🏈 Virginia at North Carolina, Saturday, 25 October 2025, 1200, ACCN

Football
101

Think our play is due to injuries or teams catching on to our system? You’ll probably say both lmao. I really like our O plan this year when healthy

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102

Kenan will be a ghost town. Their fanbase hates Belichick, noon kick, terrible team, not a big name opponent despite ranking/rivalry. They will fold if we can build a 2 score lead early on

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103

Agree it is both. Our annual OL injuries, like usual, have hampered us. And I think opposing DCs have dialed up looks to take away what Morris likes to do. I assume his apparent left shoulder injury is also an issue to some extent.

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104

The oline injuries are an issue, but overall I think the depth has held up. It’s tough to start the same 5 guys up front week in and week out for a season. Generally speaking the Oline has done well protecting Morris and they are still opening lanes.

I think the bigger issue is Morris’ shoulder and the offense’s inability to drive the ball down the field. UofL and WSU did a good job with putting a lot of guys into the box and keeping things narrow. Virginia didn’t ask much of the defense by stretching them vertically with legit deeper plays or horizontally and making them move.

WSU was able sit their safeties in the box and play a guessing game of timing the blitz and it generally worked. The Hoos offense was at it best on the long drive because WSU was concerned about the Hoos going vertical and they did on the 1st down play on a 19 yard pick up and again on the TE leak out that led to another big first down. Virginia followed that up with a couple of knifing runs that then led to a PA pass down the seam to the TE and 1st and goal. All those actions worked together and were created by creating the pace, loosening the secondary and slowing the stunts.

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105

SP+, which hates us and where we rank 51st, but hates UNC more and ranks them 108, thinks the spread is too small and rates us as a 12 point favorite. Of course SP+ also still ranks Penn State 17, so Connelly probably needs to tweak something there.

https://twitter.com/espn_billc/status/1980041657895505977?s=46&t=KRUvpbKQ9s5_3BPeM0gClg

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107

Getting Wilson and Wohlbaugh back is huge. Boley practiced yesterday so he’s good to go. Depth is helping big time.

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108

That’s the thing I don’t understand. In this day and age, how can Connelly still put out something that is seemingly that glaringly inaccurate and still be considered a usable source?

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109

They are bad, but I was more impressed with them Friday night than I have been the previous 2 times I’ve watched UNC. The gameplan was decent, but they turn the ball over too much. UNC should not challenge the Hoos especially if the front 4 on D are sharp

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110

I don’t think he does that bad of a job… It just has its limitations. It’s a hell of a lot better than FPI and the matchup predictor stuff ESPN puts out.

It’s very very hard to model every NCAA team, and I think he gets the vast majority of it directionally correct.

Coaching changes, injuries, teams giving up, etc. are pretty hard to model in for every team. I actually respect him a lot for putting it out with silly, easy to dunk on stuff stuff still in there each week. That’s at least an honest way to go about it.

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111

Fair enough. It’s not a knock on him I genuinely do not know how it works and I don’t read his stuff.

I definitely understand that it’s difficult to model the entire NC2A

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Is directionally correct that impressive tho?

I mean I understand the philosophy behind these predictive metrics, try to evaluate the most “predictable” aspects of football and build a model that places the most emphasis on what is “predictable”. And yea, it does get things “directionally correct” in that most teams at the end of year are within the general range of where they are actually. That just isn’t that impressive to me IMO bc it’s pretty easy to tell after a decent sample size which teams are elite, good, average, below average, and bad. Just from the naked eye honestly, don’t need to be a coach or football nerd or anything like that.

At the end of the day, someone has to/is going to make these models. They’re useful in the same way a rotten tomatoes score is. I don’t need a rotten tomatoes score to tell me Pulp Fiction is a great fucking movie. Or that the fast and furious movies are mid. But they consolidate readily apparent info and present it in a way that is easy to comprehend so that we can point to these as proof of stuff we can already see. Connelly and all these other models get way too much praise IMO. Especially the SP+, it’s widely respected in a way that just isn’t warranted or deserved

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113

This is my biggest frustration with how people/fans interpret sports analytics. There’s still a ton of bias in the data just like there’s bias in the AP top 25. Probably not as much bias, but still plenty.

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114

I also think non-die hards will get caught up in these analytics and don’t understand the difference between predictive and resume-based metrics. Like our resume this year is absolutely worthy of a top 25 ranking. Do I believe we are a top 25 team? not really (I think we’re in the 25-40 range) but people will get caught up in one or the other. Including people on the committees that actually determine the postseason sometimes. Remember that FSU snub? FSU absolutely had a resume worthy of being in the playoff. Unequivocally. But the argument for leaving them out was that Alabama would prob beat them on a neutral field (ie valuing predictive over resume). Predictive should have absolutely no bearing on anything outside of point spreads and matchup discussions. We may see that BS again this year with Notre dame if they sneak their way into the playoff over a more deserving ACC or Big 12 resume

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115

The counter, as always, is if you can do better than SP+ than you should be rich betting college football.

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116

FSU was left out because their QB got hurt

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118

Yeah FSU would have absolutely gotten in if Travis wasn’t hurt. The CFP guidelines clearly tell them they can consider injuries, and your starting QB is a pretty big one. More than enough to give the SEC champion the nod. They were right, too! Bama took the national champion to OT in that playoff game!

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119

If you love Pulp Fiction, rotten tomatoes won’t help you form an opinion on Pulp Fiction

But what about some random movie that you read about it? One friend said watch obscure French film #1. And the other said watch #2. You might use rotten tomatoes (or similar service) for that

Same thing with these computer models. For whatever the equivalent of an obscure French movie is in college football…

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120

Probably not too useful in analysis to be using platitudes like this, but I genuinely think if we don’t beat ourselves in this one then we should be good.

UNC is bad, an absolute trainwreck offensively and a mess of a secondary outside of former Hoo commit Will Hardy at Safety.

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121

Well, this is certainly an interesting subplot

https://twitter.com/stillmikebarber/status/1980668595823865937?s=46&t=vkjgQUekzGC7z44tIfnIRQ

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