virginia. That's a big difference.
That leads us to the local players currently on UVA's roster. They currently have only seven scholarship players from the Northern Virginia area and none of them are starters. Virginia Tech, by comparison, has ten local players on scholarship and three of them are starters, one of which, Ryan Williams, is by all means a superstar. The discrepancy was even more apparent last year when local players Cody Grimm, Ed Wang and Brent Bowden not only starred for Tech, but they were selected in the NFL draft. It may be a long, long, long time before three local players from one school all get drafted again.
So has UVA misjudged our recruits? Do they not even recruit our area? No and no. Every single local UVA player is in the two-deep. Every single one. By this time next year, they will almost assuredly have three local players starting, so it's nothing to be concerned about. UVA also sends out offers to plenty of our local talent. For various reasons, a lot of them choose to go elsewhere.
A lot of that should turn around with new head coach Mike London, who should give UVA a bit of a bump in recruiting in the next couple of years, something which is expected when any new head coach steps in. They already have Stone Bridge's Rob Burns committed and it appears they have a good shot at landing T.C. Williams' Jay Whitmire as well.
For now, though, the local presence on UVA may seem a bit low, but that will change in a hurry starting next year. There's a ton of local talent waiting in the wings for this program and so far they've done an excellent job in breaking into the two-deep rotation. Combine the fact that London will likely start landing a lot more prospects from this area then it's perfectly conceivable for Northern Virginia to be very well represented down in Charlottesville.
