UVa aims to start streak

By Jay Jenkins

Published: October 10, 2008

In remarkable fashion, Virginia silenced a handful of its critics in a matter of 60 minutes.

The Cavaliers (2-3, 1-1 ACC) avoided a turnover, blanked an FBS opponent and showcased an unpredictable offense.

What will Virginia do for an encore?

That will be discovered today at noon inside Scott Stadium against East Carolina (3-2, 1-1 Conference USA), a program attempting to find its own identity.

East Carolina, as was the case prior to last week’s thumping of Maryland, is riding a two-game losing streak. Yet wins that opened the season over Virginia Tech and West Virginia provided substantial fear in Virginia’s pregame preparations.

“Those are the teams that they beat and played their very best against,” said Virginia coach Al Groh. “We take our reading off of their performance against those two teams as to what East Carolina is capable of, so we can see what the benchmark is for their performance.”

Once deemed as a potential BCS sleeper, ECU lost back-to-back games against North Carolina State and Houston as it struggled to sustain offensive possessions with success on third down.

As Virginia did following back-to-back road losses to Connecticut and Duke, East Carolina must regroup. That comes easier following a week of rest and self-scouting measures.

“This is a new season — a two-week season,” said ECU coach Skip Holtz, noting that a contest next week with Marshall precedes another bye week. “We’ve looked at this as a five-week season, a two-week season and another five-week season. You sit down and you look at where we are right now and we are 3-2; we cannot change that.

“We are where we are. But I think we can certainly grow and learn from it. We are not having as much consistency as we need to have in some key areas and positions.”

Virginia, which lost to ECU in 2006 on the road, would love to bottle up what was showcased against Maryland, a program boasting two wins over opponents that were ranked prior to kickoff.

For now, signs of life have salvaged the season, but few knew the Cavaliers would embark on a remarkable turnaround so soon after a discouraging loss under a quarterback, sophomore Marc Verica, who was making just his third career start.

“We had seen progress in a number of different areas,” Groh said. “We’ve said repeatedly that we thought this would be a team of progress, that it certainly wasn’t going to be a team that was ready to burst on the scene the first week of the season and clearly we had little struggles doing that.

“Hopefully, we are progressing in the way that we anticipated might be the case.”