Bronco Mendenhall keeping Virginia rebuild on everyone’s mind
Despite making a bowl game last year, Bronco Mendenhall is making sure we know how far University of Virginia football still has to go.
After a successful run at BYU, with a 99-43 record over 11 seasons, Bronco Mendenhall was an odd hire for Virginia. But after the Cavaliers went 2-10 in his first season as head coach, they won six games and went to a bowl game last year.
Former Virginia coach Mike London left a pretty bare cupboard for Mendenhall, with a decline in the quality of recruiting classes, a 15-33 record over the last four of his six seasons and just one winning season during his tenure. Mendenhall wound up playing 17 freshman last year, and his three recruiting classes have been no better than 11th in the 14-team ACC (via 247 Sports), so things haven’t been a lot better on the talent procurement front.
At a recent university Board of Visitors Meeting, Mendenhall was candid with an assessment of his roster, saying, “I believe we have 27 ACC-caliber football players on our roster today.”
But Mendenhall did point to moving things in the right direction over the coming years, predicting that by the 2018 recruiting class arrives he’ll have “65-ish” ACC-claiber players:
"We have 85 scholarships to give. That means that with our [recruiting class of 2018] arriving, that we think that number [of ACC-caliber players] will jump to the mid-40s this year.By the time [the Class of 2020] comes, we will have 85 ACC-caliber players…In the meantime, my job is that I relish and I’m lucky to have to show a trend upward through success and winning with the existing resources we have — through motivation, culture and innovation."
Independent of its agreement with Notre Dame, the ACC requires each team to play at least one Power 5 school in non-conference play each year. Virginia will get Indiana, Maryland, Illinois and Georgia in the coming years, but Mendenhall wants things to be far easier.
Since ACC requires each team to play at least 1 Power 5 non-conference school, Virginia’s Bronco Mendenhall admits: “I want to play the worst Power 5 team that we can play,” @SamBlum3 reports
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) June 11, 2018
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Virginia has fallen behind the best teams in the ACC in recruiting, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. But if Mendenhall sees a rebuild through, a move toward 7-9 wins every season and an annual trip to a bowl game is well within reach.