Virginia's defensive line

Last year in Charlottesville, the Virginia defensive line -- aided by the very loud and raucous crowd -- caused problems for UConn in the fourth quarter. It's a new defensive line and the game is at Storrs. Earlier this week, I asked Virginia coach Al Groh about his new d-line, which lost the likes of Chris Long.


"We certainly made it a lot better, production-wise, than we did last week. We have three or four young players in there that we think are going to be very good players for us. They'll play upwards of 50 games for us while they're here. They've only been in two, so clearly there's a long ways to go. The analogy that we've drawn to the past is when a player such as Chris Long entered the lineup, there wasn't a lot of hype or a lot of oohs and aaahs. 'Oh, isn't this great that Chris Long is going to be playing?' There was a lot of skepticism and doubters toward that sort of thing. Now, after he left, that attitude is, 'Wow, what are you going to do without Chris?'"

" I'm not predicting that we're going to have another best defensive player to ever play at Virginia circumstance, but we have some players that we think have the ability to establish themselves that, by the time they leave, maybe it will be the same response: 'Wow, what a great career they had. It's going to be difficult to replace them.' But they're kids with good talent, very ambitious, they're all competitive and frankly, they're probably a little bit ahead of the curve from where our redshirt freshmen defensive linemen would be after two games. But they're going against a very veteran group. We would suspect that there's a lot of players on that UConn offensive line who have looked across that line of scrimmage the past three years who have seen kids like these guys line up across them and kind of spit them out. We recognize they're going against some guys who know some of the tricks of the trade."