Young Guns Report: Week 1

                Before I get this started I wanted to sing the praises of the football team for the wood that they laid on William and Mary this weekend. It’s been a long time for me since there was that much excitement in Scott Stadium especially from the students. I have season tickets up in the young alumni section where there were quite a few “back in my day” comments being made about how much more into the game the student section seemed to be. Excluding them starting the stadium travesty that is the wave while we were on OFFENSE the students did a great job and actually stuck around for the whole game for the most part. Is UVA Football finally becoming about football and not just another excuse to get blackout drunk and look down on commoners? Perhaps, let’s check the turnout at the Southern Miss game.

                All that being said I’d like to track the performances of our key new players this year. I’ve identified the 5 guys I think are going to be keys to really showing the direction of the program in the next couple of years and who you can get the most excited about as “London Guys.” Those 5 are: Demetrious Nicholson, Clifton Richardson, Dominique Terrell, David Watford, and Darius Jennings, with a wink and a nod to Brandon Phelps if he gets any solid PT, but that secondary looks ferocious and more importantly very crowded. So how did they do against the Tribe.

Demetrious Nicholson:

                We all knew that the Tribe’s only offensive hope really was to hope that they could pick on this true freshman corner, which became very apparent early in the game. That being said before the game even started I told my father that there would absolutely be a pick from Tra at some point in this game, mostly because the high school competition he faced was most likely as good as the Tribe, if not better. Compound that with the fact that Mike Paulus looked absolutely terrible all game and you get the first pick of what should be many in Tra’s career. Even more encouraging was the trust it looked like the coach staff had in him. With most true freshman starters you would expect the coaches to roll safety help in his direction but from what I could see that was not happening. In fact it looked like they were letting Tra play one on one with guys for a lot of the game. If this is the case and Nicholson can keep his level of play up that makes the defense that more ferocious and attacking, which is bad news for opponents.

Clifton Richardson:

                Somewhat overshadowed by the great first game of Nicholson was the also very impressive play of Clifton Richardson. Richardson rushed for 57 yards on 7 carries including a beautiful and powerful touchdown run. Richardson is a mammoth running back in comparison to the rest of the backs at 6-0 215 and looked every bit the part of the solid change up to the speed and shiftiness of Parks and Jones. Altogether the backs looked great in this game, due mostly to the tremendous advantage we had in the trenches. It will be interesting to see how they progress moving forward but they are no doubt the strength of the offense, and it looks like Richardson is going to be a big part of it. Which may be bad news for Perry Jones. It will be interesting to see moving forward how Coach London juggles these backs, but this is a problem I am happy to have.

Darius Jennings:

                Jennings looked great. He was the second leading receiver in the game with four catches for 61 yards including a very nice 26 yard grab. Jennings also split time with Dominique Terrell on kick and put returns adding 59 yards of return yardage. Jennings looked every bit of the explosive receiver we expected. Kendall said it best, we have an embarrassment of riches at the WR position. As Jennings gets more and more comfortable in the offense, coupled with the emergence of Tim Smith yesterday, this offense could get scary very quickly. Young guys flying all over the field making ridiculous catches and leaving defenders in the dust? More please. We had flashes of what is to come later yesterday, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t incredible to watch.

Dominique Terrell:

                Terrell played ok yesterday. He wasn’t used as much a Jennings was, save a few end-arounds and punt returns. This is most likely due to the super conservative offense we ran all day. It looked like they wanted to get the ball in his hands more but with the ground game going as well as it was there really wasn’t much of a need to change it up. Would I have like to see them tear of the top of the defense with a nice play action bomb to Terrell or Jennings or Smith more often? Sure. But did we need to do it? No. This game served its purpose, unfortunately at the expense of Terrell’s stat line, but don’t look too much into that. They were looking for him which means we should be hearing more from him soon.

David Watford:

                He did not look very good at all yesterday. In fact I would venture to say I would be more comfortable with Ross Metheny as our backup QB. As Kendall said when the Tribe brought pressure Watford looked hurried. He looks like he’s going to come in to run an option change up type attack when he gets in but it doesn’t look like the coaching staff is too comfortable turning him loose to throw very much. Maybe as the season progresses he’ll be more comfortable but as of now he looks like he has happy feet back there, which will be compounded as the opponents get tougher.

All in all it was a great game. I did not at all expect to hang 40 on the Tribe, nor did I expect them to only get past midfield on offense once the entire game. UVA did exactly what they should have to them which was great to see. Now can we PLEASE make this game vs. JMU every year? I think we can handle them and it would be great to see.

The first Wahooze road trip is next weekend. I’m headed to Bloomington to watch us hopefully smack Indiana in the mouth. They did just lose to the Fightin’ David Lettermans of Ball State this week. There will be a big ol’ post on that one.

GO HOOS!