Stronger on each side of the ball, Frogs will easily defeat Virginia

Everyone who is around the Horned Frog football program knows that the team will be ready for the Virginia Cavaliers on Saturday. But the Cavaliers will be prepared for the Frogs as well – and they’ll be looking for some revenge.

The Frogs are definitely not William & Mary, but Virginia just let a little game against what they thought was a little team fall through the cracks. They’ll be waiting to bring the pain of a bad loss down on the Frogs.

Despite this, Virginia doesn’t have the tools to beat an even better prepared Frog football team. In rotating three different quarterbacks, the Cavaliers will not be able to find any sort of rhythm, just like the Eagles dealt with in the preseason with Michael Vick. Even if they stick with one snap caller, the offense will not have the same level of chemistry a top collegiate team should have at this point.

As Frog fans have seen in the past, any attempt to run the ball on the Frogs is futile, as will be the case this year with All-American Jerry Hughes and linebacker Daryl Washington, who head coach Gary Patterson said is the most athletic linebacker he has recruited.

And even if raw talent isn’t enough to push the Frogs to a victory, something is brewing in the Horned Frog camp. Coach Patterson has been very hesitant to reveal anything about his game plan or starting lineups for the Virginia match up and has even closed practices for the past week to NFL scouts. The Frogs unveiled the “Wild Frog” formation last year and found great success, so could there be a new surprise in 2009?

Be ready for a high octane offense this Saturday ready to move the ball by power on the ground and speed through the air and put up an abundance of points that will leave a confused Cavalier defense wondering what just hit them.

Sports editor Travis Brown is a senior news-editorial journalism major from Dallas

Disheveled team will correct turnover problem, pull off big upset

No one in their right mind would predict that the Cavaliers will beat the Horned Frogs tomorrow. After that humiliating defeat to William & Mary, it seems Virginia’s offense consists of a large blob of nothingness being passed off as a spread offense. The quarterback carousel spins right round baby right round. There’s no identity, no discernible plan.

The defense, on the other hand, is apparently composed of secondary that can’t remember that it’s their job to cover receivers, defensive ends who get knocked over by flabby linemen, and a bunch of linebackers scratching their head in confusion.

You’d have to be bat-guano nuts to pick Virginia against No. 16 TCU. I’m one step beyond insane, though. I’m optimistic.

First, the loss to FCS school William & Mary wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed. As obvious as this sounds, Virginia would have crushed the Tribe if it weren’t for turnovers. William & Mary scored 19 points off of turnovers! Nineteen!

There’s no way the Cavaliers lose the ball seven times again. It just won’t happen. Something like that doesn’t happen twice in a row. It doesn’t even happen twice in a decade.

The Cavaliers are at rock bottom, humiliated, and ready to prove they’re not failures. They have nowhere to go but up, and the Horned Frogs have nowhere to go but down. This is when upsets happen. Think USC-Stanford.

You get a long run by senior halfback Mikell Simpson in there, a 40-yard scramble by senior quarterback Vic Hall, a deep bomb from senior quarterback Jameel Sewell to sophomore receiver Jared Green, and all of a sudden, you have a game.

This week, the key Virginia number won’t be seven, as in turnovers, or 13, as in the number of years since a loss to a lower-division team. It will be one, the number of points we win by.

21-20.

You heard it here first.

Dan Stalcup is a senior associate editor at The Cavalier Daily