The funny thing about summer for college students is it is a time of both rest and restlessness.
On the one hand, summer gives you a chance to relax, hang out with friends and waste entire days watching Family Matters, Full House and Step By Step on ABC Family. But after you've heard Carl Winslow yell "Look what you did!" at Urkel for the 85th time, you start to look at the calendar and calculate how many more days are left until everyone returns to Charlottesville and college life starts up again.
For sports fans, it's no different. I love major league baseball as much as the next guy, but things get a little too slow over the summer for my liking. I knew something wasn't quite right when I was flipping the channels one day and got very excited when I saw ESPN2 was airing a Major League Lacrosse game.
Maybe that's why I'm counting down the days until formal practice begins for the Virginia football team (13 days) as well as the amount of time until the season kicks off Sept. 3 against Western Michigan (44 days). All the news about the early commitments for the class of 2006 is interesting (see story above) but I'm anxious to start talking about the upcoming season.
After all, I will be a fourth-year this fall and so far I have yet to see a Virginia football team play in a postseason bowl game that either A) was sponsored by someone other than Continental Tires or B) was held east of Boise, Idaho. Sure, the football program has made strides since Al Groh's arrival in 2001, but I'm running out of time. This is my last year to be a student fan and I've got high expectations.
For the third straight season, Virginia will begin the year ranked in the Preseason AP Top 25, but this season the Cavaliers will likely start the year ranked lower than they were 2004 (No. 16) and 2003 (No. 18). I guess that's what happens when you lose seven players to the NFL Draft. Also, the Cavaliers will have to play the Big Three of the ACC, hosting Florida State and Virginia Tech and closing out the season against Miami on the road. The rise to the top won't be easy this year, especially considering that Virginia has to play Maryland and Boston College in hostile territory as well.
I'm fully aware that the cards are stacked against Virginia as far as playing in the inaugural ACC title game this December in Jacksonville, but this is the only chance for the class of 2006 to see some end-of-year success from a major sports team. This year's graduating class was the first group of students who never got to see the men's basketball team make the NCAA tournament. I'm fairly confident that the class of 2006 will continue that trend. That means the football team needs to pick up the slack for us hard-core Wahoo fans who will be graduating in a few months.
Beating Virginia Tech in 2003 was great, but the win was fairly inconsequential and did little more than ensure a bid to the Continental Tire Bowl. Florida State has beaten the Cavaliers the last nine times the team has met and Miami handled Virginia with relative ease at Scott Stadium last year. If Virginia wants to consider itself among the top ACC football teams, it needs to come up with a big win over one of these established programs.
The days of the Cavaliers becoming a regular top-ten powerhouse are likely a couple of years away and Al Groh has done a fantastic job so far with this program. But for the sake of the rest of the class of 2006, let's hope Virginia starts making serious strides in that direction this year. A win over the Seminoles in October or a trip to the Peach Bowl in late December would be nice.
Reminiscence for the mid-nineties isn't limited to slacker college students watching old TGIF sitcoms. Virginia sports fans love thinking back to 1995 when the Cavaliers handed Florida State its first ACC loss under the lights at Scott Stadium.
That was the last time Virginia beat Florida State, and the Cavaliers haven't had a bigger win against any team since. With three of the best mid-nineties sitcoms all on the air together once again, maybe the stars are finally aligned for Virginia to recreate the magic of a decade ago. If any group of Virginia students deserves to see it happen, it's the class of 2006.
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