Since Florida State joined the ACC in 1990, Virginia has won or shared the conference football regular-season championship twice. Both title runs included a dramatic victory over the Seminoles.<\/p>\n
The old saying goes that once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence and three times is a pattern. With a trip to FSU up next, the Cavaliers sure hope so.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mindset has always been that if you want to win this league, you\u2019ve got to go through Tallahassee,\u201d Virginia coach Tony Elliott said about Saturday\u2019s 3:30 p.m. matchup. \u201cThat\u2019s just the mindset; that\u2019s just the way that I see it. That\u2019s the level of respect I have for Florida State.\u201d<\/p>\n
Virginia (3-1, 1-0 ACC) has won just one of 10 visits to Doak Campbell Stadium, a 14-13 nail-biter in 2011. The Cavaliers are 5-15 all-time against FSU, with the most impactful victories coming at home.<\/p>\n
In 1995, a late goal-line stop of Warrick Dunn on the game\u2019s final play preserved a 33-28 prime-time Thursday night victory that handed the second-ranked Seminoles their first loss in 30 conference games and punctured their aura of invincibility. Virginia and FSU went on to share the ACC title with one league loss each.<\/p>\n
Thirty years later, the Cavaliers won a 44-38 thriller after FSU\u2019s Duce Robinson juggled a potential touchdown catch that could have forced a third overtime. As in 1995, students and fans swarmed the Scott Stadium field.<\/p>\n
It was the first signature victory in a seven-game winning streak that spurred Virginia to the outright regular-season title \u2014 and started FSU down a path of four straight losses.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year was a really big win,\u201d junior receiver Kam Courtney said.\u201d I felt like that game kind of gave the entire team confidence that, \u2018Ok, we can really make a run at this.\u2019 And I feel like it\u2019s the same this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re a hungry team, of course, a good team. So (we need to) come back prepared and finish the job.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once the undisputed ACC kingpin, FSU is just 2-2 this season (0-1 in the ACC) and has won the conference title just once since 2014 \u2014 in 2023, when the Seminoles got snubbed from the four-team College Football Playoff despite a 13-0 record. That\u2019s one of just two winning seasons since 2017.<\/p>\n
The Seminoles didn\u2019t even win the ACC\u2019s Atlantic Division from 2014-20, thanks to strong Clemson teams that featured Elliott as offensive coordinator. Those epic battles \u2014 including the \u201cbutt-whoopings\u201d he said he previously absorbed as a Tigers player and coach \u2014 are the source of Elliott\u2019s respect for FSU.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can make the mistake and throw out what\u2019s happened over the last couple of years if you want to,\u201d Elliott said. \u201cbut they\u2019re extremely talented, they\u2019re well coached, and if you want to find your way to Charlotte (site of the ACC championship game), you\u2019ve got to win down there in Tallahassee.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will be the first time we\u2019ve taken a team down there. It\u2019s a tough place to play. I\u2019m glad it\u2019s not a night game, to be honest with you, because it gets pretty rocking down there. But nonetheless, it\u2019s a blue-blood program. It\u2019s Florida State.\u201d<\/p>\n
But these Seminoles don\u2019t appear to be of the same caliber as Bobby Bowden\u2019s perennial contenders \u2014 at least not defensively. The program that produced Deion Sanders ranks 135th out of 138 FBS teams in passing yards allowed per game (290).<\/p>\n
That\u2019s good news for the Cavaliers and Beau Pribula, who went 24-for-28 for 279 yards and four touchdowns in little more than a half\u2019s work in last Saturday\u2019s 42-3 rout of Delaware.<\/p>\n
The emergence of transfer Rico Flores Jr., who had one reception in Virginia\u2019s first three games as he battled hamstring issues, came at an opportune time. The former Notre Dame and UCLA wideout had nine catches for 113 yards and a touchdown against the Blue Hens and joins Courtney, Da\u2019Shawn Martin and Jacquon Gibson as legitimate targets.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it was a glimpse of what Rico can do, what Kam Courtney can do,\u201d Pribula said after the Delaware game. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of guys we have that can make plays like that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the experience (Flores) has, and he\u2019s just a savvy guy. Reliable guy, and he knows how to play the game of football.\u00a0 And when you have experience like that, I think it helps the whole room.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since Florida State joined the ACC in 1990, Virginia has won or shared the conference football regular-season championship…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417111,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[111,114,110,232,234,233,16682],"class_list":["post-417110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-college-sports","tag-latest-headlines","tag-sports","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news","tag-uva"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}