Five.

Something profound dawned on me today: We want our football team to lose, to guarantee Al Groh's swift dismissal at the end of the season. But if we lose TOO MUCH, would it potentially hurt our ability to find a good replacement; to hire the slam dunk head coach to take us back to winning and eventually to the next level?

Let's say we follow the current trajectory and end up at 1-11 or 2-12 this season. Wouldn't that show the world that this program is at ground zero, lacking the basic foundational infrastructure to win, and probably almost completely devoid of talent? It would certainly damage our standing in the unspoken/unseen pecking order of BCS conference teams, taking us down to Duke / Iowa State / Baylor levels of hopelessness.

Now let's say Al Groh rallies the troops to a 5-7 finish. It's bad, he'll still definitely get fired, but we'll still be hanging in there as a potential sleeping giant in the college football world. There would be evidence of upside, and a sense that the floor is still fairly high here at UVA.

The risk is that if we rally too much and get to 6-6 and a bowl game, however unlikely that may be. Would Al Groh get another season? One more year of Al Groh would plunge this program into the dark ages, and I think the administration and BMDs ("big money donors" -- an acronym I'll use a lot on this blog) understand that. But going 6-3 down the stretch would certainly get certain short-sighted fans excited.

So now for the rest of the season I'm officially pulling for the football team to win... five games. No more, no less.

And I'll call my shot. We *should* win the following games: Indiana, @ Maryland (god they're awful), and Duke. I think we'll also beat Boston College here at home. That takes us to four wins, which leaves one more win for the finding. I think it comes either @ UNC this weekend or home against Georgia Tech later this month. (But we better not win both of those games, because that would be six wins.)

This team isn't nearly as bad as they've played to this point, and for everything I dislike about Al Groh right now, he's not that bad of a coach. We'll win some games this season. The key is how many.

Five. That's what we need. No more, no less.

Five.