I posted this on the Subscriber side, but thought it was interesting enough to post here too.

I stumbled upon the Ahmad Hawkins podcast where he spent about 40 minutes breaking down the VT / UVA game, and I have to say it was an excellent listen for those who care about the X's and O's (or just want to relive Friday night's victory again). I'll link the podcast at the bottom, but here are the cliffs notes. I'm not an expert and can't validate if what Hawkins is saying is true, but here's his take. It would be interesting to get the opinions of our experts:

VT runs the “Wide tackle 6” defense, which is essentially based on:
o First and foremost -- stopping the run with sound gap control
o Pushing the pocket forward in the A gaps with the DTs and not allowing the QB to step up in his throws. The QB won’t be as accurate and won’t get optimal velocity on throwing the football.
o Speed up the clock of the QB by making him uncomfortable to make decisions before he wants to make them
o Lots of man-to-man solo coverage with safeties coming down to play Robber roles and fill in mid-range routes

UVA knew coming into the game they wouldn’t be able to run the ball, as they hadn't all year, so their game plan was to go pass-heavy and win one-on-one matchups against our banged up secondary. UVA did this with success against Miami, but Hawkins was highly critical of UVA’s OC (Anae) and made several observations of why VT was able to neuter the UVA offense.

Anae tried to first mitigate the VT DL pressure by moving Benkert around and running rollout plays --
usually with 2 WR sets on one side. Everything else was max-protect, keeping in extra blockers to give Benkert and the WRs more time to connect. Against Miami this formation worked because the UVA WRs ran out-and-up routes and go routes (“bang routes), but against the Hokies UVA mostly ran “very elementary” short and middle routes that were very easy to defend in VT’s scheme. There were several reasons for this:

1) Benkert was asked to often roll-out towards our Whip side, which is our strongest coverage side. Without a TE to defend, the Whip can “overhang” as an extra coverage man and sit in the short and middle zones, thus giving VT a 3 on 2 advantage.

2) With two WRs on one side, VT could easily roll coverage to that side of the field thus clamping down Benkert’s options.

3) Without a TE running routes the Whip was free to “buzz” out to play coverage and help lock down throwing lanes.

4) Foster saw this and also made further adjustments by stunting the DL towards the side where UVA was running rollouts and effectively locked UVA down by forcing Benkert right back into the Whip.

5) UVA also mostly ran Zaccheus on short “Arrow” routes toward our Whip side (instead of away from the Whip). Against Miami, Zaccheus ran deeper Bang routes which put stress on Miami’s safeties. They did not do this against VT and instead opted to run Zaccheus on short routes.

Hawkins was frustrated by this watching the game and wondered why UVA would not run Zaccheus away from the Whip, or have a WR/TE option on the non-Whip side of the field, or take advantage of the short quick outs against the VT corner that always plays 10 yards off the ball, or run more out and up plays like they did against Miami. This very much played into what VT wanted to do defensively.

On the plays where UVA did run out and up routes, they had success in catches by Levrone and Zaccheus at certain points in the game but then Anae inexplicitly never went back to it.

Per Hawkins, the way to beat a Wide Tackle 6 is to run 4 WR (two WRs on each side) and force VT into playing pass defense by running quick outs and then going vertical on the defense depending on where you have your best matchups. Hawkins felt UVA had WR matchups against the VT secondary (especially with the injuries) and the QB to do this but couldn’t understand why Anae called a game that played into the strengths of the VT scheme.

The cumulative effect of all of this is VT was never uncomfortable defensively, UVA couldn’t run the ball and therefore had very quick possessions, which meant that UVA’s defense was on the field way too long, and by the end of the game VT was able to run the football and play keep away as evidenced by the time of possession advantage (22 minutes for VT to UVA's 8 min in the 2nd half).

Hawkins also had a big issue with Anae calling the team “soft” in his public post-game remarks, and he spent about 10 minutes talking about the effect a comment like that can have on the players. He felt calling a player “soft” is fighting words, and if it’s not backed up by specifics within the team then the players will feel strongly disrespected by their coach and will lose trust. Hawkins didn't feel UVA played soft -- they just got beat. From his perspective it was because Anae called a gameplan that played square into the strengths of a Bud Foster defense.