AH, WHAT autumn would be complete without an Al Groh debate? Love him — which probably isn’t too popular a stance on the cocktail circuit these days — or hate him, nearly every loyal Virginia football enthusiast has an opinion on the subject. I myself defended the old ball coach in a guest column last year before I even joined the Cavalier Daily staff. (I have no comment about that piece at this point in time.)
While the “to fire or not to fire” debate will surely rage on day and night, there are some underlying trends that need to be dealt with, plain and simple. I’ll reserve judgment on Groh’s abilities here, but suffice it to say some changes must be made in how we operate our football program. Whether these changes will require a new coach is something that only Director of Athletics Craig Littlepage and company can decide. It never hurts to take a look at some raw data though, and I’ve laid out a good n’ plenty of it on this page.
The first error that must be corrected is equating coaching performance (and fan approval) with the number of wins alone. While some will argue that winning games is the sole mission of any team’s front man, this number taken out of context is almost meaningless. Take this Southern California vs. Duke example. If any coach replaced Pete Carroll at USC tomorrow and carried the team to a seven-win season, it would be an atrocity. People would be calling for his head before he had a chance to catch his breath. On the other hand, if someone took over the Duke football program and took the team to a seven-win season, it would be something of a miracle. Same number, different contexts.
Using this frame of mind, it’s clear that when fans gripe about the state of Virginia football, it is about much more than the ratio of wins-to-losses. During his first seven seasons, Groh has averaged slightly over seven wins per year: 7.285 to be exact. Compare that with his predecessor, George Welsh, who averaged 7.053 over the course of 19 seasons. Yet most fans who remember Welsh fondly can’t say the same for Groh. Why? Because Welsh built the program from the ground up, taking Virginia to its first ever bowl game. He also was a poster child for consistency, winning seven or more games for 13 consecutive seasons. Context is the key distinction between the two men. Posting seven wins a season for a program that had never done much of anything and then giving fans a sense that the team would never slip too much from year-to-year is a good system for keeping most people content. Bumping around between nine and five win seasons leaves fans dazed and longing for some stability. It just doesn’t feel like the program has any direction to it.
Couple that trend with a more embarrassing one: player attrition due to off the field troubles. This off season’s woes epitomized a severe lack of team discipline. The list of players kicked off or leaving the team is too long to fit on this page, but it includes starting quarterback Jameel Sewell and cornerback Chris Cook for academic reasons, as well as Mike Brown and J’Courtney Williams for legal issues. Before the 2005 season, a similar kind of decimation took its toll when eight of twenty-four committed Virginia recruits were lost either permanently or temporarily due to academic ineligibility. Sure, every school has to deal with player retention issues and off-the-field concerns, but ongoing trends of this nature are unsettling at best.
None of this is meant to be an indictment against D-1 athletes or football players in general. God knows if I had to balance a varsity sport’s schedule with my academic one, I’d be a mess. Rather, I just wish to point out specific instances with relation to managing the football team. At some point, the head coach must take a degree of responsibility for excessive off-the-field distractions. A lack of team discipline was one important factor that brought former basketball coach Pete Gillen’s career crashing down. During his seven seasons at the helm, no less than 14 scholarship players left the program before their eligibility was up. Certainly he isn’t at fault for all of those situations, but it does raise a few questions about the state of the program.
So is it time to oust Coach Groh? As I mentioned above, I fortunately don’t have the burden of that decision on my shoulders. Regardless of who’s in charge, however, some responsibility needs to be taken for these enduring problems. In reality no coach — not even one worth $1.785 million a year in total compensation — can fix all of these concerns, but by owning a share of the blame, he gives us all hope that he can be part of the solution. Hope would be a good thing to give us right about now.
Ross Lawrence is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at r.lawrence@cavalierdaily.com.
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